Crackdown 2

Eurogamer: Okay, I'm now officially asking you about whatever the second tranche of questions are supposed to be about. Will you need to take the Freaks and the Cell down in the same way as in the first game, bottom to top?

James Cope: There's a very similar approach in some respects. The mission hierarchy in the first game was just a bit repetitive - find the boss, kill the boss - and I think people rightly criticised it for being a little bit formulaic and boring, so one of the things we're trying to do now is the same freeform mission structure exists but within that mission structure there's a hierarchy of activities that create a system.

So effectively what's going on is that certain parts of the world are controlled by the Cell, the Freaks are running riot across the city at night, and the Agency is effectively working through Cell strongholds in something we call free tactical location, so it's a lot like destroy-capture-defend mechanics. That interplay of those three things is quite important to the way the mission structure works.

It's nice, but it's also very difficult to do because we've also got this design direction of needing to keep the game completely open so players can do things in any order. That's a very hard to try and structure. But there's a nice mechanic there that we're pretty pleased with, as ultimately the objective of Crackdown 2 is to retake the city and a big part of that is destroying the Freak population and the mechanic for doing that is quite exciting, and that brings in some of the new things like underground territories and things like that.

It's difficult [to describe] because there's a very big thing we've yet to talk about in the game and it's intimately linked to the mission structure [laughs]. It does involve the Freaks and the underground territories, and the ultimate objective in the game is pretty fundamental to that.

No Volk and all play.

Gareth Noyce: I think there's one difference [between Crackdown 1 and 2], I mean Crackdown gameplay was the primary gameplay of the bosses and everything else was secondary. I think Crackdown 2 we've got primary, secondary, tertiary and then Achievements and bits and bobs, so I think there's a few more layers this time.

Like Crackdown, you don't need to do everything, you can just tackle what you want, but there's more layers to it this time, which is one of the improvements we were trying to chase really.

Eurogamer: I was quite excited when Eurogamer contributor Christian Donlan visited you and told me he thought there were new orb types. Can you expand on that a little, or is it too early? Or was he wrong?

James Cope: Ha ha, no, he's totally right, there are new orb types. I can't really say what they are at the moment.

Eurogamer: Can you say what colour they are?

James Cope: Er, green ones. Purple ones. I tell you what... if people imagine in their minds the Golden Snitch from Harry Potter they probably won't be too far from the truth.

Eurogamer: Awesome. Harry Potter Crackdown crossover exclusive! So, one of the things that was at the heart of Crackdown for me was the guy in the Agency tower. We thought maybe he'd been replaced. Is it the same guy?

Gareth Noyce: It is totally the same guy. I know that came up on the other thing you printed, but it's definitely him.

Eurogamer: I'll sack Donlan.

Gareth Noyce: I'll tell you what it is, I think they'd just not mixed his voice in the build that we'd shown before, so he sounded a little bit thinner, but it is the same guy.

Eurogamer: I'll reinstate Donlan. And does he have any awesome new catchphrases you can share with us? The Agency tower man, that is.

Gareth Noyce: He's got some awesome ones in PvP. He's got one in PvP which is... "You put the 'gent' in 'Agent'."

Eurogamer: He's still got it. Obviously, big spoiler for people who haven't played the first game, but he totally betrayed you at the end of it. What's his excuse now? What's he up to?

James Cope: That's a difficult question because that would probably give away a fundamental part of the game we want players to discover, but the Agency is still on a mission to restore peace and order and all that kind of thing.

To be perfectly honest, that plot point at the end of the first game is not something we wanted to develop on, because it was going towards the game in a different direction. We weren't really ready to deal with that - it was a bit of a sod that we kind of had that line to deal with, and we are dealing with it, I just can't say how at the minute.

Gareth Noyce: But you know, 10 years have passed and there's a pretty good story for what's happened in that time, so it does all sort of tie up.

James Cope: And I think Billy [Thomson, designer] has already spilled that we want to do Crackdown 3, so you've got to string the pieces together and figure out what's going on there, which will be nice.

Eurogamer: Fair enough. So no jokey ending betrayal to this one then.

Freak in the morning and freak in the eeeeevening. Well, just in the evening.

Gareth Noyce: Well, there was always a line for Crackdown even from the first game. That plot line you're talking about was meant to take the game in a certain direction, and we're still heading through the arc that was originally kind of conceived, we're just doing it slightly differently.

