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Crackdown for Xbox One (Cloudgine, original director, UE4)

Orca

Member
That's a terrible comparison. Destiny is an MMO, where the multiplayer is the main selling point of the game. Crackdown is a primarily singleplayer experience with co-op as an extra feature.

When did Destiny become an MMO? It's an online game with MMO trappings - mainly the negatives like grinding and rare drops - but it's missing that first M entirely as there's nothing massive about it.

There's really no reason that Destiny had to be online-only. The single player portion, bad as it was, could have been done offline.
 

Kampfheld

Banned
It has a single player campaign? Im assuming thats like the original Crackdown and bigger cloud multiplayer stuff too? That would certainly be interesting (I understand you probably can't clarify any further), I wasn't really sure what to expect but I would like that a lot if there were two separate things going on.

No artificial seperations and as few as possible user interface interruptions to select modes. Think about it like SO - just even one step further into that direction.
 

Tmecha

Neo Member
One word "freedom"

Loved crackdown 1 , u had free will to climb the tallest buildings and jump off, stack cars up and blow them up or do massive stunts over them all with free will not effecting the games main mission while playing with your friends.
 

PaulLFC

Member
No exaggeration, this is likely the game which will make me buy an Xbox One.

I have a PS4 already, and am mildly to very interested in some other X1 exclusives, especially the Forza and Forza Horizon series.

However, Crackdown 1 was my all time favourite 360 game, and if I made a list of my favourite games of all time, it would rank very highly indeed. From a game bundled with the Halo beta to get it to shift (never a good first impression when a highly anticipated demo has to be used as a carrot), I wasn't expecting much but liked the sound of it from impressions, so I bought it. It provided me with the kind of fun a game hadn't for a long while before, and rarely has since - it was fantastic.

I didn't enjoy Crackdown 2 as much, although it did provide me with much entertainment in the form of this video (nsfw language). Hopefully Crackdown 3 can be a return to form for the series.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
I don`t get why they will require an online connection in order to use cloud environmental destruction. We have very old games that handles such destruction offline without problems. They obviously can`t handle destruction at this level, but Xbox One is a new console.
 

Bread

Banned
I love the idea that the cloud will be necessary for this engine to work, I want a real level experience that no other game has offered.
 

Orca

Member
I don`t get why they will require an online connection in order to use cloud environmental destruction. We have very old games that handles such destruction offline without problems. They obviously can`t handle destruction at this level, but Xbox One is a new console.

Do you want the improved graphics/resolution, improved physics, longer draw distances and all the rest of the stuff games have now...or just the destruction you had back then?
 
No artificial seperations and as few as possible user interface interruptions to select modes as possible. Think about it like SO - just even one step further into that direction.

I like that idea, thanks for the reply Kampf, always nice to have you around answering questions :)
 

leeh

Member
No artificial seperations and as few as possible user interface interruptions to select modes as possible. Think about it like SO - just even one step further into that direction.
Really looking forward to it, from what you've said it really sounds promising.

Whatever you guys end up doing with the cloud, I'd love to see some documentation around it, but I suppose that'd be giving your game away ;)
 
One word "freedom"

Loved crackdown 1 , u had free will to climb the tallest buildings and jump off, stack cars up and blow them up or do massive stunts over them all with free will not effecting the games main mission while playing with your friends.

Yep, that's my 1 word also, but I actually didn't enjoy the first crackdown nearly as much as some others. Were it not for the Halo 3 beta (which I totally got suckered into), I may not have ever bought that game.

It did have some elements I loved, such as the cool transforming vehicles, the ridiculous amounts of mayhem the player could cause, and the general feel of scaling and jumping on and off those massive buildings. However, I felt it left the player alone a little TOO much. I didn't get enough feedback from the game to make me feel as if the things I was doing mattered or made any difference. I felt it could've done more to both give you that freedom while also doing a better job of making you feel apart of a living and breathing world. Give me more story feedback, present some characters to livening up the place, something!

Give me the equivalent of a crackdown batcave where I can go and do some interesting things. I felt it could've become Microsoft's unique version of GTA, but I felt it held back a little too much.
 

Hip Hop

Member
Oh, I forgot one major point in my massive post on the last page:

INCLUDE KEYS TO THE CITY MODE

oh fuck yes, this.

Honestly, that mode will make or break my purchase. It was the major reason as to why I bought the first and second one.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
lol people ignoring an actual developer who has shown the cloud in action on this very forum before

lol

Yeah, behind closed doors in order to showcase it for others. It`s something else when millions of gamers are trying to showcase it for themself. It`s like saying that every TV commercial must be true.
 
