UPDATE: Crackdown 3 officially delayed to February 2019

UPDATE: Crackdown 3 has been officially delayed to an unknown date in February of 2019 said a rep speaking to Windows Central. The game will be at E3 this weekend and the delay will be used to add polish and new features to the open-world game. You can read a statement from Microsoft below.

“Our fans’ response to the signature antics and explosive gameplay of “Crackdown 3” has been incredible. To ensure we deliver the experience they deserve, “Crackdown 3” will be launching in Feb 2019. We look forward to sharing more on “Crackdown 3″ this Sunday during the Xbox E3 2018 briefing.”

You can read the original story below:

Long awaited Crackdown 3 seems to have issues coming together, as sources reportedly told Kotaku that the game will get another delay to 2019. If true, this comes as bad news into the already anemic exclusive line-up on Microsoft’s home console.

Rumors about a delay were swirling recently on the internet when Amazon Spain started canceling pre-orders over a week ago.  Microsoft’s General Manager of Games Marketing Aaron Greenberg promptly responded back then to those rumors, denying any truth in them.

With these two new sources claiming Crackdown 3 to be delayed, it looks like more than just baseless rumors. Crackdown 3 had a more than just tumultuous development history, with an initial reveal all the way back at E3 2014. Planned for a release in 2016, the ambitious open-world action game with a huge focus on destructibility, missed its initial landing target and got firstly delayed to November 2017. The plan was to get a showpiece exclusive to come out together with the newer Xbox One X console. Another delay happened with a nebulous 2018 date.

And here we are today, with what looks like a third major delay. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft will directly address a delay during their upcoming E3 press conference or silently hand out a press release afterwards. No matter how, if Crackdown 3 really gets delayed to next year, it will hardly instill confidence among fans that the game is shaping up as desired.

Microsoft did put an emphasis at Crackdown 3’s initial reveal four years ago on how the team was implementing an almost revolutionary new technology by offloading performance intensive destruction physic into the cloud. Powerful servers would work in tandem with the Xbox and calculate computationally expensive physics workloads, relieving the games console of otherwise too much work.

We don’t know if this new approach to enabling higher-than-normal console performance played a role in the troubled development of Crackdown 3 but it will be interesting to see how it all pans out when the game finally releases. Hopefully without any more delays.