Crackdown: Welcome back to the agency

Microsoft’s tease of the return of Crackdown and the reassuring chime of an agility orb will have brought a smile to the face of most early Xbox 360 adopters. While the lure of the Halo 3 multiplayer beta was the primary reason for many to grab a copy of Realtime Worlds’ superpowered cop sandbox, it was the open design and smartly conceived Achievements that kept players from trading their copies in. What we’ve seen so far has given us a glimpse of what Microso is hoping to achieve with this new title, with the help of original game creator Dave Jones’ new company Cloudgine.

You see Cloudgine is primarily a cloud platform development team, not a design team, so its involvement is likely to be largely on the tech and processing side of things. A tech demo by Microso from last year showing how frame-rates can be supported using cloud processing gave clues as to what this could mean. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, actually confi rmed the demo was an early prototype for Crackdown’s return. Massive destruction, cloud processing backing it up and at least four-player co-op are all looking likely at the moment. And those lovely agility orbs of course.