New Crackdown Screens

*BUMP*

Crackdown in stores Feb. 20, demo on Jan. 18: http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/21/crackdown-in-stores-feb-20-demo-on-jan-18/

For those of us still concerned that Crackdown lacks some of the cohesive elements necessary for a mainstream hit, Microsoft is offering a demo, set to hit Xbox Live Marketplace on January 18. The demo will include -- for Xbox Live Gold members -- a preview of Crackdown's full-scale online co-op, which gives the game a huge boost over its competition.

Bring it on!

Edit - new pics and video: http://xboxyde.com/news_3905_en.html
 
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I really like the art direction, it's just neat. I like how it's a GTA clone but with it's own style too. It's going to be like rampaging around blowing stuff up with superpowers.


Considering Crackdown is made by the guy who created GTA, i dont think clone is a proper term :?:
 
This game is looking really good.

The Platforming elements in the SandBox gameplay is an extremely welcome addition. As you progress and build your powers, your supposed be able to reach places you couldn't before (whatever effects your jump ability).
 
I'm really hyped about this game. Between Lost Planet and Crackdown, the 360 really has some quality titles to start the new year...
 
This game is not getting nearly enough hype, it looks fun as hell, some imporessions from Xboxyde:

I've been playing the Crackdown preview build since a few weeks now, and since I can't do any videos or screenshots (even if the game is already really polished) I had decided not to mention it here and get lots and lots of emails/private messages about sending a video just because you guys have been here a long time or something like that. Well it turns out I like the game so much I've been posting impressions regularly on another forum, and I thought that in the end it would make a decent preview for you guys. So enjoy this different kind of content, and please do not ask me for videos or images.

12-23-2006, 04:01 PM
Ok I've spend some quality time with the preview build, and I'm very happy with what I've just played. Gameplay is fine (fire with right trigger, you are free to lock on or not by using the left trigger), jumping around and going on top of the building is as fun as I was hoping it would be. My agent is just level 2 in agility and firearms so I can't go all crazy with the jumping, but it's still very amusing to just hop to the top and watch the awesome draw distance. Yes, it's as good as these screenshots.
I've had a some slowdowns, but it's a one month old build now and it was already very smooth most of the time. They mostly occured when something crazy was happening like a chain explosion making a dozen bodies and cars fly around.

12-25-2006, 04:55 PM
I hooked up the debug at 2PM because I wanted to check something in the game, and ended up playing for almost 3 hours, mostly goofing around the rooftops. I can't believe how much fun just jumping around and scaling building can be. I wanted to increase my agility so I went looking for some agility orbs. They are green "blobs" that get you some agility points. So with some you get very few of them, but with others quite a lot. Once you reach 100, you level up. I'm still just in the southern half of the first island (though I can go anywhere else if I want, but I won't have respawn points nearby) but I found 86 (500 in the whole world) of them already. They are easy to notice for the most from the ground, but it can sometimes be a bit tricky to get to them. For example you may have to go up a nearby building, then jump to another, go to a higher point then jump down to that orb. Lots of fun :)

There are also hidden orbs, blue ones that are very well hidden, usually somewhere you won't notice it unless you actually hear it. They make a distinct sound you notice from about 20/30 meters, so once you hear it it's time to look around. These ones give nice boosts to all abilities. 300 of them in the world, found only 9 so far. There are also races, either by car (didn't play much of these) or rooftop races where you have to go through a number of checkpoints on rooftops in a certain time to get a big skill bonus. I loved this, it takes a few tries just to get the way you have to time the jumps but it's fun, fun, fun

For a preview this build is already very solid. I've had very little slowdowns, and for such a huge world the pop-in is almost inexistant. And even from a very high point you still get to see what's going on on the ground. The black points in these screenshots are actually all animated and just look like they behave there.

I'm very very impressed by how much fun I'm having so far. I'm no fan of sandbox games, but the gameplay in Crackdown is so nice that I just want to play more.

12-25-2006, 11:17 PM
Played a bit more, killed my 4th bad guy and I guess I could already give a try to killing the first kingpin. But instead I keep goofing with the orbs. Found 171 of the agility ones, and 23 of the hidden blue ones. My agility level is now 3 stars, driving 1 star, strength too. Car morphing looks great, and with my first driving star the driving is much less float than before.

One annoying thing with the driving is that running over someone by accident will still make you a "bad guy" for the peacekeepers and it's almost impossible to complete a race without running over lots and lots of people. So by the end of the race you have to go hide somewhere until things calm down. It's not really that bad, but maybe disabling this during races would have been a better idea, I don't really know.

Some upper rooftop races are pretty crazy, like the one where you have to scale the Ferris wheel up and down in like less than one minute. I really love this type of challenges
I'm keeping myself from going to the 2 other islands so I still get the surprise, even though I can see some of their architecture from a distance already.

