Earlier today, we reported that Crackdown 3 will be missing the ability to party up with friends for the multiplayer mode Wrecking Zon at launch. Given that the Wrecking Zone mode is the only mode with the much vaunted destruction tech in the game, and may be what a lot of people may have wanted to play, it came as a bummer. Joe Staten, the creative director of the game, had at that point suggested that the game might get that capability in a post launch update, and now, in an official update made on the game’s Twitter account, that position has been reiterated.

Speaking on Twitter, the developers said that they are aware of the demand for the ability to party up in Wrecking Zone mode, and that they will launch it, along with other downloadable content, as part of an update for the game after the launch. No actual timeframe is given, so we don’t know when to expect this feature, but at least we now concretely know it is planned as part of the game’s future roadmap.

Crackdown 3 launches on Xbox One and PC on February 15.

Agents, we know you’re eager to play #WreckingZone with friends and we’ll be adding Xbox Live party functionality in an upcoming title update along with other post-launch content. Thank you for your patience and please stay tuned here for more info soon!

— Crackdown (@crackdown) February 11, 2019

Crackdown 3 launches, at long last, later this week. The game has been a long time coming, with an extraordinarily protracted development cycle, a lot of which can be attributed to implementing its ambitious take on cloud-powered destruction technology in game.

That destruction will be available in the multiplayer component of the game, the aptly named Wrecking Zone. However, if you are hoping to get together with some friends, and muck around with destroying things together, you’re in for a rude awakening—at launch, Crackdown 3 will not support playing Wrecking Zone with friends.

No less than creative director Joe Staten himself has confirmed this on Twitter, suggesting that it may be a part of the game’s post launch plans. But as for why the game won’t have this ability available at launch, I couldn’t guess. It’s a bit of a shock, especially when you consider this has been one of the selling points for the game from the beginning. At least it sounds like the campaign for the game will have some meat to it.

Not for day one, no. Stay tuned for updates on our plans post-launch.

— Joseph Staten (@joestaten) February 10, 2019

For Crackdown 3’s multiplayer Wrecking Mode, the player count is capped at 5v5 players—so ten players, in two teams of five players each. In an age where 100 players participate in one game, that can feel a bit lacking. A few months ago, speaking regarding the player count in the game’s multiplayer, a Crackdown 3 developer suggested that they were limited by technical constraints and resources, suggesting that the cloud powered multiplayer style they were going for may not have been able to feasibly support more players.

However, speaking in the latest issue (Issue 173) of Xbox: The Official Magazine, Joseph Staten, the lead on Crackdown 3, went back on that sentiment entirely, asserting that the 5v5 player count was a design decision, chosen for balance considerations, rather than being imposed on the development team by any technical constraints.

“That was a design-led decision, it wasn’t a technical constraint,” Staten said. “Five versus five gave us a good balance, especially with map size and overall chaos. Crackdown 3 is very fast; you’re hyper-agile, the world is blowing up all around you and if you are surrounded by 50 other players it just becomes much harder, I think, to feel powerful. This way, you can really stand out, take aggressive actions and be rewarded for them. You can feel like an Agent. So, really, it came down to design; there’s certainly the ability to have more or less players but as we’ve playtested it over the years we just gelled around team-based five versus five action.”

I feel like the truth is probably somewhere in the middle—yes, there were or are technical considerations that imposed the limit on player count, but once those became apparent, the whole game was designed around them. In the end, as long as Crackdown 3 plays well, no one will care about its player count, or why it ended up being chosen.

Crackdown 3 launches on February 15, for PC and Xbox One.

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.

Five long years after it was announced, and a decade since the last entry in the series, Crackdown 3 will be launching a few months from now. But is that it, then? Will Crackdown fans have to go another decade without a new game in the series? According to Microsoft’s creative director Joseph Staten, no.

Speaking to Windows Central, he expressed a desire about wanting Crackdown to become a Microsoft mainstay franchise, alongside Halo, Gears of War, and Forza, noting that the IP of course has to earn it, but also hoping that Crackdown 3 is that moment for the series, echoing similar statements that have been made about the game in the past.

“Every game that Microsoft Studios makes… that’s the hope, that’s the dream for every title we publish,” he said. “Some games earn that, and some games don’t. Our hope is that every game that we ship, we give it the best shot at becoming the next big franchise. The way we look at that is, you have to earn that. It’s not a foregone conclusion. We think Crackdown has a lot of potential, it’s a really fun game, we hope people love it.”

I do hope the game comes together after five years of development time and so many studios having worked on it. Hopefully Crackdown 3 fills a slot in Microsoft’s otherwise lean first party portfolio, and can become a familiar part of it going forward. My interest in the game is piqued after Microsoft confirmed it won’t have microtransactions or loot boxes. Crackdown 3 launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on February 15, 2019.

Crackdown 3 is almost here—can you believe it? The game, which will have been announced five years ago in 2019, will finally launch in just a few months. And now it’s time for the developers to prepare to meet five years’ worth of expectations and promises from those who are looking forward to the game.

One of the ways they will do this is by not including any microtransactions or loot boxes in their game. Speaking to Windows Central, Microsoft’s Joseph Staten explained that while the developers are not going to be committing to any post-launch support plans just yet, they can be sure they don’t want to add any microtransactions or loot boxes to the game.

“We’re not committing to [any post-launch plans] right now, we’re still experimenting with what’s best to do,” he said. “We’re looking at what people find fun, tweaking the balance and so on. We also look at the long-term hooks. We know that we didn’t want to go with microtransactions. We’re not going with the concept of loot crates. There will be things you can unlock, increasingly cool things. Whether they’re rank based, or based on the number of matches, we’re honestly still playing with it. We’ve made hundreds of things to unlock. We can take that to many places.”

