No, it doesn’t change a thing about when the game will actually be available to play, but you can already preload Crackdown 3 ahead of its launch on 15th February – as announced back at XO18 alongside a new Wrecking Zone mode. That’s just over three months from now.
Thing is, it might as well not exist. Yes, the game can symbolically be pre-loaded, but the amount of data you actually get to install is comically small, taking up just a few megabytes of space. That makes sense because, even if you accept that the world map has already been established, that the audio has all been recorded and it’s now being polished, any of this can still change in a way that would need the files to be replaced, and packaging it up for consumer devices is a whole other kettle of fish.
Still, it’s a first step for Microsoft, who are enabling the ability to download Xbox Game Pass games before release. That placeholder will, likely in early February, balloon in size and get the full client downloaded ahead of time.
One of the biggest asks we’ve had for @XboxGamePass was to allow pre-load (pre-install) so you can download and be ready the second launch happens. It’s available now – and starts with Crackdown 3 on Xbox and Windows. ????
— Mike Ybarra (@Qwik) November 13, 2018
Source: Mike Ybarra, Reddit
