[360] Crackdown 2

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The version of Crackdown 2 shown at TGS -- and only briefly, in a private meeting room -- is only about 60 percent complete. According to Ruffian, it's a "snapshot" of the game's current state of existence. It's a little buggy, the net code lags a bit, and the visuals are currently lacking most of the detail passes that will make the final product look suitably polished. And yet, it's still very definitely Crackdown, which means that even in this rough state it's a lot of fun.

Like many games these days, Crackdown 2 is being designed as a multiplayer coop game that can be played solo, if you must. The campaign mode supports up to four players at a time over Xbox Live (twice as many as in the first game), while deathmatch supports up to 16 players. Ruffian also mentioned a PvE (player versus environment) mode set for key points in the campaign which will enable up to eight characters to join together at once. Unfortunately, that mode won't be properly revealed until a later date, so no further details are available.
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Deathmatch gameplay
http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/26561


25 minutes of single player and co-op will be up later.
 
NavNucST3 said:
"Didn't like", is not quite strong enough, but to answer the question as asked, no, no I did not.
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ROFL I'm not sure I like the zombies either, but there's other stuff that I might like as well...

http://kotaku.com/5367537/hands+on-with-crackdown-2s-tribes+like-multiplayer

Evidently it's more focused on multiplayer and has a Tribes feel to it. Has support for jump pads that launch you farther than your superpowers can. This supposedly makes it feel faster paced. I'm definitely going to need gameplay videos or a demo to persuade me to pre-order it.

Tommy McClain
 
From the video, I gotta wonder if Crackdown's mechanics are a good fit for deathmatch. Looked like jumping's a really bad idea, since you have limited air control and weapons lock on, plus not many hits to score a kill.

SP's focused on you being a mega-badass, for competitive MP I guess not everyone can be a badass.
 
Maybe they should do a multiplayer beta to get more feedback. Include it with Alan Wake.;)
 
Eurogamer Hands-on

oh my at the multiplayer! :D

As one match turns into two, then five, then a dozen, it becomes obvious that Ruffian has zeroed in on something rather special with multiplayer: while it would be pointless to try and take on the CODs and Halos at their own game, there's simply nothing else like 16-player Crackdown available at the moment. The matches move at a crazy pace akin, perhaps, to Quake III, but they also feature that frightening degree of mobility the Agency has given you - an arm-flailing leap that seems to last forever and terminate just where you want it to, and a targeting system that allows you to pop people's heads off from the other side of an island.

Glowing jump pads, although initially seeming rather artificial, actually slot really well into Crackdown's simple genome - regular air boosts for this most sky-minded of titles - and Ruffian chains them into elaborate tangles at times, ping-ponging you around an entire map in the space of 30 seconds, or simply chucking you mischievously high into the air, where you can pick out a range of different scurrying targets, or, more likely, become the ultimate target yourself.

16 players means there's always a chance to find somewhere to catch your breath for a few seconds or build up a nice lingering rivalry with a handful of other people, but such is the speed of movement and the relentless pace of respawns that it can feel like you're playing against hundreds, and there's a smart scoring system that sees you rewarded with different points depending on the quality of each kill. The concrete-splintering ground-strikes seem to be most worthwhile. Throw in power-ups like extra shields, invisibility, and regular chances to change your weapons, and multiplayer becomes hard to put aside.

snip:
Pacific City was a wonderfully memorable playground, and for a lot of players it would be something of a shame to say goodbye entirely. Ruffian appears to have achieved a remarkable balancing act: retaining the very basic layout of the city and its three islands, keeping all the neighbourhoods and districts in roughly the same place, but then swooping in close to extensively redesign each of the individual areas. The docks, as deathmatch hinted at, are now gigantic and far more vertical, while the refinery is more elaborate, filled with new dead-ends, gantries and shortcuts to discover.

Given the backstory, dereliction is a bit of a theme throughout: that smart little observatory nestled in the armpit of the mountains where you once found that big golden globe you then ran about lamping people with, is now burning wreckage filled with dozens of hazards, while the three tall cooling towers stuck rather incongruously in the middle of town are partially shattered in Crackdown 2. Citizens move about the emptier streets in patched-together vehicles reinforced with corrugated iron, or barricade themselves in skyscrapers where the Freaks can't get them.

Trashing the place appears to have been done partly to create a different kind of playground, but also to allow for an eruption of content from below. Crackdown 2 will feature numerous large underground cavernous areas where the Freaks live in picturesque squalor.

snip:
There's a handful of other things to be seen - night and day will pass very differently in the new Pacific City, with both the Freaks and the Cell thronging the streets in force after dark, while elsewhere Ruffian's hard at work on a more varied mission structure, mixing up the familiar baddies who need a truck parked on them with tasks that tell a little bit of story (the one I'm shown involves an assault on the Volk refinery to reconnect the Agency to the power grid).

There's also - whisper it - going to be a new strain of orb potentially joining the party, although at the moment there's only the Pavlovian green glow of the agility variety scattered, temptingly, on every rooftop and ledge (Ruffian reveals, rather shockingly, that the originals were put there simply because most testers ignored the game's verticality without them). But there's no word yet on new vehicles or new powers or tweaks to the levelling system, and the Agency Tower - one of the most beloved gaming landmarks of this hardware generation - is still being redesigned, even though the team does hint that it's not necessarily the tallest building in town anymore.
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30dhyte.jpg
 
obonicus said:
I'd like to see videos of what MP looks like now, the earlier video looked pretty bad, especially the lock-on.
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The MP looked really bad to me: die spawn die spawn die spawn. Like a frantic QuakeIII, but all outdoors and no skill to hit people. I LOVE the idea of vertical shooters in HUGE cityscapes. But what I saw looked like a skilless spam fest.
 
while I agree it is not a MP skill shooter but it offers something different so as not to compete with the standard bearers, with vertical chaotic fun
 
And how long does that fun last? Games with low skill reward don't last long. And it ceases being fun when you die left and right from bad design.

I am not trying to bash it--something difference can be great. But guys were out in the open dieing left and right and never saw it coming. Spawn, die, spawn, die, etc. That doesn't strike me as fun.

A big city? Fun.
Free movement in the city? A lot of fun.
Superman skills? Awesome.
Something new? Great.

Where it failed in the videos is that unlike a game like Q3A where map mastery was important and being in the open wasn't an instant death sentance Crackdown 2 was wide open (=no map mastery) and with the lock on required little skill. This kills replay value and longterm fun.

The fun parts are fighting it out in a huge city. But we could have that AND good gameplay. I just didn't see good gameplay in the videos.

Taking a crack at it I would say some team games, especially escort or CTF or even territories, could utilize the concept better. Quake with auto-lock is a really bad design idea IMO.

EDIT: As an example, Prey had a different MP style, pretty cool even. But it had no legs. It wasn't balanced enough or designed well to have enough reward early on but require enough skill and depth to reward a lot of play.
 
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