12-26-2006, 10:12 PM
Played "for 5 minutes tonight" and ended up playing for 1 hour and a half. Again. This time I killed another general in a rather epic fight at a car racing track, and then I tried again to scale the biggest building in the game, the agency tower, and this time I actually managed to do it
I couldn't get on top of the last little metal spear because it requires 4 stars in agility, but I was still at the top of the highest tower. Got me an achievement, and the view was worth all the frights. Believe me, it really feels like you are high in the sky. Awesome view, I actually waited for a full ingame day so I could get to see all the hues on the whole city. And yes, you see everything of all the islands, even moving cars and all. The technology in this game is very impressive.
Whatever happens now in the next islands, I can already safely say that Dave Jones and his team nailed the whole exploration part perfectly. Now maybe the lack of a proper story will dock a few points of the final score, I guess it will depend on what the reviewer actually expects when he starts playing.

12-28-2006, 09:51 AM
I played some more yesterday night to show the game to a friend and killed the last general for the first island. I didn't try to kill the kingpin yet, but instead went to explore the second island a bit. It looked like a very industrial area with big buildings kinda more difficult to scale than on the first island. I arrived by chance right at the location of a general and got mowed down by guys with grenade launchers :D

12-29-2006, 08:39 AM
Finally killed the first Kingpin yesterday night. Since I had killed all his generals the fight was quite easy as he was far less well protected than he should have been. I also finally played with the sniper rifle and sniped my way through the first layer of henchmen by either killing them directly or using the exploding barels not far from them :) I was a bit disappointed that the gang was still in action in action on the island even after their boss was killed. I was hoping that the island would be totally freed of them. Not that just the roaming baddies are a real problem to deal with (they are definitely not), but it just feels like doing all I did was a tad pointless. Not that big a deal thankfully. I explored a bit more of the northern island, the buildings seemed much more difficult to scale, but I'll be up to the challenge! I guess I'll stop my updates on the game there though, there aren't many things to spoil in the game besides the locales, so I won't mention where the generals and kingpins can be in the other islands. I'll work on my driving skills now, I'm still at my first star in driving, and already have 3 stars in gunfight and agility.

12-29-2006, 09:20 PM
My precious debug 360 just died its 3 red lights death. No more Crackdown for me :(

01-04-2007, 10:18 PM
Got a new debug today, so I wanted to try it a bit. Of course as I expected I ended up playing Crackdown for one hour and a half. This time I wanted to check out the southern island since I never went there before. Frankly I was half expecting to be disappointed after the awesome first island, but the "level" design is still as good as before. I think there are even more suicidal jumps to do than before. Only for some reason some blue orbs were quite visible instead of being hidden. I've been having some fun with the sniper rifle, just jumping from one building to another, locking on a target and firing, killing him instantly. Fun times :D

Did I mention before how precise the whole jumping thing is? This would have killed the game if they hadn't nailed it, but nailed it they did. I almost never miss my target when I jump, even if it is a 50*50cm board somewhere. The littlest bump of the analog stick moves you exactly where you want to. There is also this timing between 2 jumps you have to really keep if you want to win the most difficult rooftop races.
 
Crackdown Blog

The Look of Crackdown

There have been criticisms leveled at the game about our not using next-gen graphics technology and suggestions that we are a cel-shaded game but nothing could by further from the truth on both counts. In fact the irony is that we actually had to use some extremely cutting edge techniques in order to achieve the look and detail we wanted given that our budget had to be spread so thinly across such a large volume of assets on screen at once. The following are just some of the highlights of this technology that we are particularly proud of:

http://blogs.ign.com/Real_Time_Worlds/2007/01/10/42967/
 
I don't usually do this, but seeing as this is Beyond3D, I think some of the breakdown they give on the techniques is well worth discussion.

The following are just some of the highlights of this technology that we are particularly proud of:

Ambient occlusion textures - As part of the lighting setup, we run a radiosity simulation over the entire city which works by firing 16 million million photons (that is 16x10^12 photons) into the geometry. Their effect is then measured at approximately 32,000 million points. We save out the results as textures and apply these to the environment. We wrote our own custom tools to achieve this which, as well as being of a much higher quality than those from our 3-D package, they also meant a 100X reduction in computation time!
Surface textures - To get all the detail, blending, and radiosity effects in the environment requires no less that six texture maps - four for colour, and two for lighting. Also, the blends between all those maps vary across the surface to provide more variation which is a gigantic amount of data to set up on each surface. Again our need for full precision control meant we produced custom tools for the job.
Outlines on everything – This is a fundamental part of the game style and we wrote three versions before finding a method that was antialiased and had a reasonable render cost. We're achieving the effect by leveraging the Xenon's MSAA hardware in a new and unusual way.
Fake window interiors – The technology we're using for windows is the next generation beyond parallax mapping. For every pixel of every window, the shader simulates raytracing through the blinds, through the interior window box, and finally into the room until it hits the floor or ceiling. And after that, the full lighting equation is run.
Procedural Sky – The whole sky including the clouds is completely procedurally generated. The sky is blue and sunsets are red because of Rayleigh scattering - the effect of blue wavelengths of light being more likely to bounce off air molecules than red ones are. We run an approximation to the double integral needed to compute Rayleigh scattering - and we do it for every pixel of sky, for every frame. In addition, the shape of the clouds is procedurally generated by the GPU. Like the sky, all the lighting on the clouds is run by the GPU for every single pixel of sky, every single frame.