Do you want the improved graphics/resolution, improved physics, longer draw distances and all the rest of the stuff games have now...or just the destruction you had back then?

I want a game that keeps functioning even when they take those pretty cloud servers offline. I will never purchase a single-player game that doesn't work without an internet connection, simple as that. If the cloud stuff is multiplayer-only, then fine.
 

Orca

Member
PSNow is streaming. It`s something completely different.

How is that different? If anything, PSNow is arguably more complex, as it's running the entire game on another system and streaming the video feed to you - this is just running one subsystem of the game and feeding data back.
 

JeffG

Member
How is that different? If anything, PSNow is arguably more complex, as it's running the entire game on another system and streaming the video feed to you - this is just running one subsystem of the game and feeding data back.

Streaming more complex? Hardly

Client stream inputs to server
Server streams video and audio to client.


Using cloud for gaming is an ongoing handshake between client and server tracking actions and responses

Even if the new crackdown sucks, as a tech demo it may be the most interesting game to be released in these next few years
 
How is that different? If anything, PSNow is arguably more complex, as it's running the entire game on another system and streaming the video feed to you - this is just running one subsystem of the game and feeding data back.

Yea... I don't think you realize what it is you're saying here. There's a reason there's a boatload more skepticism towards one of these things over the other. Trying to do what Microsoft has been talking about in relation to Xbox One, and that is obviously being discussed with regards to Crackdown, is a more complex state of affairs, and it doesn't really take a genius to see that.
 

Rembrandt

Banned
Didn't Mark at Sony say that using the cloud to improve performance won't work well?

Why are you being so pessimistic like it's absolutely impossible? You really think MS is designing am exclusive around something that just won't work? Jesus.

There's even another dev here that posted a short gif of their work using the cloud and said it worked.
 

Anion

Member
lol people still believing in cloud.
.
Shining Sunshine
lol people ignoring an actual developer who has shown the cloud in action on this very forum before

lol

Do you believe in PSNow?

I don't even know what this means and I strongly suspect you don't know what you're talking about.

Could you elaborate on that please?
Guys, he is jealous of the cloud's new status and is trying to astroturf for his kind
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
Why are you being so pessimistic like it's absolutely impossible? You really think MS is designing am exclusive around something that just won't work? Jesus.

There's even another dev here that posted a short gif of their work using the cloud and said it worked.

Maybe because the way they promoted it to begin with?
 

Bessy67

Member
Maybe because the way they promoted it to begin with?
Not defending the overhype, but it would be interesting to see how the whole "cloud power" would have played out if they stuck to their guns and basically required an internet connection for the console.
 

Synth

Member
Didn't Mark at Sony say that using the cloud to improve performance won't work well?

Why the hell would we give any consideration to a company representative downplaying a competitor's approach?

It's about as sincere as them saying that EA Access doesn't represent value for their customers...

EDIT: Or Nintendo telling us that watching someone else play a game isn't fun (because they ain't got Twitch streaming).
 
Will this game also offer a "watered" down version along with the cloud service for players so that they could still play even when live is down? Live on the xbox one at the moment isn't exactly as reliable as it was on the 360 whether it be due to idiots like lizard squad or a ms internal problem. Seeing as this game will have a legitimate single player component unlike games like destiny, it's quite risky for it to entirely rely on having a constant reliable online connection.
 

Bessy67

Member
Will this game also offer a "watered" down version along with the cloud service for players so that they could still play even when live is down? Live on the xbox one at the moment isn't exactly as reliable as it was on the 360 whether it be due to idiots like lizard squad or a ms internal problem. Seeing as this game will have a legitimate single player component unlike games like destiny, it's quite risky for it to entirely rely on having a reliable online connection.
Has Live ever been down for more than a couple consecutive hours since Xbox One launched? The worst for me has been Lizard Squad around Christmas and I was only offline for 2-3 hours.
 
Has Live ever been down for more than a couple consecutive hours since Xbox One launched? The worst for me has been Lizard Squad around Christmas and I was only offline for 2-3 hours.
I honestly don't know exactly but I do feel like it has in fact been down more times than that. I wish there was an xbox live service history report for the year to actually check.

edit: found this but these seem to be isolated issues, possibly people with isp problems.
http://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live
http://downdetector.com/status/xbox-live/archive
 

Rembrandt

Banned
I consider myself in the middle camp, the one that is cautiously optimistic about Cloud gaming. I want to see more of it (in games) to form myself a good opinion. The Drivatar system in Forza 5 was a good, small sample of that. But apart from that and the awful Grunts in Titanfall, it hasn't done much for console gaming lately. So let's wait and see it's usefulness in the near/medium future. But let's not also brush aside its potential benefits, because I think that's where we'll all end up eventually.

