Interviews// Crackdown 2: James Cope, Producer

SPOnG: I've noticed as you collect more Orbs your armour changes with the upgrades you get. How customisable is the armour?

James Cope: It automatically upgrades in terms of its shape and things like that. What we wanted to do was represent the Agent as a weapon – they go from a person with a face to a non-entity that works as a humanoid weapon for the Agency. That's always the intention we wanted to have with the Agents actually, they are faceless beings.

Like I was saying earlier about characterisation, your Agent just doesn't have that. No background, no story, they're all vacuuous. So in terms of customisation we decided for that reason, and reasons of technicality – in order to hit the four-player co-op and make it the same as the single-player experience – we had to tone down the level of customisation in Crackdown 2. We've kind of done enough for people to have some sort of influence on what they look like, but without having the resource intensity that we would have otherwise had to have dealt with.


SPOnG: Any reason why there are no female models?

James Cope: Erm... (laughs). There is a reason, and again it's a technical one. The big problem is we can't afford the budget to have all of the duplicated animation and textures and models and...


SPOnG: The anatomy.

James Cope: Yeah (laughs). It's really (sighs)... it's really difficult – we actually had female Agents in Crackdown 2 a long time ago, and we had to cut them out of the game. It was a hard decision because I do understand the demand for that form. I would like to play as a female Agent myself but we can't have that, we just can't afford it.

We only have a certain amount of resources so we spent it getting as much gameplay as we can in there and everything we did in Crackdown 2 – and Crackdown before that – that was a choice between aesthetic and gameplay, we went with gameplay. It is sad that female Agents aren't in there, because even if you think about it in terms of gameplay, you have to wonder what you would gain in any sense by having different kinds of anatomies. It would be unfair for two people to be playing as a female and male, with one of them having radically different capabilities.

At the end of the day we had to say “Look, we can't afford it, we're going to have to make this decision and live with it.” I hate not being able to deliver something that people want. But it really is just a boring technical reason, we're not misogynists (laughs)!


SPOnG: Obviously no studio wants to screw up a sequel, but with apparent tension from RealTime Worlds and the feedback from the fans, is there more pressure on you guys now to make this an even better experience?

James Cope: There was always pressure from the fans to make a better experience, that's why I like the challenge that they have set us... We had a very hard thing to do, when we decided to start work on this game, and we were very conscious of the fact that we were risking disappointment for a lot of people.

This is why we completely sympathise with people when facing disappointment, like the lack of female Agents or transforming cars. But we have to make those decisions and it's hard to satisfy everyone's needs. I do think that, now we've got to this point in development, fans will see that we've made a game that's worthy of the Crackdown name. I think all of these things were a gamble, and Ruffian exists because of that gamble, and we've been lucky in making it happen.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

James Cope: Thank you very much.