Ruffian planning "disruptive" openworld

By Tom Bramwell Published 5 July, 2010

Reckons other openworlds are a bit samey.

Crackdown 2 developer Ruffian has said it wants to make a "disruptive" game that advances the openworld genre in a way that its peers so far have not.

"One of the things that we think about games like inFamous, Prototype and Grand Theft Auto - not to denigrate them in any way - is that they're all doing the same sort of thing," producer James Cope told IGN.

"We're going to do something to really bring the genre forward."

Creative director Billy Thomson said a key word for the Dundee-based studio's next game is "disruptive".

Crackdown has "got one foot in reality and one foot in complete madness," he said. "What we would like to do in the next project is go further in that direction and go completely nuts. We think there's a lot that can be done with our engine."

There's no word yet on whether that game will be a sequel to Crackdown 2, which is due out this Friday, 9th July in Europe and will be reviewed on Eurogamer today.

However, Ruffian senior engineer Neil Duffield offered an indication of the team's thinking when he spoke to Digital Foundry last weekend.

"We managed to increase the NPC crowd count by around a factor of eight from CD1 to CD2, so who knows what we will have for Crackdown 3," he mentioned casually in answer to one of our tech guru's questions.

Look out for our Crackdown 2 review at 2pm BST today.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (15) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Jonathan_Fakenham #1 2 years ago

    Sound like they're onto something. I'm sold.

    Just counting minutes and hours until Crackdown 2 arrives now.

  • muscleblade #2 2 years ago

    Same here. Crackdown 2 will be great.

  • Doctor_What #3 2 years ago

    I ~hope~ Crackdown 2 will be great, but every other developer since C1 seems to have missed what made lightning strike on that one, so I hope that they understood it themselves...

  • MrMarbles #4 2 years ago

    "We managed to increase the NPC crowd count by around a factor of eight from CD1 to CD2, so who knows what we will have for Crackdown 3"


    I seem to remember an Edge interview with Realtime Worlds in the run-up to Crackdown's release, stating that they could have had way more pedestrians than they ended up using and that they toned the number down for the sake of fun as they just got in the way.

  • ignatiusjreilly #5 2 years ago

    Crackdown has "got one foot in reality and one foot in complete madness," he said. "What we would like to do in the next project is go further in that direction and go completely nuts."

    If you are half one thing and half another, how can you go further in that direction?

    /pedant

  • lucky_jim #6 2 years ago

    I got quite sucked into the Crackdown 2 demo, but didn't play the first game much because it was already pretty old news when I got my 360 in 2008. I just hope that the people claiming the demo's set in one of the less inspiring areas of the city are right, cos while the gameplay was fun, I couldn't see myself wanting to spend too much time in that area!

  • Bumbuliuz #7 2 years ago

    Looking forward to buying Crackdown 2 and Im hoping for the best with the game.

    APB doesn't intrest me a bit and Im dissapointed with the way the game is setup. I have no intrest paying for an multiplayer only game on my pc of this kind.

  • edhe #8 2 years ago

    @lucky_jim - yes it's in the worst part of the islands - the old Volk area was uninspired in the first game and just plain rubbish in this one - the other two main areas, what was shai-gen is awesome, and the other one was brilliant too. The area in the demo isn't the best.

  • CaptainQuint #9 2 years ago

    Any word on whether or not the sluggish controls (slow camera control) of the demo are by design or not? Meaning that it all gets a lot tighter and faster, once a player has levelled up a bit? Because I really didn't like the handling of the low level character in the demo - compared to Crackdown.

  • sneetch #10 2 years ago

    @ignatiusjreilly
    Crackdown has "got one foot in reality and one foot in complete madness," he said. "What we would like to do in the next project is go further in that direction and go completely nuts."

    If you are half one thing and half another, how can you go further in that direction?

    It's possible but you need very long legs. ;)

  • rojjer #11 2 years ago

    this game has been hyped quite a lot both here and at other gaming sites - I hope this is a good thing..

    One thing that bugs me is that some of my friends harp on about the graphics not being top notch. grrrrrr... its supposed to be about the gameplay people! And I quite like the look they've gone for

  • darleysam #12 2 years ago

    Can we punch holes in buildings. I want to throw a man through a skyscraper.

  • muscleblade #13 2 years ago

    Crackdown 2 actually look pretty good. Much improved over the original.

    Gamereactor gave it a 7/10 but complained about idiotic things like: "you cant reach the top of buildings without collecting orbs. I dont want to collect orbs i just want to do the missions" Its just missing the whole point of the game imo. I cant wait for the orb collecting tbh.

  • davisorle #14 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 20:44:35 16-04-2012

  • man.the.king #15 2 years ago

    @ignatiusjreilly

    "If you are half one thing and half another, how can you go further in that direction? "

    Lean? ;)