Crackdown 3 features 100% destructible environments. That’s kind of mind-boggling in the best sort of gotta-have-it way. Critical skepticism dictates that we should be wary, however. Crackdown’s developers indicated to GamesRadar that all physics processing is being done in the cloud, and that the game would be optimized to require a 2-4 mbps connection.
It all sounds good, but what does that connection requirement actually mean? For those who deal with the foul world of data caps, it means having to pay attention to how much you are playing. A 4 mbps connection consumes 1.8GB of data per hour, meaning 72GB used in a 4 week period if you played 10 hours per week. Depending on which evil empire provides your mediocre internet connection, that could very well mean overage charges.
Secondly, there is latency to worry about. ‘Ping’ is a measurement of latency – how long it takes for messages to make a round trip in the system. If you are contacting a server that’s far away, or your connection is poor, your ping will be high. This is perceived in game as lag, although in this case you could suddenly be underneath a collapsed building as the connection jerks around. Sure, the demo at Gamescom was butter smooth, but it has to be assumed that the ‘cloud’ servers in this case were actually behind the stage with a fat physical connection between them.
Thirdly, there is server load. SimCity taught us that online requirements can be absolutely fatal to playability. What happens if the servers start to fall behind? Slowdown? Crashing? Getting booted from games? Microsoft better have a metric f-ton of servers at the ready.
Yeah, this is all pretty pessimistic. I hope Crackdown 3 is fantastic, but the connection requirement concerns me. What do you think readers? Hit us up on Twitter!