Microsoft Regrets Early Announcement for Crackdown 3

If you have owned an Xbox 360, you've probably played Crackdown at some time in your life. The original game was released about 10 years ago and it quickly rose to the top of the charts as it collected a cult following for several years. We are now on to Crackdown 3, which was announced back in 2014, however we still aren't able to play the game. In fact, the game was announced for the Xbox One before the console was even available for purchase.

Players assumed that the game would be available shortly after the Xbox One's release, which is completely understandable. Was Crackdown 3 announced so early because Microsoft wanted to use the game to raise their Xbox One sales? According to Microsoft, no. Obviously it did raise the opening sales for the Xbox One, but that wasn't the main purpose behind the early announcement.

Microsoft believed that the game would be finished up much earlier than they are now discovering. In a public statement, Microsoft came out and said that they "probably announced Crackdown too early." Well, what's the big delay here? The reason the game hasn't been released is due to the extremely complex way Microsoft went about creating it. Instead of using one developer for the entirety of the game, they are using three different studios that are each working on their own gameplay mode for the game.

According to Microsoft:

We definitely underestimated the challenge of making sure the quality bar of all three of those modes was high and it delivers on what we need to deliver on. So we had to take the extra time, [and] make sure that were delivering the game the Crackdown fans want. It was a super hard decision to do that, and it was made harder because we announced the game.

Currently, the game is set to release at some point in 2018. While no official date has been put into place, I would assume that we will be seeing the game around Q2 or Q3 of next year.