Interview With Billy Thomson Lead Designer of Crackdown
In what is probably the most anticipated title to be released this year, FiringSquad landed an interview with Billy Thomson, the lead designer of Crackdown. Release date for this new game is February 20th and already many are hyping up the game. This game may need to have a gnre of it’s own, with it’s sleek comic design and great play.
Here is the a sample of the interview:
FiringSquad: First, how did the idea for Crackdown come about?
Billy Thomson: The original high level concept was to make a MMORPG based in a real world city. So, on paper Crackdown actually began life as a fairly heavy RPG game, we had designed far more skills, and as I mentioned we had originally planned of going MMO. As always the first step of game development is the prototype phase, so we prototyped the foundations of what we believed to be the most fundamental areas of the game – the progression of the key skills, Agility, Strength, Firearms, Driving and Explosives – and started playtesting. What we very quickly realised was that these core skills were incredibly good fun to play around with in the test environment we had built, but they were far more fun when played as a fast paced action oriented game rather than the slower more deliberate pace of your standard MMORPG. So, with this information we made up our minds to take Crackdown down a different road, one that still had RPG elements but was more focused on fast paced action based gameplay similar to that found in an arcade game. At this point we decided to forget about any plans of making Crackdown a MMO game, we knew what we wanted. We wanted RPG based character progression in 5 key skills, a solid physics model to create fantastic vehicular based gameplay and allow for a huge amount of object interaction, to design our own city from scratch, with zero loading times and the ability to constantly be able to see the vistas of the environment that you would be playing in, a truly freeform mission structure, and a density of characters, vehicles and street furniture never seen before in a city based game. Our goal was to cram each and every one of these features into the most intense action game available on the Xbox 360, and we wanted it all available for co-op play too – doesn’t sound like that big a job if you say it really fast!
Read the rest of the interview here ->
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