Interview | Ruffian Games (Crackdown 2)

Crackdown 2 releases worldwide next week so we asked Microsoft to hook us up with Billy Thomson, creative director on Crackdown 2 at Ruffian Games, so we could ask him a few questions about the upcoming sandbox sequel.

Could you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what it is that you do for Ruffian Games?

[Billy Thomson] Hi, and thank you for taking the time to cover Crackdown 2. My name is Billy Thomson and I’m the Creative Director at Ruffian Games. I’ve been doing design work on games since the beginning of 1996 which feels like a lifetime ago. The most popular of those games would likely be Grand Theft Auto, GTA 2 and Crackdown – which I was Lead Designer on. At Ruffian Games it’s my job to provide a high level creative vision for the games we make and try to keep the team focused on that vision on a day to day basis. Normally this can actually be a really difficult task, but the team at Ruffian is fantastic to work with, making my job nice and simple.

Can you tell us a little of the plot of Crackdown 2. Have the events after the last game made life better for the inhabitants of Pacific City and the people of The Agency?

A little over 10 years have passed since the defeat of the 3 gangs who terrorized Pacific City. The first couple of years saw Pacific City enjoy a brief period of peace and prosperity, with the Agency taking full control of the city, law and order was upheld, life was good. Then rumours of Freak virus outbreaks began to emerge. The Agency put measures into place to track down the virus and destroy it, but the virus spread too fast for them to track and deal with. The chaos caused by the virus created the opportunity for small groups of violent protestors to begin joining forces calling themselves the Cell. This group blamed the Agency for the Freak virus outbreak, claiming the Agency had an antidote that they were withholding. The battle lines were drawn and the Agency had to fight the Freak virus and Cell uprising during the day and night. Soon enough Cell had sabotaged the Agent project, destroying all of the cloned Agents and the technology required to grow them. Without the protection of the Agents the Agency were forced to retreat to the Agency Tower while Pacific City fell into ruin as it was completely overrun by the infected Freaks. Crackdown 2 begins at the time when the Agency have rebuilt the Agent project and are now ready to bring the fight back to the Freaks and the Cell.

Often in sequels developers go for a different, or more cities. What made you to keep the action centered in Pacific City?

The Freak virus that plays a central role to the story and game objectives of Crackdown 2 was actually released by the player as they killed one of the Shai-Gen bosses – Baltazar Czernenko – in the first Crackdown. So continuing on in the same city was a requirement to continue that story, not to mention that Pacific City was one of the brightest stars of Crackdown. We wanted to give people a familiar place to play the game, albeit with a complete gameplay and aesthetic overhaul.

You’ve gone from criminal gangs as the enemies to Mutants – what made you go for this change of direction?

As I said it was a continuation from the first Crackdown, so it was a story we wanted to complete and it all ties into the original genetic technology that is used to create the genetically modified Agents. The other reason we wanted to add these characters to the game was to provide a bigger challenge to the player. A top level Agent is so powerful that any normal human being doesn’t stand a chance against their strength and agility, so we wanted to create a super powered set of enemies that could easily deal with a top level Agent. We wanted to have the tools to strike fear into even the most experienced Crackdown players and the Freaks give us that ability.

One of the things most loved about the original Crackdown was it’s free roaming element. Especially as you increase your various stats allowing you to leap superhero-like from building to building – I take it these elements are very much present in the sequel?

The skill progression system is at the very heart of Crackdown, if you took that away you would move the game towards games like Saints Row and GTA – both great games but not the type of game we want to make. So, yes you can expect to see some completely insane demonstrations of superhuman strength and agility as well as a plethora of new weapons, gadgets and vehicles.

For fans of the original what fundamental differences will they experience in Crackdown 2′s core gameplay?

Probably the most obvious change is the number of enemies you will be up against. When night falls the streets are completely crammed with Freaks, there are thousands and thousands of them everywhere. Fighting against these guys is insanely fun – it’s like popping bubble wrap, only with massive explosions. We didn’t alter the core controls of the game much at all as they were generally pretty tight and intuitive, so it’s been more a case of making a few tweaks here and there to sort out some of the issues we had or new additions to areas we felt were a bit weak from the first Crackdown, like hand to hand combat and vehicle handling. We’ve also doubled the number of players in co-op from 2 to 4 and added in brand new 16 player PvP competitive game modes.

I understand there is an increased focus on multiplayer in Crackdown 2. Could you elaborate on this?

As I mentioned we have doubled the number of players that can play in the full campaign co-op game from 2 players up to 4 players. This was a massive job for the code team as we had to completely ditch the network code from Crackdown – as it wasn’t scalable without being detrimental to the core gameplay experience – and write a brand new peer to peer network system. This allowed us to have 4 player co-op in the full game with truly seamless join in progress, allowing players to jump in and out of your game with no effect at all to your experience. Players can play together in the same space or they can go off to the far sides of the city and take on completely different objectives and the game handles it all without a glitch. The new peer to peer network code also allowed us to scale to 16 players for arena based PvP competitive multiplayer game modes which are incredibly good fun to play. Anyone who enjoyed old school Quake Deathmatch will love what we’ve done with our PvP game modes.

