Crackdown Q&A with Dave Jones

We visited sunny Dundee, Scotland, to meet up with Dave Jones, the creator of Crackdown™ for Xbox 360 to find out about his latest creation.

Xbox: One of the things that we found most interesting about Crackdown is the level of freedom. Was it hard, from a development perspective, to drive the player through to take on the kingpins?

The man behind Crackdown.

Dave Jones: No, I don't think so. I think it depends on what kind of player you are and I think that's what the crux of it always comes down to. I could design a game for me, or I can design to the level that everyone personally wants to have it on. I think if I had not designed this game and came at it fresh, I'd think, "Oh, that's pretty cool, I'm going to play around this city for hours and hours and hours. I'll get to a really high level and then go blitz all the missions." Some people will play the game that way, others will think "No, just give me the story, point me to where the others are. I'll go and if it's tough I'll go back and keep trying, just edge through them bit by bit and I'm on a mission to finish every one of these as soon as I can."

Xbox: If you are a new player coming into Crackdown for the first time, how are you brought in to the experience?

Jones: You're brought in and we're doing as much through user tests and voice over prompts as we possibly can, so the agency is always talking to you. It will say "Right, we recommend you go up against Los Muertos first. Here's the first guy to go against and you're a good level, maybe you want to go and clean up some scum on the streets to get to level two and then do this guy." We'll talk you through that and if a player ignores it, that's fine, but the game does recognize that. He may go straight to the Shai-Gen district and these guys are nails compared to a level one or two agent but the game says, "Agent, we hired you, we recommend you don't take them on. If you do, there could be dire consequences for you." We never say "Don't do it," that's the cool thing. To some people, they're like "That's a challenge," and they think "I want to be the first player at the start of the game to take out Shai-Gen with no leveling." Now that, I don't know if it's possible or not. That's the nice thing—it probably is though.

Take on three gang factions in the streets of Pacific City.

Xbox: How does the co-op mode sit alongside the single player game?

Jones: Well, co-op's an interesting one because the design principle was that it's not a special mode: You could be playing a single-player game, and halfway through get a friend to join you for an hour and then pop out again. What we didn't do is ramp up the difficulty massively because there are two players. You can have some fun, but at the same time if someone's struggling, co-op's just as good to help somebody as it is just to simply play the whole game through. The thing that is different is we have a completely different set of achievements and leaderboards for co-op mode versus single player. For everything you do there will be leaderboards in both single player and co-op modes.

Xbox: If you have double the number of players in co-op, would you consider doubling the number of explosive barrels in the game?

Jones: Believe me, if we could do that we'd double the number of barrels in the single player game too!

Xbox: How do the leaderboards work in the game?

Jones: We wanted to integrate them heavily into the game and we wanted it to be not just like a normal leaderboard where you look up where you are. It is kind of meaningless, it doesn't really egg you on, does it? So that's why we decided to keep it all in the background and feed it to the player. It looks at what you're doing—we have hundreds of leaderboards, we're tracking everything you do in the game. Basically we set quite a low personal best: let's say you blow up three cars, the game will record this as your personal best and then it looks through all your friends and says your friend Jim, he's got six. Then the player will go for seven, new personal best and you beat Jim but you'll then get the next personal best of perhaps, ten and eventually you get to the best of your friends and it then goes out to global leaderboards and tells you the world record. I think that's hours of gameplay as you think "I need to get on the top ten leaderboard" or "I love doing this thing in the game, I reckon if I steal these cars, park them all around the block and an explosive barrel and put it here … " Just to do all that stuff and be awarded for it out of leaderboards, that's one of the great things about pairing Xbox LIVE® with sandbox gaming.

Xbox: Could you go into any detail on the achievements we can expect to see in Crackdown? Have you got any favorites?

Take the car and hit the road.

Jones: There's one where if you can fall 1000 feet to your death, you get an achievement. You've got to get yourself in a situation where you can do that. I don't think even jumping off the top of the agency building gets you that achievement. You've got to do something pretty clever, with a friend and with explosives to get yourself to that peak and then fall to your death.

Xbox: How do the gangs work?

Jones: The whole idea was we wanted to make the kingpin really, really tough. We wanted a gang eco-system, because I think eco-systems are cool. The eco-system shows the guy at the top and it's like you're chipping away at the generals. There are three kingpins, always in play and they're very heavily fortified with all the generals in place. Visually as well, if you do drive up to Garcia for example and have a good look you'll see trucks parked outside garden gates and they all walk around with these big M16s and everything. Even subtle things like if you target them and look at their hit points they actually have two lines of hit points which is double health because they're super pumped up. They're super pumped up because their drug guy keeps them super pumped up with drugs. We explain all that and if you wander into it then you're going to get wasted. Though, like I said, there will be some guys who are very, very good players and very, very sneaky who take them out and I don't mind that because that will be shown in an achievement or a leaderboard if you manage to do it with a low level agent. This is all in the dossier, you get a dossier with everyone in the hierarchy, what they do and if you kill them how it affects the kingpin. It's very nice visually to go away, kill the arms supplier, kill the vehicle supplier and when you come back to his location, rather than walking around with their M16s they've got Uzis and pistols. Rather than big trucks parked outside, there's just little cars parked outside: They're just not getting the level of service that they had when the generals were in power. It's a nice simple mechanic, it's very visual and people get it.

Xbox: The three gangs are very distinct. How would you describe each one?

Jones: We wanted Los Muertos to act first, ask question later, so they're very reactive. They run around, they scream a lot, they're not that accurate with their fire arms, they tend to send loads of guys after you but they're not that fit so you can kill them quite easily. Then there's the Volk who are an Eastern European gang with a lot of ex-military guys. A little more organized, a bit smarter on the tactical stuff—they'll use cover a lot more and things like that. Better weaponry, that sort of stuff, but still an illegal gang. Then we have the Shai-Gen: They're not a gang, they're actually a corporation. A big, legal, bonafide corporation that just do very dodgy things in the background. They're not very reactive at all. The Shai-Gen, when you kill a few of them they won't send someone after you immediately, but when they do they'll send a sniper who's very good, very quiet—a very different reaction from Los Muertos.

Defend the city as a superhuman law enforcement officer.

Xbox: Do you have any plans for downloadable content?

Jones: We have loads of ideas. We're just not quite sure which is the best one to go with first. We have some very unique ideas as well, I have to say. The agency vehicles are a lot of fun for a lot of people. An agency motorbike would be cool, imagine a motorbike and all the cool stuff you could do. There's that, there's new gangs, there's loads of stuff we'd like to explore once we've brought the game out.

Xbox: The humor and the visual style stand out as painting an unreal world, unlike other sandbox games where they try to mimic a realistic gangland feel. Was this a deliberate move?

Jones: We realized that if we went very realistic, first of all we'd be compared against them. That would make people feel even more like it's a GTA game but really it's not, not when you play it. It's very, very different. More importantly, because we also pushed the credibility a fair bit with physics. Everything has to be about fun and gameplay more than trying to stick to realism. When people do something that's out of the ordinary, graphic novels do it the best, whether it's Sin City or whatever. They tend to come up with a style so you know that it's not really real and then you can get away with a lot more that you put into the subject matter. Because we're doing fifty meter jumps and we have cars that morph, people don't question it too much because it's fantasy. It has this contemporary feel to it in some respects because of the style. And to be honest, because we're fed up with grays and browns and realistic worlds—it gives a bit of color for a change.

Xbox: Thanks so much for your time, Dave.