Pacific City Approves Bond, Will Put More Agents On The Streets

While his answers in no way were prompted by my piece about the potential (and disappointments) of Crackdown, Realtime Worlds producer Phil Wilson did a Q & A yesterday with Eurogamer. Despite being far too tight lipped for my tastes, he did give us a few glimmers of hope in a form I hadn't predicted.

Repairmanjack: What are the chances of having a patch that resets the bosses? I'm having to create new gamertags or delete the game from the hard drive to replay it and Time Trials don't really make up for this.

Phil Wilson: Ah crap, I can only apologise for this cock-up on behalf of persons that shall remain nameless. You wouldn't believe what happened here even if I told you but suffice to say that we will have a 'reset gangs' option in the free DLC (in place of the current crimes on/off toggle - and it's quite possible that you heard it here first!) So while I'm spilling beans, there's also another great mode that I'm pretty sure is also kinda what you're asking for but a whole lot more - so I hope that goes some way towards compensation. Our bad!

...

Polar: Are there any plans to implement competitive multiplayer play in the future? Can you let you let us know anything exclusively exciting around the up and coming downloadable content?

Phil Wilson: Sadly I can't say much about the DLC but I will say that we've got some competitive (and one co-operative... if you chose to play it that way) game modes that we're already having a great time playing. Longer term it would be good to offer multiplayer to more than two players in the Crackdown Universe - the prospect of mass co-op is definitely an exciting one.

Kudos are in order, especially if this is all free / very cheap. The whole process of releasing a game, patching it within the first week, and then unloading overpriced content that should have been in the game from day one is a troubling trend. Keep it free, Crackdown, or else we won't even buy Crackdown 2 for the Halo 4 (or Halo Wars) beta.


Oh, who am I kidding, or course we will.

Lovin' from the Onion

The Onion, America's Finest News Source, just weighed in on the videogame violence debate in their brilliant series of Colbert-esque self-satirizing political cartoons.

Thankfully there are some people who know a thing or two about games who work for influential, widely read publications. Keep up the good fight Onion.