The original game was made by Realtime Worlds. Ruffian Games, a relative start up, has taken over the franchise. Was there any difficulty inherent in this adoption?

Much of the team are made up of the core team that made the original Crackdown so we didn’t have many problems from that perspective – we know the game design, the code, the art style, the production pipeline, everything about the game. The only issue we had was the stress of building a new studio, hiring a team, etc. while actually making a game that we could all be proud of. That was the tricky bit, but we’re through the other side now and we have without doubt managed to create a game that we can all be proud of.

As a fan of the original I have plenty of good memories – leaping from the top of the Agency tower (the highest point in the game), pinning enemies to vehicles with the harpoon type weapon which was made available via DLC. Do you have any particular stand out memories from the sequel to share with our readers?

I think my favourite moment has to be when we were playing 4 player co-op. I was carrying one of our new hand to hand melee weapons, it’s a long iron bar with a big chunk of concrete attached to one end. Our Lead Designer – Steve Iannetta – was running around with the UV Shotgun – it’s an energy based weapon that creates a powerful blast of energy that instantly vaporises Freaks, but it also creates a really powerful physical force. It was night time and the streets were crammed with thousands of Freaks. I was beating the s*** out of big groups of Freaks who were surrounding me, and Steve was standing behind me blasting away with the UV Shotgun, flinging vehicles into the air and crashing down into swarms of Freaks, killing them all in a pile of embers and ash. We were having a great time, laughing at the mindless chaos we were both creating. Suddenly we heard a Chopper coming close by. We looked around for the Chopper and saw coming at us from above a nearby rooftop, both it’s miniguns were firing constantly at the street below annihilating Freak after Freak on the street ahead of us. This was all fairly normal for Crackdown up to this point until we noticed this ball hanging beneath the Chopper that had rockets flying out of it.

Steve and I pretty much stopped in our tracks and were like “what the f…” The Chopper started to come closer and it as did we started to see what was going on. Our Development Director – Gareth Noyce – was inside an Agency Tank that was suspended beneath the Chopper. Our Producer – Jim Coper – had attached the Tank to the base of the Chopper he was flying with Mags – Mags create an elastic magnetic bond between multiple objects which allowed the Chopper to airlift the Tank and swing it through the air. When we both saw the Chopper swinging the Tank that was firing rocket after rocket into the masses of Freaks below it was an unbelievable sight. It’s seeing this kind of mad use of the huge amount of vehicles, gadgets, weapons and abilities that the player has at their disposal that makes me love Crackdown.

Increasingly big budget games have downloadable content available immediately, or soon after release. Will this be the case with Crackdown 2?

I’m not sure how soon it will be available, but people can definitely expect to see some great DLC released for Crackdown 2 sometime after release of the full game on July 8.

Things get left out in games due to deadlines, resources and so on. Was there something that you really wanted to include in Crackdown 2 which you just couldn’t?

Yes, we really wanted to create a replay system that would allow players to capture their last 30 seconds of gameplay and then have it rendered as a video and uploaded to either Xbox Live Marketplace or Youtube. Crackdown 2 is the type of game that will spawn so many user created videos that we really wanted to make it a simple process for players to show off their antics to the world. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to deliver that feature, but it’s something we’re really keen on pursuing in our future projects.

How well do you expect Crackdown 2 will be received by gamers – fans of the original and newbie’s alike?

I quite honestly don’t know, I’m incredibly pessimistic about the games I work on, it’s probably a subconscious defensive measure but it keeps me safe. Looking at it with a slightly less cynical head on, the demo has been out for a week now and the vast majority of the online response seems to be extremely positive, so I can only hope that the full game will be received in the same way. I’ve got absolutely everything crossed right now.

Having not touched or seen the game in person (yet) I’ve probably missed some all important question. Is there anything you’d like to add?

I think you’ve covered most of what we want to highlight in Crackdown 2. The only thing that you haven’t asked is whether or not we’d be doing a demo as we did on the first Crackdown. We’ve recently released the demo which is available to Xbox Live Gold members from 21st June and for Xbox Live Silver members from 28th of June. The demo has a good chunk of the Crackdown 2 content in there, with accelerated skill progression which will allow players to fly through the skills levels at a far faster rate than is present in the full game. You get 30 full minutes of play on one of the 3 islands with up to 4 player co-op play.

It’s a huge amount of content that will give you a really good taste of what’s going to be on offer to everyone from July 8th in New Zealand – 6th in the US and 9th in Europe.