Billy Thomson talks of Crackdown’s beginnings and its story

RealTimeWorld’s Crackdown has been hugging the limelight lately thanks to the Halo 3 beta development and the fact that the German ESRB has not rated the game yet. But then again, exposure is exposure, and that’s the important thing in the biz – letting the people know that your product exists and trying to make people buy it, regardless of their reason for doing so. Now, we got so used to Dave Jones talking about the game, so we shift our attention towards a FiringSquad interview with the game’s lead designer, Billy Thomson.

He reveals that the game was supposedly an MMORPG, so that makes it a heavy RPG game. But when they were testing the game’s prototype, what the team realized was that the core skills like Agility, Strength, Firearms, Driving, and Explosives “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.” From there on, they were dead set on making the game into a RPG-based character progression using those five skills.

Mr. Thomson also talked about the fictional backstory of the game. Pacific City is now controlled by three rival gangs- The Los Muertos, the Volk, and the Shai-Gen corporation. All of them have their own stories as to who formed them and how they rose in power. In an attempt to overpower the gang, The Agency was formed to counter the security threat and to stop the increasing of gang-activity.

The Agency, although experiencing a drastic decrease is law enforcement recruitment, is making its last stand against gang-related crimes. The Keep is the agency’s high security compound and last bastion of hope. In this time of conflict, it becomes hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad ones.  As they say, the path to evil is laden with good intentions.

Inside the Keep, lawmen are exploiting the work of a disgraced scientist, which is a human modification program that could produce superior law enforcers. You are the Agency’s first prototype, and it’s your job to annihilate gang crimes and kingpins.

To read the whole interview, click on our Read-link below.

RealTimeWorld’s Crackdown has been hugging the limelight lately thanks to the Halo 3 beta development and the fact that the German ESRB has not rated the game yet. But then again, exposure is exposure, and that’s the important thing in the biz – letting the people know that your product exists and trying to make people buy it, regardless of their reason for doing so. Now, we got so used to Dave Jones talking about the game, so we shift our attention towards a FiringSquad interview with the game’s lead designer, Billy Thomson.

He reveals that the game was supposedly an MMORPG, so that makes it a heavy RPG game. But when they were testing the game’s prototype, what the team realized was that the core skills like Agility, Strength, Firearms, Driving, and Explosives “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.” From there on, they were dead set on making the game into a RPG-based character progression using those five skills.

Mr. Thomson also talked about the fictional backstory of the game. Pacific City is now controlled by three rival gangs- The Los Muertos, the Volk, and the Shai-Gen corporation. All of them have their own stories as to who formed them and how they rose in power. In an attempt to overpower the gang, The Agency was formed to counter the security threat and to stop the increasing of gang-activity.

The Agency, although experiencing a drastic decrease is law enforcement recruitment, is making its last stand against gang-related crimes. The Keep is the agency’s high security compound and last bastion of hope. In this time of conflict, it becomes hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad ones.  As they say, the path to evil is laden with good intentions.

Inside the Keep, lawmen are exploiting the work of a disgraced scientist, which is a human modification program that could produce superior law enforcers. You are the Agency’s first prototype, and it’s your job to annihilate gang crimes and kingpins.

To read the whole interview, click on our Read-link below.