Eurogamer: Since this section of the phone call is supposed to be about progression, could you maybe give an example of an ability from the first game and how you've evolved it for the second game, and how people will see it come through?

James Cope: Probably an easy one to talk about is just general hand-to-hand combat, because that's something that we felt in the first game was pretty limited. Throughout your whole character progression you only have the same hand-to-hand move, and that was really weak, and what we're trying to do now is make sure abilities and upgrades are skill-based, so you unlock stuff as you're going through your progression, and hand-to-hand's a very obvious one there: you get more moves as you go through the levels.

That's the kind of approach we wanted to take because it fixed a lot of problems and also because it's more rewarding for the player to get stuff unlocked. Another good example is driving skill - it was really frustrating in Crackdown 1 to level up your driving, because you try and run people over and they all dived out of the way, they were just too clever. The Freaks [in Crackdown 2] work well for levelling up your driving skill, because they're just cannon fodder.

Gareth Noyce: Yeah, that one's a good one. At the end of the first game you've got all the vehicles in one hit right at the end, so we're going to spread all the good vehicles out [in Crackdown 2]. We've kind of taken that approach with everything - make sure there's something for the player as they go up every skill level, so there's loads of bits and bobs you get access to as you go up through the skill level, and everyone I know seems to have levelled up everything but driving in the first game...

Eurogamer: I think I read on the infamous Wikipedia that you get a helicopter if you get your driving skill to a certain level...

Gareth Noyce: That's not actually tied to driving skill.

James Cope: Yeah, it's agility. The helicopter really is the ultimate agility tool, and that to be honest is because we don't want to break the game too early for people. We really want to be controlled about it. The helicopter, you know, takes you anywhere, and it's great fun. Especially jumping out and skydiving.

That's a careful thing we have to do. We do want to give people loads of fun toys, but we also want to make sure they have fun in the game without it being too fun too early.

Eurogamer: Absolutely. You've got to regulate it a little bit. It does genuinely say "driving skill opens up a special helicopter" on Wikipedia, so I think I might go in there and edit that. Wikipedia in "unreliable" shocker. Anyway, one of the things that's a bugbear of mine in openworld games is when you've collected about 400 of something of which there are about 402, you can't find the last two. Do you have a solution to that for Crackdown 2?

Gareth Noyce: Yeah, we are doing something to help the player with that. I'm not sure how much detail I can go into, but definitely. We're not giving them away, but the more you get the easier it will be to find some, and the other thing I'd say about the orbs is when you've got the helicopter it's going to be really easy to get anywhere you want, so I genuinely don't think people will have that problem.

James Cope: I think one of the biggest problems we had on the first game is you had to find another orb in order to know how many you had left. That was a bit of an oversight, which made a difficult challenge even more difficult. We won't be doing that again [laugh].

Eurogamer: One last question, then. What are a couple of cool things you've done in the game lately that don't really have anything to do with anything but are just kind of cool emergent things you've been doing?

James Cope: That's a good question, there's a lot there. One of the funniest things I've seen is playing on the fact we've got this seamless join-in-progress thing. At the moment when we're working on the dev builds anyone can join in anyone else's game, and you don't actually know when a player's joining a game, so it's quite funny watching Billy doing some work - placements for multiplayer or something - and Gareth just silently joined his game, walked over to Billy and twatted him one round the face.

Yeah I'm using this screenshot in part two as well. What of it?

Eurogamer: Well, if there are loads of bugs in the game I'll just assume you couldn't help yourselves going into each other's games and ruining the whole QA process.

Gareth Noyce: I think it's just me. I've just got a bad habit of joining games and running people over.

James Cope: He speaks truth. I tried to play [Zelda] Four Swords with him once.

Eurogamer: That is not a game that enjoys co-op with people who grief. I had to review it and people just kept fouling it up for me for a laugh. My friends.

Gareth Noyce: That's what co-op's for though isn't it? I thought it was an extension of PvP.

Eurogamer: I think the clue is in the name.

James Cope: What else have we got, Gareth? What's good at the moment?

Gareth Noyce: I'm trying to think of things we can reveal. To be honest with you, I've just spent a lot of time racing. It sounds really dull, but just messing around with the new cars has been great. Also the chopper.

James Cope: Yeah, chopper with weapon attachments is good fun.

Gareth Noyce: I wasn't going to say that.

James Cope: I didn't say which weapons.

Gareth Noyce: Put it this way, you've just got to sing the Air Wolf theme in your head.