Even though it had been a very long time coming, Crackdown 3 ended up falling short of most of its pre-release promises by the time it came out in 2019. The open-world sci-fi shooter suffered from switching developers midway through its production, as well as mismanaging the fans' expectations on what the game could feasibly deliver.

Still, the development team that ended up launching this version of Crackdown at last - Sumo Digital - may well be working on a potential follow-up, now that the dust has settled. Namely, the company has just posted a new job listing for an Associate Art Director, and some of the information contained in the listing may suggest that a Crackdown 4 is already being made.

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Though the rumors of Crackdown 4 being in development aren't new by any stretch of the imagination, Sumo Digital's new Associate Art Director position specifically references LittleBigPlanet and Crackdown as the two key flagship AAA franchises that the studio had previously worked on. The listing also plainly states that the hiree will work primarily on developing and growing the universe of an existing AAA IP, which effectively boils the list down to the two aforementioned game franchises.

Crackdown 3 Agent from the front

It's no secret that Crackdown 3 got announced too early in its production pipeline, and that Sumo Digital ended up shipping a game that simply couldn't hope to match the promises it had made during its hype-up period. To that end, the developer might be hoping to reinvigorate the franchise with an entirely new entry, as it's highly unlikely that it would be working on LittleBigPlanet, as that IP is owned by PlayStation

In fact, it's not impossible that Sumo Digital could be hoping to deliver the kind of Crackdown game the fanbase had hoped to see since Crackdown 3 first promised highly destructible environments and a reactive cityscape, all the way back in 2015. Modern hardware could feasibly pull off that sort of thing, and Sumo may well be trying to leverage the current generation of Xbox consoles in order to do so.

If it really is Crackdown that Sumo Digital is working on - for which there's no official confirmation as of right now - it's also possible that the company could be working on remaking the original Crackdown instead of producing a new title in the series. This game is often featured on lists of best Xbox exclusives that never came to PC, and retrofitting it could be a good way to leverage if there's any substantial interest left for Crackdown in the first place.

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