Crackdown 3 targets a February 15, 2019 launch date, complete with separate campaign and multiplayer competitive modes. The multiplayer modes, dubbed "Wrecking Zone," take place in a virtual arena dotted with gigantic explosive-filled skyscrapers, huge twisting sci-fi walkways, and electrified pitfalls. Notably, every chunk of these arenas can be destroyed by players, offloading physics computations to Microsoft's Azure cloud. Leveraging Azure, multiplayer matches in Crackdown 3 utilize massive amounts of additional processing power beyond your base Xbox or PC, bringing persistent, dynamic physics-based destruction across sizeable urban-industrial-style maps. Last week, we talked to Microsoft about how it all works, and the implications it could have for the future of gaming. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more

Getting Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone into a playable state sounds like it has been a gargantuan task for Microsoft. We spoke to Brian Stone, Microsoft Studios' head of engineering, to learn a bit more. Crackdown 3 has traversed various incarnations since the early demonstrations in 2014. The original prototype showcased grey isometric shapes spilling out of a featureless, monochrome building. Today, we have towering neon skyscrapers with fully destructible building blocks, right down to the foundations. Stone impressed the technical grind required to get Crackdown 3 to where it is today, and how Cloudgine, Ruffian Games, Reagent Games, Sumo Digital, and Certain Affinity all collaborated at various stages of the project on a very particular vision: completely destructible environments, offloaded to Microsoft's Azure cloud. Microsoft encountered a range of unforeseen technical challenges as a result of that vision. Stone gave us some further insight into how the tech works, and a glimpse at the depths of complexity Microsoft's team had to deal with in order to get these features to work. From him: Collectively, a lot of people working on the vision for the game at that time had made this bet — something that's always been true of Crackdown: you're this badass guy or woman, this character who can just light shit up. 'What if we actually made that real? What if we made a space where everything you shot at was destructible?' We knew we couldn't do that online if we limited ourselves to just the console client that you have in your living room. [But] what if we did physics in the cloud? Two years of pure engineering work to ... actually show something, all just tech. The ability to distribute computation across multiple servers, and because objects can get thrown from one spot to another, seamlessly hand off ownership of every chunk from one server to another without dropping a frame. Marshalling that data to the game server, and then from there to the client, that was a lot of hard work. Being able to dynamically scale the amount of servers we throw at the problem, so that we're not spending compute unnecessarily. That when you're starting out, only a few cores are needed, and then as destruction scales up, depending on what's happening, we can dynamically throw more cores at the computation.

The demo Stone was referring to was the above clip from Build 2014, which shows how physics calculations done over your internet connection can vastly increase the processing capability for what you see rendered on your home console. We were told that Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone can use anything up to and beyond 12 times the power of a base Xbox One X. Stone noted how Microsoft's on-going investments in datacenters and Azure hardware upgrades have helped mitigate some of the potential issues. There are some problems that we would have had in the past, that we don't have anymore. There used to be regions where we just had unacceptable ping times. It doesn't happen anymore. We were worried about population density, from an Xbox install base perspective, so we had to think about transferring server control from one data center to another. Investment in data centers has solved that. So how does it all work? Those concerned that Crackdown 3 will need some kind of advanced internet service package or additional data bandwidth to run properly can rest assured that it works the same way any other multiplayer game would. Still, getting Crackdown 3 into a position where it wouldn't overwhelm your data caps also represented some hard technological challenges. Stone explained: When you have thousands of fractured chunks all blowing up simultaneously, you don't just have a problem of how to spend enough server compute to simulate the physics. You also have the problem of, 'How do I get all of that data down to the client?' There is some local prediction that has to happen. So that when you jump, there's not a round trip to the server and back. Anything literally local to you, that you collide with, needs to be predicted on the client. [T]here is some magic happening on the client, so that it feels as responsive as possible. [W]hatever is happening on the server, across multiple cores of physics work, gets marshalled onto a game server, and then there's a whole other set of compute that gets applied to compressing that, using some very sophisticated compression. We then send that compressed stream to the client, then the client decompresses, and renders the information as graphics. That 10 second description represents two year's worth of hardcore programming work. Crackdown 3 as a foundation Stone offered a developer quote to describe Crackdown 3 from an engineering perspective, "It takes you half the time to do 90 per cent of the work, and then it takes you the other half to do the last 10 percent." I inquired about whether or not this tech could be applied beyond Crackdown 3's Wrecking Zone, perhaps to other Microsoft or even third-party titles as a sort of middleware suite, like Microsoft's Simplygon and Havok software. Stone said: I certainly hope it gets applied to other games in the future. Right now, my head is 100 percent focused on Crackdown. [B]ut absolutely, my hope is that when we've proven that this is possible, not just show it, that other developers will pick it up and run with it.