Microsoft wasn’t all about good news and announcements for the Xbox brand. In the case of Crackdown 3, the game has been pushed out of its expected 2016 window and moved into 2017.

The announcement came courtesy of Microsoft’s E3 press conference, but then they followed that up with a post over on the official Xbox website, where Reagent Games’ creative director Dave Jones announced that in order to meet the demands of Crackdown 3’s design, they would need to spend some more time refining the experience.

Jones writes…

“Crackdown 3 is a game built for the future with a multiplayer experience that will redefine what it feels like to play games, and as we continue to work on this, it has become clear that our original timeline of delivering multiplayer to fans this summer, while maintaining the size, scope and quality of the game, would be challenging. Our top priority is to give gamers an experience they have never seen before at a scale never thought possible, and sticking to our original timeline would have compromised that goal.”

Last year Microsoft and Reagent Games demoed some of the multiplayer-focused destruction that would be present in Crackdown 3.

Microsoft had previously been buzzing about the game’s physics being offloaded to the Azure cloud servers, but most people with an ounce of common sense and even the most rudimentary understanding of network infrastructure knew that cloud gaming was not going to be possible on a mass scale within the consumer market.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they had to gut all the cloud-oriented physics and go with something more… doable. The Xbox One certainly can’t handle the kind of physics that they were demonstrating in a native environment.

Anyway, we’ll likely get to see more of Crackdown 3 at some point during GamesCom. The title is set to arrive on the Xbox One.  Special Crackdown 3 controllers are also being given away over on the official Xbox website, so feel free to check that out while you suffer through the long wait for the game’s release next year.