However, to call Mark Cerny a "company representative" just like any other guy is unfair. That guy knows more about tech than essentially every one of us here combined. And nothing is stopping Sony from also using Cloud computing, it's not exclusive to Microsoft (though they own a vastly better infrastructure for it and seem more eager to use it). So Mark has not really any advantage to say it doesn't work well right now if he'd actually think it is. /rant =P

He knows more than we do, but Microsoft has huge cloud computing servers and whole teams dedicated to it. There's no reason for me to believe one man vs hundreds just because his pessimism fits a view.
 

Synth

Member
I consider myself in the middle camp, the one that is cautiously optimistic about Cloud gaming. I want to see more of it (in games) to form myself a good opinion. The Drivatar system in Forza 5 was a good, small sample of that. But apart from that and the awful Grunts in Titanfall, it hasn't done much for console gaming lately. So let's wait and see it's usefulness in the near/medium future. But let's not also brush aside its potential benefits, because I think that's where we'll all end up eventually.

However, to call Mark Cerny a "company representative" just like any other guy is unfair. That guy knows more about tech than essentially every one of us here combined. And nothing is stopping Sony from also using Cloud computing, it's not exclusive to Microsoft (though they own a vastly better infrastructure for it and seem more eager to use it). So Mark has not really any advantage to say it doesn't work well right now if he'd actually think it is. /rant =P

I'm not questioning his knowledge. I'm questioning why we'd ever expect him to say anything different. They're currently sitting on a spec advantage, whilst the opposition is arguing that that utilisation of cloud processing would allow them to do things that would somewhat negate that advantage. The last thing anyone should ever expect anyone in the Playstation camp to respond to that claim with would be "yea, they may have a point". It's not about whether they can do the same themselves or not, it's about whether they're choosing to. They could allow EA Access onto their console, and likely would if they didn't have a conflicting service. However, because they choose not to have it, their official line will be that it's not a good thing to have. Nintendo could allow Twitch streaming, but because they apparently have no plans to, they'll dismiss the merits of it.

I'm not making any statement about Cerny himself. Just saying that his position means he's not someone you really should ask about the potential merits of any Xbox initiatives.

Also, the Grunts aren't awful.. they're just easy. Their reactions and respones to events around them is very good, and Respawn could easily have made them a frustrating nuisance to fight if they believed that would be beneficial to the game's design. The same implementation is also running the auto-Titans for example.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
Not defending the overhype, but it would be interesting to see how the whole "cloud power" would have played out if they stuck to their guns and basically required an internet connection for the console.

It would probably have played out the same way. The Xbox One only required you to check in once every 24 hour, and that wasn`t to benefit the whole "Xbox One will be 8 times more powerful in the cloud" BS.
 

FordGTGuy

Banned
I don`t get why they will require an online connection in order to use cloud environmental destruction. We have very old games that handles such destruction offline without problems. They obviously can`t handle destruction at this level, but Xbox One is a new console.

I would like to see these games you're referring to that can handle tens of thousands of objects being blown about without framerate dips.

It would probably have played out the same way. The Xbox One only required you to check in once every 24 hour, and that wasn`t to benefit the whole "Xbox One will be 8 times more powerful in the cloud" BS.

For one it isn't bullshit, the quote wasn't meant that every Xbox One has the equivalent of around two or more Xbox Ones in the cloud capable of cloud computing on command.

If you want to call cloud compute bullshit, you might want to do some research on Azure.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
Why the hell would we give any consideration to a company representative downplaying a competitor's approach?

It's about as sincere as them saying that EA Access doesn't represent value for their customers...

EDIT: Or Nintendo telling us that watching someone else play a game isn't fun (because they ain't got Twitch streaming).

He wasn`t asked about Microsoft. He was simply asked about if it was possible to use the cloud in order to power up their system. He only responded that it wouldn`t work very well. Didn`t Digital Foundry publish an article about that as well?
 

FordGTGuy

Banned
He wasn`t asked about Microsoft. He was simply asked about if it was possible to use the cloud in order to power up their system. He only responded that it wouldn`t work very well. Didn`t Digital Foundry publish an article about that as well?

It's not about "powering up the system", cloud compute isn't going to increase the local power of a console. It can however offload non-latency sensitive and certain latency sensitive tasks onto to the cloud to be calculated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECsbaO1XGBU&hd=1

If the server can handle a lot of the heavy calculations it frees up local system power for other tasks.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
I would like to see these games you're referring to that can handle tens of thousands of objects being blown about without framerate dips.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 handled games with heavy physics like Red Faction: Guerrilla very well. I would be suprised if this generation couldn`t handle way more demanding physics offline.