As with any games project (particularly one where you are going for a unique look) we’ve certainly had our trials along the way and we had to make some difficult decisions regarding the rendering direction of the game. We knew we would never be able to afford lots of complexity and detail in each individual asset so we decided to always favour the overall visual impact of the scene and have it compliment and facilitate the sheer volume of stuff and non-stop action.

Well designed lighting was going to be the key to the success of the Crackdown look but after some months experimenting with the basic system, it was evident that it wasn’t going to cut it. The exaggerated palette was very sensitive to even the slightest lighting changes and on occasion this unfortunately meant we submitted screens from builds with some pretty garish colouring (our orange and purple extravaganza at X05 was not one of our finest moments
2.gif
)

We remained stubbornly confident that this could be resolved and, over time, we resolved the issues we had bit by bit. We introduced a huge number of controls to allow a much greater level of refinement and this allowed us to stabilise the problems we were having and ultimately nail the unique Crackdown look that we had worked so hard for
1.gif


Our decision to go with our impressive deferred lighting technique to allow thousands of lights visible across the world at any given time was the making of the night time vista and this was the icing on the cake that we think helped people to truly appreciate the decisions we’d made. This can only be hinted at in a screenshot but to see the entire city with thousands of streetlights to the distance, thousands of characters walking around and hundreds of moving vehicles with headlights really is an impressive sight.
It will be nice to see the final version in action. The premise sounds interesting.
 
I don't usually do this, but seeing as this is Beyond3D, I think some of the breakdown they give on the techniques is well worth discussion.

It will be nice to see the final version in action. The premise sounds interesting.

Ya, I can't wait for this game, about time something good came out, it's been a while!

It sounds as though they are making some really good use of the 360 hardware and Xenos specific features ;)
 
Is there any reason there are black outlines around everything, most noticeably the character models. I agree it looks nice for an "open ended" game, but they could really this the black around everything. One more thing, I am not the biggest fan of some of those textures either. Crackdown definitely has its very own graphical style. It sort of looks like some pseudo cel-shading or a very slight hint of cartoony.
 
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Wow, they seem to be pushing a lot of cool techies in the game.


Too bad they didnt talked about their smoke and physics engine, they both seem above avarage...
 
Is there any reason there are black outlines around everything, most noticeably the character models. I agree it looks nice for an "open ended" game, but they could really this the black around everything. One more thing, I am not the biggest fan of some of those textures either. Crackdown definitely has its very own graphical style. It sort of looks like some pseudo cel-shading or a very slight hint of cartoony.

We immediately set about creating a detailed Art Vision document since an art style as different as this one would need to be communicated very clearly to everyone working on (and paying for) the game. We looked at a lot of different comics and graphic novels (always in abundance in a games studio?) and it was the intensely detailed and dynamic works of Frank Miller that really seemed to hit home as what Crackdown should be all about.
...
Outlines on everything – This is a fundamental part of the game style and we wrote three versions before finding a method that was antialiased and had a reasonable render cost. We're achieving the effect by leveraging the Xenon's MSAA hardware in a new and unusual way.
;)
 
The disconenct between the main characters and everything else in the environment at once jarring and captivating. It's ugly as hell, but I can't take my eyes off it.

This game looks like a total riot. Smart of MS to push it with the Halo 3 promo. I think the enthusiast community is a little too cynical about new IP. We're always talking about the strength of existing franchises, but breakout new IP is where the mindshare is won. At least that's what I think.... Whatever GTA comes next may sell more, but I think the real buzz will be over Crackdown and the word will get out.
 
Ugly as hell??

http://www.gfdata.de/archiv12-2006-gamefront/Crackdown_0108.jpg
http://www.gfdata.de/archiv12-2006-gamefront/Crackdown_0109.jpg
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http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/773/773714/img_4159022.html
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/773/773714/img_4159024.html

The main character does stand out, but the world look pretty nice to my eyes. Draw distance is huge! Every surface is normal mapped with nice varied textures, and no aliasing at all. Unlike GTA this game will be nice and easy on the eyes.
 
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The main character is my only beef in regards to graphics; I have not played the game, but the uber jumping and gameplay that seems to be "stand there and just fire" seems a little shallow, but the videos are all from easy level and such. Hopefully the real game offers some strategy and challenge.
 
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