Author: John Scalzo

Rockstar has announced a new feature for their Rockstar Games Social Club platform that’ll make its debut in Max Payne 3: Crews.

Crews are sort of like clans, except that they’ll exist outside of any individual game. Players will be able to join a Crew in Max Payne 3’s multiplayer mode and they’ll still be a member of that same Crew when future Rockstar games like Grand Theft Auto V, and other “appropriate titles,” are released.

In an interview with IGN, Rockstar’s Vice President of Creativity, Dan Houser, laid down some details on what you’ll be able to do with Crews:

How will Crews be able to interact?

Houser: One major way will be with Feuds. In multiplayer games we have a feature called Vendettas – if someone kills you twice, you can initiate a vendetta against them, which lets everyone know that you’re out to get that person. For you, a special X marks their blip when they’re visible to you on the map. If you take that person down, you get extra XP. If they survive your vendetta though, they get that XP.

Crew Feuds are essentially Crew Vendettas: impromptu skirmishes between crews that can spring up in multiplayer matches that quickly spawn a first-to-10-kills battle. You can be playing any team-based game with a completely new set of players, but if you spot two or more members of a crew you’re feuding with on the opposite team, any kills you get against them will count to the overall feud so rivalries will spring up automatically – and when they do, you’ll be notified and the grudge will come to the forefront of the game.

We’ll track who you’re feuding with, how long you’ve been feuding, and who’s winning. You’ll get extra XP for taking down members of crews you’re feuding with, so you’ll be able to remember those grudges for future matches. Again, we want to create more drama out of the interactions that go down in typical multiplayer matches.

And the beauty of this system is that crews persist over time and across future games. Multiplayer is an ever-more important part of all our games moving forward, and by creating crews through Social Club the crews that you create in Max Payne 3 will be ready and available for you to play in Grand Theft Auto V from day one. It’s all part of our larger approach to make multiplayer deeper and richer than what’s currently available, much more easily accessible to the newcomer and rewarding for the hardcore.

Whoa. Why didn’t anybody think of this before? Max Payne 3 will be available for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on May 15 with the PC version following on May 29.