Edit:

Link is the PC version, but the physics are almost the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHKPW49BdBI
 

Synth

Member
He wasn`t asked about Microsoft. He was simply asked about if it was possible to use the cloud in order to power up their system. He only responded that it wouldn`t work very well. Didn`t Digital Foundry publish an article about that as well?

They wouldn't have had to mention Microsoft at all for him to know what the question entails. He isn't stupid.

There's really nothing Digital Foundry can publish that would have more merit than the demonstrations already provided by both MS and NVIDIA. In theory it works, in a controlled environment it also works in practice. The remaining questions are if anyone actually has the infrastructure to make it work on a wide scale, and if there's many applications for it that are actually useful to games.

"Mark Cerny said it sucks" or "Digital Foundry doesn't seem convinced" aren't really worth discussing at all though.
 
However, Crackdown 1 was my all time favourite 360 game, and if I made a list of my favourite games of all time, it would rank very highly indeed. From a game bundled with the Halo beta to get it to shift (never a good first impression when a highly anticipated demo has to be used as a carrot), I wasn't expecting much but liked the sound of it from impressions, so I bought it. It provided me with the kind of fun a game hadn't for a long while before, and rarely has since - it was fantastic.
I cried reading this post. It was beautiful. You are beautiful. Crackdown is beautiful.

Can't wait!
 

FordGTGuy

Banned
The PS3 and Xbox 360 handled games with heavy physics like Red Faction: Guerrilla very well. I would be suprised if this generation couldn`t handle way more demanding physics offline.

Edit:

Link is the PC version, but the physics are almost the same.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHKPW49BdBI

Oh man...

Haha you're really going to use Red Faction as competition to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECsbaO1XGBU&hd=1

There are probably a max of 200 objects in said videos, some of which are pre-calculated animations. The tech demo posted above is completely physics driven with over 50,000 objects.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
It's not about "powering up the system", cloud compute isn't going to increase the local power of a console. It can however offload non-latency sensitive and certain latency sensitive tasks onto to the cloud to be calculated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECsbaO1XGBU&hd=1

If the server can handle a lot of the heavy calculations it frees up local system power for other tasks.

Considering how old the game is, and how well the physics run on old hardware, yes.
 

FordGTGuy

Banned
Considering how old the game is, and how well the physics run on old hardware, yes.

Not even in the same league.

Resogun maybe? Sure that was simple geometry, but it was also a small game in scope.

Extremely simple in comparison.

If you guys are trying to compare the calculation power between a $400 console and a CPU-driven server farm, you're going to have a bad time.

If it upsets you guys so much then just ignore the game and move on.
 

Gamezone

Gold Member
Not even in the same league.



Extremely simple in comparison.

We just have to wait and see how it turns out. EA also stated that Sim City required online because it was necessary for servers to calculate stuff in the cloud. I know that isn`t the same as Cloudgine, but im sceptical.
 

FordGTGuy

Banned
Well you're the one who asked for a game. ;)

Which did nothing to change the known facts.

We just have to wait and see how it turns out. EA also stated that Sim City required online because it was necessary for servers to calculate stuff in the cloud. I know that isn`t the same as Cloudgine, but im sceptical.

Are you honestly comparing Simcity to Crackdown?

My god man, it's not even the same publisher let alone the same data centers and service.
 

Synth

Member
I still think he's someone we should lend a ear to, but let's just agree to disagree. =P

Agreed (to disagree :p).

I was not saying "awful" in the way that they were easy to kill, but more in the way that they were a rather poor demonstration of cloud computing. They showed some very basic AI behaviours and I doubt the game would had been really impacted if they were running on the CPU. But hey, what do I know?

Yea, they're not a great showcase of cloud implementation, as really they're just doing the sort of task a dedicated server usually would. With that said though, there's really not that many local examples I can think of that are comparable. Usually when playing against AI you only interact with a few in your immediate vicinity, not all of the units across the entire stage/map. Titanfall however is dealing with every unit potentially interacting with every other player, regardless of where they are. If they were to be run locally, not only would one machine (the host) be responsible for all of their actions (whilst having to run the rest of the game too), but their connection would also be responsible for updating every other player of these actions. Realistically I'd say it simply wouldn't be happening.

This can kinda be substatiated by the lack of traffic in something like Outrun 2 online. The AI isn't complicated, but rather than being able to only concern itself with the cars near the player (as it would offline), it would also have to deal with the cars around all other players, even if someone is so far behind, that they're not even in the same stage of the course. This is also the case with the original Forza Horizon... and as you may know, not the case with Forza Horizon 2, that runs on Azure.
 
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