One of the biggest question marks on Microsoft's upcoming slate of Xbox releases is the long-awaited Crackdown 3. At the company's Gamescom 2015 briefing earlier this morning, we were finally clued in to what's going on with the third entry in one of the most exciting open-world franchises in all of video games.

From the outset of the footage shown this morning, it's clear that everything possible is being done to recapture the magic of the first title — but, at the same time, this is a game that looks to take full advantage of the power of modern consoles.

The footage began with confirmation that a couple of much-loved elements of the original Crackdown are back. We saw an agent hopping from rooftop to rooftop collecting agility orbs, and a brief demonstration of one of the transforming vehicles made available by the Agency.

From there on out, we began to see our first glimpse of what's new for Crackdown 3. It seems that the game is poised to take full advantage of the much-vaunted cloud computing that the Xbox One is capable of, and the results are really quite spectacular.

The power of the cloud is being utilized to introduce fully destructible environments to the franchise. We saw this on a small scale with an agent shooting individual bullet holes into a wall, and later when a team of agents playing together co-operatively managed to take down an entire building.

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This is part of what's being described as a 'revolutionary new multiplayer experience'. We didn't hear much more about exactly what that comprises, but from the footage on show, it seems to be a broad co-operative mode. It seems that this gameplay — and the full suite of destruction options — will be limited to online play.

However, that doesn't mean that single player is being forgotten. It seems that the classic Crackdown structure of taking down targets to undermine enemy resources is back, but there's also a greater variety of enemies in the style of the game's sequel.

While this is certainly our best look at Crackdown 3 thus far, no release date was given at the conference. However, it was confirmed that Microsoft and Reagent Games are prepping a beta for the game, which is scheduled to take place next year. Given the quality of the footage shown today, you can bet that plenty of Xbox players will be eager to get on board.