Ruffian planning "disruptive" openworld

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.