GoldenEye98
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https://www.gamesradar.com/crackdown-3-wrecking-zone-multiplayer-hands-on/
There’s a very real delight to be had in pulling a building down around a group of otherwise aggressive enemies in the Crackdown 3 Wrecking Zone multiplayer mode. Perched atop a towering skyscraper, it’s difficult not to get drawn into the sheer, incredible spectacle of it all; mouth agape, eyes blinded by the collapsing neon fixtures of the futuristic cityscape enveloping you.
The Agents begin to desperately scramble for cover through falling debris, crashing through walls and windows as they tumble to the ground with weapons drawn high, all in an effort to outmanoeuvre encroaching players before the bullets start flying.
We won’t bore you with the specifics as it is all extremely complicated, a technical accomplishment that Microsoft Game Studios admits it has only gotten working as intended in the last 12 months or so, but you should trust us when we tell you that it is pretty goddamned spectacular. By using its established cloud infrastructure – a bank of data-centres made up, effectively, of interlaced Xbox One units – Microsoft’s engineering team has been able to offload all of the advanced physics calculations necessary to power something as revolutionary as Crackdown 3’s awe-inspiring destruction. And it can do it without taking anything at all away from the game’s gorgeous graphics, silky smooth framerate or its heart- pounding moment-to-moment action – if anything it enhances it entirely.
That’s because Ruffian Games – the team responsible for both Crackdown 2 and the multiplayer side to Crackdown 3 – effectively has up to 12 times the processing power of the Xbox One X (or 30 times the original base Xbox One) to play with. The hard work is handled behind-the-scenes, up there in the cloud, so all you need to worry about is tracking Agents through the chaos and keeping your mind focused on the objective at hand as the world crumbles down around you.
What it means is that, regardless of the strength of your internet connection, you’ll be able to jump into Wrecking Zone and bask in the glory that is 100 per cent destruction without any noticeable impact to the core game experience. You’ll be able to stand alongside nine other players and literally tear an entire city apart piece by piece, grappling with your foes as you shred through environments with wild abandon. By utilising the Azure network, Crackdown 3 is able to render hundreds upon hundreds of individual pieces of debris in real- time, for every one of the players in any given game.
In effect it means that, were we to be running away from a gaggle of enemies, we could use an assault rifle to hastily carve a makeshift door into the façade of an approaching building in an effort to break line-of- sight, and that will synchronise for every player in the game without any delay. Perhaps you may see an enemy running along a bridge overhead – rather than leaping up to their level in an effort to engage them, you could whip out a rocket launcher and rip the floor right out from under their feet, catching them unawares and open to an easy kill. As you may imagine, this makes for some fairly interesting, if not totally awesome, gameplay scenarios and opportunities that – to put it simply – no other multiplayer game on the market can accurately capture or reproduce.