Crackdown 3 will have no Microtransactions or Loot Boxes

In an interview with Windows Central, developer Sumo Digital answered many questions about the Xbox One’s long-awaited third entry in the destructive open-world series, Crackdown 3. The studio goes into detail about the game’s tumultuous development, its game modes and even the future for the franchise.

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. – Joseph Staten of Microsoft Games

Calling Crackdown 3’s history anything but problematic would be an understatement. Ever since the game’s first public showing during E4 2014, as one of the highlight exclusive games to bolster the game lineup of Microsoft’s then-nextgen console, gamers were skeptical whether the lofty promises by Microsoft could be turned into reality.

That might be hard to believe when seeing gameplay footage but it’s a certain technical aspect Microsoft touted which sounded like a true technological shift towards the future. The Cloud. Nowadays, talk about the cloud is everywhere. From social networks, private data backups to even game streaming. Powerful servers, stationed across the globe, are enabling many of the services we are using daily.

We knew going in when we started Crackdown 3 that this technological heavy lift — Azure powered, multiplayer fully destructible environments — was going to take a lot of investment, a lot of time to get right. To a large extent, the project schedule has largely been driven by that technology investment. – Joseph Staten of Microsoft Games

In Crackdown 3’s case, the computational power of servers – namely Microsoft’s Azure server network – will be used to enhance the physical destruction models of the game. Increasing the sheer scale and detail of destroying towering buildings and entire city blocks. Sadly, this ambitious goal led to Crackdown 3’s repeated delays over the years but Microsoft is confident that the game will be ready early 2019. Crackdown 3 comes out February 15, 2019 for Xbox One and PC.