Microsoft’s XO event returns this year, and we’re pretty sure there’s going to be some notable announcements to look forward to. For one thing, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer is in attendance, and there have been some interesting teasers already surfacing around the internet.
But it’s important to remember this isn’t E3 2.0; let’s not get ourselves worked up over a whole bunch of pipedream announcements that almost certainly won’t come true. For that reason, we’re going over some of the hype-worthy announcements most likely to drop at XO18.
Hypeworthy Announcements That Will Likely Be at XO18
Crackdown 3 Release Date & Cloud Destruction Multiplayer
Let’s be real, Crackdown 3’s constant delays either side of what was a disappointing showing at last year’s E3 has taken the wheels off its initial hype train in a big way. This is a game that desperately needs to make a good impression at its next presentation, and XO18 seems like the perfect stage.
The strange thing about Crackdown 3 is that we haven’t seen much –if anything at all– about the one feature of the game that originally had fans hugely excited: its Cloud-based destruction technology.
This feature looked set to deliver on streaming aspect of the Xbox One’s design that was much talked about at the console’s launch. Yet when Crackdown 3 was finally showcased in detail, the cloud-destruction that looked like such a game changer was nowhere to be seen.
Developer Sumo Digital was quick to clarify that cloud-destruction was only ever a multiplayer feature. Since then, though, all we’ve seen is the single-player mode, and that in itself went down like a lead balloon.
Presumably, Sumo Digital has been hard at work reshaping great swathes of the game. But when if we do see Crackdown 3 at XO18, we want to see the whole thing, the new-look single-player and multiplayer with cloud-destruction highlighting the game’s full bag of tricks.
