(Not) Awesome!
Seriously, this kind of thing makes me sick:The bright color palate of the first "Crackdown" was replaced by darker, more apocalyptic browns and grays in "Crackdown 2." Even the character customization is decidedly subdued, as players only have four colors to pick from (blue, and three different shades of gray). Cope said this was intentional, and that Ruffian was using the dull palate as a way to show the state of Pacific City:
"We wanted to launch the game with a level of consistency. The colors you get by default are Agency-approved colors. Because you can't tell a narrative story, we've looked at external methods to add variety. With DLC it gives us a point in time to refresh people's understanding of the game. By the time the DLC comes out, people will know for certain that The Agency isn't good and then we can start fitting in to the propaganda we set up ahead of launch. The expansion of the armor colors becomes much more vibrant and radical from the Agency's approved perspective as we start looking at DLC."
Crackdown 2, in terms of color palette, makes Quake look like a Van Gogh painting. All right, that's an exaggeration, but there's no denying that graphically, the game is dull.
More:
Cope confirmed that there are currently there are two DLC packs planned for "Crackdown 2," tentatively titled The Toy Box and Deluge. The Toy Box is coming first and will include the return of Keys To The City, a debug mode which allows players to spawn in any object they want, gain even more powerful abilities and generally just mess around. He also mentioned that new gadgets and vehicles will be added in that pack.
The second pack, Deluge, will be more focused on changing the way people play "Crackdown 2."
"We're looking at new game modes to expand the play, rather than say, Here's some new map packs for the game you've already got, which I don't think it great value from a consumer's perspective. We're aiming at having a completely new way to play the game you've already got. I think people are much more appreciative of that."
Hey, no worries. Even though you just paid $60 for a game with a 71 Metacritic score (and a much worse "user rating" score of 5.7), you can still salvage your purchase by buying more!
How positively Orwellian.
It's getting very hard to get excited about "big" games anymore, because they seem to be mere vessels for setting up ancillary revenue streams, and it's only going to get worse in the future.
It's a double-edged sword, though. Maybe if the DLC had been included with the original game, reviewers would have given the game a higher score. Maybe word of mouth would have been better. They didn't, though, and it isn't. Hold shit back at your peril.
That's why guys like Tarn Adams or Vic Davis are a thousand times more interesting. They're making games, not DLC or marketing or anything else. A game, to them, isn't the launching pad.
It's the rocket.
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