Crackdown 3 won't get a battle royale mode

Following the great success of games like Fortnite and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the industry has been caught up in the craze for battle royale games. Titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Battlefield V are having a go, and even Red Dead Online (Red Dead Redemption 2's multiplayer component) includes a mode that has BR features. That said, not everyone is jumping aboard the good ship Last Player Standing, including Sumo Digital and its upcoming game, Crackdown 3, which won't come with any sort of battle royale mode, at least not for the moment.

Confirmation of this comes from Microsoft's head of production for global publishing, Jorg Neumann, who in a long and in-depth interview with Windows Central announced that the new action title will not have a battle royale mode:

"[We] prototyped a bunch of modes. We have all kinds of dreams how this can take off. [People] were asking about Battle Royale, "why aren't there 100 players?" There's a reason we have five versus five, and the map sizes too. There's so much stuff that you need to keep in memory, due to the destruction, that there's limits. Once you have a map that is a nice size and creates the pace of destruction the way we dreamed of it, having more players can be counter-productive, but we're still experimenting, tech will evolve too."

Thus it seems as though the reason the studio decided not to work on a battle royale mode is that the higher player count would negatively impact on the underlying technology powering the game.

Crackdown 3 is expected on February 15th on Xbox One and PC.