Players will be able to climb high and dive deep in this summer's open-world big-city Xbox 360 exclusive Crackdown 2. The tallest building? Over 500 meters. But that's barely the half of it. [UPDATE: The developers shared a little more.]
On this week's Kotaku Talk Radio podcast, four of the men at Ruffian Games who are developing Crackdown 2 told our listeners that the in-game world is 1000 meters, or 1 kilometer, tall. (That's .62 miles, mile users.)
The first Crackdown included a central building called the Agency Tower that was one of the tallest climbable structures included in recent video games. "You'll be climbing for a lot longer in this one, man," one of the Ruffian guys told us this week.
It wasn't clear if that kilometer includes any airspace, but Ruffian did say that the game's tallest building will be over 500 meters tall. In addition, the new game will have an expansive subterranean zone, which surely accounts for some of that 1000 meters.
[UPDATE via Crackdown 2 producer James Cope: "The original Agency tower in Crackdown was just shy of 400 metres tall... The merit of tallest building [in Crackdown 2] now belongs to one called Hope Tower in Unity Heights (ex Shai-Gen) and its highest point is about 500 metres. We also go as far as 500 metres underground and you can jump or Wingsuit [glide] from the very top of the world to the very bottom which is a distance that's beyond 1km. Then there's the Helicopter in which you can go even higher so at its absolute maximum you can skydive for about 1.5kms vertically."
Developers for the game had already signaled to me that there would a lot more verticality to the new Crackdown. Even the first game rewarded players for climbing high atop its skyscrapers, but with the addition of playable helicopters, an added underground and more tall buildings, this is surely a sequel whose new world is vast in an upwards direction.
To hear the conversation yourself, jump to the 32nd minute of the latest episode. Crackdown 2 will be released on the Xbox 360 July 6 in the U.S., a few days later in Europe.
Full download instructions for this and all KTR episodes.
Download the MP3 [Chat About It]
Listen to it [Chat About It]
Subscribe via RSS [Chat About It]
Download to your iPod or iPhone [iTunes]
Subscribe to podcast on iTunes [iTunes]
Download to your Zune [Zune]