With battle royale being so popular that even popular western game Red Dead Redemption 2 has allegedly incorporated it into its new multiplayer Red Dead Online, there’s an implicit expectation that the question of battle royale being included will be tackled by the developer of any upcoming multiplayer game these days.
Crackdown 3 is one game that will have a multiplayer mode, with full scale cloud powered destruction for its environments to boot. It’s the kind of game that could really have a unique spin on battle royale that could help it stand out even in an increasingly crowded genre, right?
However, speaking with Windows Central, Jorg Neumann, Head of Production for Global Publishing at Microsoft, said that there are memory limitations which may impose a cap on something like a large scale battle royale mode happening in the game.
“We prototyped a bunch of modes. We have all kinds of dreams how this can take off,” he said. “People were asking about Battle Royale, “why aren’t there 100 players?” There’s a reason we have five versus five, and the map sizes too. There’s so much stuff that you need to keep in memory, due to the destruction, that there are limits. Once you have a map that is a nice size and creates the pace of destruction the way we dreamed of it, having more players can be counter-productive, but we’re still experimenting, the tech will evolve too.”
It’s a shame to hear that, but really, every game does not need its own spin on battle royale, and Crackdown 3’s destructibility hopefully helps distinguish it in the marketplace enough anyway. It launches on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on February 15 2019.