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Crackdown 3’s creative director is no longer working on the game

Crackdown 3

Development on Crackdown 3 seems to have been fraught, to say the least. A suite of delays, which have now pushed the game’s release date back to February 2019, have been followed up by the news that the series’ creator, and the original lead development team, have both left the project.

Crackdown, which first released in 2007, was created by David Jones, the producer of the original Grand Theft Auto. When Crackdown 3 was first announced in 2014, Jones was attached to the project via his tech company Cloudgine (which handle’s the game’s destruction tech) and his development company Reagent games, which previously lead development on the game.

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Since 2014, however, things have changed. Back in January, Cloudgine was purchased by Fortnite developer Epic Games (which might explain the lack of destruction in the latest Crackdown trailer). Jones has also headed to Epic, and now works as the company’s cloud and esports strategist, as Microsoft Studios head Matt Booty confirmed in an interview with Polygon.

Replacing Reagent Games as “main development partner” on Crackdown 3 is Sumo Digital, who also worked on Forza Motorsport 7, Dead Island 2, and Hitman (2016). Weirdly, it looks as though Reagent no longer exists, as its website appears dead and its Twitter account has gone silent.

Crackdown 3 was originally due to release in 2016, but was first delayed to November 2017, before being pushed back to spring 2018. Microsoft then confessed they’d announced the game “too early,” before yet another delay pushing the game to a release that is now scheduled for February – around two and a half years after it was originally due to come out.