I’ve mentioned before how being a games journalist, there’s little room for surprises around my favourite medium. I’ve become so ingrained in its proceedings, that I’m always in the know, often ahead of times. To that end, I was kept almost completely in the dark in the lead-up to what would be the reimagined Crossfire, and it was a genuine shock to see.
While the official announcement happened during the Summer Game Fest 2026, CGMagazine was given an exclusive first-look at the bold new interpretation of Crossfire. Chief Creative Officer and Creative Director, Taylor Kurosaki and Game Director Jacob Minkoff of That’s No Moon—the development team behind the game—gave us an exclusive look at their vision and some pretty revolutionary design that may not change how this game is played, but how all stealth-action games are played in the future.
“We have a saying at That’s New Moon that we are all storytellers, and this is kind of why that’s kind of present in our studio culture,” said Kurosaki, adding, “And this project is no exception.” He explained that the studio’s two pillars of development is design and narrative and that executing the highest quality isn’t, “for vanity or because our graphics are best or anything like that. It’s purposefully done because the higher the fidelity, the more immersion the player has, the more they really feel like they are occupying and inside a world.”
Now, we were given a glimpse of Crossfire in action, but because of embargo reasons I am not at liberty to say what I saw. What I can talk about is their new gameplay innovation—what Minkoff referred to as “Adaptive Cover.” As he explained, “The way third-person cover-based shooters work is that everything is rectilinear. Everything’s very boxy. You enter a combat space and you’ve got a bunch of crates and fallen over pillars and stuff that just happen to be the right height.”
He continued to explain how, the way taking cover usually works in games is kind of a binary state. You press a button, and you enter a cover state. You’re either protected (or unseen), or you’re not. This kind of design was very limiting for creators because it makes it hard to create realistic spaces. As Minkoff described, it’s a very “sticky” state because of the limitations of technology that have existed for years.
To get even more technical, as Minkoff explained, “Basically, the metrics that every one of these games work on is from about zero to six inches, that’s your step height that you can just automatically step over. From about six inches to about 24 is you’re not allowed to build anything as a designer. From about 24 to 36, that’s your cover height. From about 36 to about 100, don’t build anything. And then from about 100 up, that’s your high cover height or your high mantle height.”
“It’s still early on, but it will be exciting to see where That’s No Moon’s interpretation of Crossfire goes…”
However, this changed through the use of Unreal Engine 5. As Minkoff explained, Nanite and Lumen allow for infinitely complex environments (so long as it fits into the memory). This allowed them to actually go out into the world and scan realistic environments and map them into the geometry in the game. “In real life, soldiers use what’s called defilade. Defilade is anything between you and the line of sight of your enemy. Humans look at that, and they organically choose to change the height of their stance, given the line of sight blockers.”
Using those principles, the team created an egg-shaped “danger-zone” around the player, that naturally changed based on enemy line-of-sight, and any obstacles in the way. Taking that into account, the player character will take natural positions behind cover in a way that makes sense and feels organic. It plays into Crossfire’s other gameplay mechanic, which is a high lethality within combat.
“The damage model is blood pressure based,” said Minkoff, adding, “What we say is every bullet matters.” He continued, “So, you have your helmet and your armor and once those are broken through, any bullet after that is going to cause damage to your blood pressure. And then it’s going to keep ticking down until you bandage yourself.” The intention is to create situations where the player needs to be highly involved, highly immersed and consistently thinking about every decision they make.
It’s still early on, but it will be exciting to see where That’s No Moon’s interpretation of Crossfire goes, given how much work they’re putting in to completely redefine how stealth-action games are played. The team is clearly going above and beyond to combine storytelling and gameplay in a way that really connects the player to the world and it’ll be exciting to see what other innovations they bring to the space.
Players can Wishlist Crossfire on Steam.
