![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. And believe us, the results really are something to behold. This is, however, the first time we’ve seen Azure used to calculate something as complex as game physics across a shared- experience in real-time. Thus far, we’ve seen it used to power the machine-learning artificial intelligence in Forza Horizon 4 (opens in new tab) and Forza Motorsport 7 (opens in new tab)’s multiplayer, as well the AI mobs in Titanfall 2 (opens in new tab)’s Attrition and Halo 5 (opens in new tab)’s Warzone multiplayer (not to mention these games’ dedicated servers). 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.Ĭrackdown 3 isn’t the first game to utilise this cloud-based technology, but it is unquestionably the most impressive application of it to date. ![]() That’s because Ruffian Games – the team responsible for both Crackdown 2 (opens in new tab) 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. ![]() 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. 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. 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. It’s pretty radical, in every sense of the word. It's an incredible take on high-octane multiplayer action where victory is never guaranteed, nor is the shape of the city after a few frantic minutes of combat – the landscape a smouldering wreckage of bullet-ridden buildings and fractured intentions. ![]() There’s just seconds to collect them before the next entanglement begins, before the Agents return to the simulation to seek revenge. The firefight ends almost as quickly as it started, with twinkling dog tags soon littering the ground where entire structures once stood tall.
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