Crackdown 2

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Crackdown, released back in 2007, has become one of Xbox 360's most cherished games.

Mixing the free-roaming, city-dwelling atmosphere of GTA with a comic book slant, the title won the hearts of gamers and Microsoft itself - who commissioned a sequel, due for release later this year.

Many of the original game's creators have since jumped ship from Dundee developer RealTime Worlds to nearby Ruffian - the Microsoft Games Studio working on Crackdown 2.

CVG caught up with Ruffian's James Cope to get the inside track on one of Xbox 360's most anticipated exclusives of 2010...

How would you say the look of Crackdown has come on from the first game - and what have you brought to it as a studio?
Less pink! [Laughs]. One of the things everyone always felt about Crackdown is that we wanted to go for this graphic novel style. People always said it was cell shaded and we never liked that moniker.

Proper cell shading is Wind Waker - and Wind Waker is the beautiful game ever made. I would bow down to that any day - that game will stand the test of time forever.

What we wanted to do was like when you open a book or DC comic and you think: "Yeah that's a style that comes off the page."

That's what we're doing with Crackdown 2 - we're really making it more vibrant, more contrasting and with more attention to detail. It feels like it's a real evolution to what we always wanted.

You're releasing into a 2010 market without a GTA on the horizon. What's your perspective on the competitive landscape?
Quite pragmatic. We have to think very carefully about the release date, even within MGS, you know: We don't want to go up against Halo: Reach, which is going to completely swamp the market.

In terms of the games that have come around and followed this genre, I think it's really nice to have that competition. It's made us really question what we do - it makes us think more carefully about what we really do best.

One of the things we do unlike anyone else is to have really true open-ended experiences. It's about having a sandbox with lots of stuff to play around with. As much as we would like, as game-makers, to have that nice cinematic storytelling thing, it's not Crackdown - and we don't think it belongs in a sandbox environment.

Other games in the sandbox genre do seem to take themselves a bit more seriously - whilst Crackdown has a bit more charm. Is that a fair description?
I think so. Some games rightly take themselves more seriously and the great thing about Crackdown is that it's nonsensical in a way.

But for me that is video games. I think the best video games are born out of nonsense in a way. Robotron is great - but it's just about shooting lots of things really quickly. And that's what Crackdown is about - shooting lots of things really quickly, blowing lots of stuff up and doing it again and again and again.

I think some of the best experiences come out of having a bit of fun during the development and not going into the [mindset] of: "Oh, it's not acceptable for players to play the game in any way but the way we want it to happen." The real beauty of Crackdown for us was seeing people get inventive.

Do you expect the Orb collecting from Crackdown to become such a national obsession?
Not really. It was brilliant for us because we had to get people onto rooftops. The whole thing about Crackdown was to have a load of superheroes running around on rooftops, and a lot of the problems we faced were due to the tradition in games like GTA. No-one even thought about the idea you could go onto the roof - it was all about running around the streets and driving cars.

So the agility orbs came about by us making sure people had a compelling reason to go off and do those things. That was a mechanic we had to put in there - we never expected it to be that popular.

Other games have now done this 'collectible orb' thing but the real beauty of what Crackdown does is that it's empowering - it actually rewards your invested time in collection. It's not abut collecting - it's about becoming more powerful as a player. It's not the fact you've got 500 things to find.

I think that's the mistake some people make now. It's like: "Oh, we have to have more collectible things." You don't: You have to have more things that reward the player.

Does it fill you with pride when you see Assassin's Creed 2 or Arkham Asylum's collectibles?
Absolutely. We love that. It's a really nice nod to the fact we did something different. We did it for a very purposeful reason but accidentally we've created a [trend] for collectibles.

I have to apologise that it was an absolute slog to find all the orbs - but we're not making it any easier with Crackdown 2. People are properly going to hate us now: We've got these orbs that run away from you. It's not as easy as it once was.

Have you had any dialogue with the guys at Realtime Worlds about the second game?
Sure. A lot of them are close friends. We keep pretty tight relationship with them. Dundee is a very close development community. It's a small town with a massive amount of video games developers. It's impossible not to have those kind of open dialogues with people.

It's healthy to have a close relationship. The guys there are very interested in what we're doing, and we're very interested in what they're doing [with open world MMO All Points Bulletin]. There's no point in bickering. [laughs] Not that we ever have.

As a MGS studio, what's your perspective on Natal - and would it be something you'd be keen on taking Crackdown towards?
There's lots of different ways of answering that. I think Natal as an experience is great because it's opening up a kind of social gaming thing and there's a good place for that. I don't think that fits with what makes Crackdown, Crackdown right now.

But that's not to say it doesn't fit in with what we want to do with it in the future. Right now, we believe in completely making core video games that are tactile - it's about having that engaging action game experience.

We have an opportunity to look at Natal in the future and because Crackdown is a bit of a nonsensical world and it's about mini-games and having fun within that, we can look at building mini-games that make sense for Natal into the Crackdown universe.

Rather than trying to switch the control mechanism of Crackdown, we want to take Crackdown towards what [Natal] might offer in tertiary stuff. Not necessarily the core mechanic of games because we make video games as a core experience and that's what Microsoft want us to do.

Perhaps 3D would be more interesting for Crackdown?
Yeah - I think it's going to be pretty good. One thing I'm not sure about with 3D games is whether the technology's ready for that social experience.

It's going to be incredibly powerful in that one-to-one engagement - where it's you and the game. In those kind of completely immersive single-player experiences I think 3D's going to be amazing.

But in the social scenario, sitting on the sofa playing with your family experience, I don't think it's going to work. You've got that whole viewing angle problem. But I think it's going to be the next step in gaming immersion.

Have you had to change much from the first Crackdown to now in terms of co-op? You've got four player co-op in the sequel, right?
Yes. We believe quite strongly in co-op gaming and Crackdown was evidence of this - for those people that were having difficulty playing a game, bringing in a mate made it easier.

So with four-player co-op in Crackdown 2 it's about making the game easier - it's four powerful beings in this world. And we don't want to mess around with that.

One of the things we had to change from a competitive point of view is that Crackdown never supported having more than one mission active at once.

We [wanted] four players on four corners of the world on four different missions working towards one goal. That was a big technical transfer but it's something we had to think very carefully about. We wanted that four different people approaching the game from four different angles. We just don't like corridor-ing people.

The co-op experience of just having people stand next to each other and be elastic banded together doesn't fit [with what we wanted to do]. Playing the same game for an ultimate purpose, chatting to each other on Live - that's the real co-op experience. You can talk about the moment you're having: "You should have been here!"

If you had to name one thing you regret in Crackdown what would it be?
It wasn't perfect - it was really rough [laughs]. One of the biggest flaws with Crackdown was the actual mission mechanic was just so repetitive. It was not intentionally [made] that way, it just pulled back to being lowest common denominator sort of thing.

[Taking on] bosses and doing the same thing over and over again was really unrewarding. That always makes me cringe a little bit.

"This is a good chance to say we've addressed a lot of that [in Crackdown 2]. We've thought more about how the interplay works in the game and added more variety. But we had to make that mistake to get to where we are. I'm glad to say we've improved on it.

Tim Ingham