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Crackdown 2

Part 1: James Cope and Gareth Noyce explain the trailer's implications.

EurogamerWhat sort of areas are we seeing in the trailer - anything we should recognise from the first game and any new areas you can talk about?
James Cope

I think there are some key landmarks in there that you can recognise. Agency Tower is a good one to pull out. It's similar structure, but it's kind of evolved somewhat. There's parts of the old Volk Island, which is now called Hope Springs, and there's bits and pieces from elsewhere in the world. I think there's a nice view of the new shantytown, which is where the civilians and pedestrians are hanging out trying to survive, which used to be like the old North Island by Garcia's Villa, and that's been repopulated.

So there's a lot of character progression from the city sense, and that's the kind of thing that we want to do with it, is have that feeling where people know the area but it's considerably evolved in terms of what's happened between the end of the first game and what's going on now.

EurogamerRight, so it's a good place to be anyway, but anyone who's played the first game will get a bit of a kick out of seeing the evolution there...
James Cope

Yeah, I mean it ranges from fairly severe destruction in places all the way through to stuff not really changed very much. So there's a ripple effect that's gone across the whole of Pacific City. That's a result of the civil war between the Cell, the Agency and the Freaks basically devastating everything in-between.

Hang on, is this guy getting up in my grill?
EurogamerWhat kind of Freaks are we seeing in the trailer and what others will be seeing in the full game?
Gareth Noyce

I think for the most part in the video you're seeing the lower-level Freaks. One of the things we wanted to get across was the tech we've got, so you can have hundreds of characters on-screen as you could see in the first game, and we wanted to leverage that so you have multiple targets on-screen.

So those low-level Freaks at night are really there for you just to cause carnage with. You can drive through them, you can throw them about, you can blow them up, and there's a lot of them, so that's very impressive technically and from the gameplay perspective. It's a good laugh just cleaning up the streets.

There are other Freaks in the game, but I'm not sure what we're allowed to reveal.

James Cope

There are various levels of Freaks. I mean, you're seeing just the basic level in the video, and there's at least two or three Freaks above that. We do want the Freaks to be there as kind of Agent parallels, so there's the Reaper Freaks that chase Agents across rooftops and things like that - and it goes a bit further than that, but we definitely can't talk about those at the moment [laughs].

Standing on top of stuff is one of the best things about Crackdown. Kicking people off stuff is second.
EurogamerIt also looked as though we were seeing multiplayer in there. Is that from the multiplayer modes or campaign co-op, and can you talk about how campaign co-op will work relative to the first game?
James Cope

It's a mixture [in the video]. There's a mix of co-op gameplay and there was some PvP competitive gameplay in there as well. I think just for impact they've used some competitive multiplayer because it's a nice controlled environment [to film] playing around. But really the essence of those is having fun with your friends and you can do that in multiple ways.

Campaign co-op... Basically when we're asked to describe the co-op gameplay it's pretty hard because the co-op gameplay is the same as the single-player gameplay, it's just got your mates in it as well. It's the same game, we try not to distinguish between them. Whatever's available is in both.

What we think is uniquely Crackdown is that that experience isn't limited, there's not a corridor of gameplay you go through, so you and your mates can really do anything you want. Four of you can be at four different corners of the world doing four different missions, for example, and that's something that is unique to us, we think. But for the purposes of the video you can't really show that very well [laughs].

Gareth Noyce

I was just going to say it's largely the same as the first game in that you can do what you want, so people drop in, drop out, there's no restrictions on it. You can take the missions out of the gameplay or you can just make your own fun up.

EurogamerOne thing I spent quite a lot of time doing in the first game - apart from inviting my then-editor to roof and then kicking him off it repeatedly...
James Cope

I know a good story about that. I know someone who actually got reported for abuse on Xbox Live for doing that.