It’s refreshing to hear a game, one with a heavy multiplayer focus at that, flat out eschew the notion of the kind of egregious, predatory monetization that microtransactions and lootboxes typically are characterized by. It certainly helps increase my interest in then game greatly. Crackdown 3 launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs on February 15, 2019. You can already start pre-loading the game now.

The incentive to simply use Game Pass instead of actually buying games on Xbox is increasing. One of the big issues with Game Pass until now, at least for new game releases, was that you couldn’t actually pre-load the games on your console. You had to wait till release day to download them, which meant you couldn’t play them right away if you wanted to.

That changes soon, since Xbox Game Pass will be getting pre-loading starting with Crackdown 3, which is due out on February 15 2019, as Xbox’s Mark Ybarra confirmed in a tweet today. In fact, technically it is available now, in that Game pass subscribers can pre-load Crackdown 3 for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs alike right now.

Hopefully, this is a feature that will be expanded to further games in the future. Ybarra’s tweet certainly seems to imply that Crackdown 3 is the first of many, and as more and more games launch day and date on Game Pass, it’s a feature that makes more and more sense.

In other Game Pass related news, the service crossed the 200 games mark recently, so if you’re not subscribed already, now’s a great time to jump in.

https://twitter.com/xboxqwik/status/1062372797404504064?s=21

If you want more proof that Crackdown 3 is actually going to come out for real this time—five years after its announcement, and after almost as many delays—then we have more good news for you. Microsoft has, at last, shared the requirements needed to run the PC version of the game on the title’s Windows Store page.

On the whole, this seems like it will require at least a mid-range PC. It’s better off than a lot of Microsoft games, which need bleeding edge specs to run on PC (although Sea of Thieves famously had a mode that would let it run even on weak machines), but you still need a decently specced up kit if you’re going to be playing this game on your computer.

Crackdown 3 will be playable at X018, which, yes, again is indication the game is near completion. Also more smoke signalling the fire—the game has received a rating at the Australian ratings board. Interestingly enough, it may also be about to get an eleventh hour title change.

Crackdown 3 launches in February 2019 for PC and Xbox One.

Crackdown 3 Official PC Requirements

Minimum

• OS Xbox One, Windows 10 version 14393.0 or higher
• Architecture x64
• Keyboard Integrated Keyboard
• Mouse Integrated Mouse
• DirectX DirectX 12 API, Hardware Feature Level 11
• Memory 8 GB
• Video Memory 2 GB
• Processor Intel i5 3470 | AMD FX-6300
• Graphics Geforce 750 Ti | Radeon R7 260X
• Notes Windows 10 version 14393.222 or higher recommended;X64 Required;Intel i5 3470 | AMD FX-6300;Geforce 750 Ti | Radeon R7 260X

Recommended

• OS Xbox One, Windows 10 version 14393.0 or higher
  Architecture x64
• Keyboard Integrated Keyboard
• Mouse Integrated Mouse
• DirectX DirectX 12 API, Hardware Feature Level 11
• Memory 8 GB
• Video Memory 4 GB
• Processor Intel i5 4690 | AMD FX-8350
• Graphics Geforce 970 or Geforce 1060 | Radeon R9 290X or Radeon RX 480
• Notes Windows 10 version 14393.222 or higher recommended;X64 Required;Intel i5 4690 | AMD FX-8350;Geforce 970 or Geforce 1060 | Radeon R9 290X or Radeon RX 480

Man, the big announcements seem to all be getting leaked ahead of the planned X018 event, don’t they? We already have rumors about a Microsoft acquisition of Obsidian, we have leaks of Age of Empires and Rise of Nations coming to the Xbox One, and now, apparently, a renaming of Crackdown 3 has also been outed.

A Reddit user seems to have noticed that Crackdown 3’s store listing on the Italian Xbox Store has changed to say Crackdown 3: New Providence. You can see a screenshot of this below. This seems to indicate that the game has gained a subtitle, and will no longer be simply called Crackdown 3. Which, honestly, given the long, torturous development cycle this game has had, and just how long fans have been waiting for it, and just how many times it has been delayed, might be a good thing—it sort of sheds the baggage a bit for it, especially if people start referring to it by the subtitle, which is probably one of the things Microsoft is hoping for if the name change is real.

If it is, we will find out this weekend at X018. Meanwhile, we can at least be sure that the game is due to launch very soon—it got rated on the Australian board, and ratings are usually right at the end of the process, as a game gets near release. That release is planned for February 22, 2019 for the Xbox One and PC.

It looks like Crackdown 3 might actually be nearing its long awaited release. The game, which was announced all the way back in 2014 (after first being teased in 2013!), which has had multiple separate studios work on it over the course of its development, which has had numerous delays… it looks like it might finally be nearing the end of the line.

Microsoft has announced a February 2019 release date for Crackdown 3, of course, but they’ve previously announced release dates for the game, only for it to be delayed anyway. That said, the game has now showed up on the Australian game ratings board, complete with a description describing “strong violence”. Given that games aren’t submitted to ratings boards until they are near completion and release (since ratings and certification cost quite a bit of money), I think this is indication that the game may actually make its release this time around.

Crackdown 3 is due out on the Xbox One, along with Windows 10 PCs, on February 22, 2019. The game will also be playable at X018 later this month, which of course is another indication that this time, the game may actually be nearing the end of its protracted development for real.