Crossfire Adaptive Cover Cracks Old Shooter Formulas

That’s No Moon released the first episode of its Crafting Crossfire series with GameSpot and Secret Tape on August 19, laying out the creative vision and the adaptive cover system that defines its single-player reboot of Smilegate’s long-running shooter. The video shows team members demonstrating real-world cover poses and explains how Unreal Engine 5 lets characters hug organic terrain instead of the waist-high boxes that have ruled the genre for two decades.

The studio calls the third-person tactical action-adventure a story-driven character piece first. Players control mercenary Layla Qassem as she forms an uneasy alliance with opposing operator Delroy Cross in the Atlas Mountains against a threat that corrupts both sides. Platforms are PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. No release date has been set.

Crafting Crossfire Opens With Vision Over Convention

In the episode, co-founder and chief creative officer Taylor Kurosaki and game director Jacob Minkoff describe a north star that links narrative and gameplay so tightly that one cannot exist without the other. Kurosaki compared the Smilegate partnership to the trust Sony once gave Naughty Dog. The team wants a contiguous single-world map where players can look back across the space they just crossed.

The series, made with Danny O’Dwyer and Secret Tape, will keep documenting the realities of building the game. An official Crafting Crossfire Ep1 post from the studio account framed it as the ethos behind pushing the medium forward with their debut. GamingBolt noted a developer literally filming himself taking cover to capture authentic body language for the animation team.

That practical obsession sits at the center of everything else the video reveals.

Adaptive Cover Turns Every Rock Into a Decision

Traditional third-person cover shooters mark combat arenas with clear chest-high walls and crates. Players snap to them, blind-fire, and pop out. Crossfire rejects that pattern. Its adaptive cover system treats the entire environment as potential protection. Characters automatically adjust stance, crouch depth and body angle to the exact height and shape of rocks, slopes or debris while tracking enemy lines of sight.

Minkoff has called it a fully analog system rather than a binary in-or-out state. The player character takes the posture a real person would use to stay hidden, even at varying distances from the object. Encounters no longer telegraph enemy placement with yellow paint or blocky geometry. Players must read the terrain, choose routes and maintain cover as an active skill.

Stealth is the primary path. Skilled players can go loud, but the systems reward guerrilla movement, breaking sightlines and flanking. Combat spaces vary in scale and often allow full stealth skips. Resource management and survival-lite elements borrowed from titles like The Last of Us add pressure once bullets start flying.

• Characters flatten or rise automatically to match cover height and angle.
• Visibility is continuous rather than a simple seen/hidden switch; light-vector style feedback appears in some demos.
• Traversal and cover blend so movement itself becomes tactical.
• Designers gain freedom to build believable spaces without forcing artificial boxes into every firefight.

The result, according to the team, is tension closer to actual small-unit tactics than superhero gunplay.

Unreal Engine 5 Made the Organic Terrain Possible

Minkoff traced the idea to two technologies landing at the same moment. Years earlier he had watched SIGGRAPH papers on phase-function neural networks and motion matching that promised third-person characters navigating complex geometry realistically. Then Unreal Engine 5 arrived with Nanite geometry and Lumen lighting that could render the dense organic environments those animations needed.

And then I saw the Unreal Engine 5 was providing the rendering technology to create incredibly complex organic environments, and those two things together made me feel that there’s this technology that will allow us to make characters navigate the environment in a much more realistic way, and those pieces together generated the concept of adaptive cover.

Jacob Minkoff, Game Director, studio visit reported by Game Developer

The studio visit breakdown of organic cover shows how Nanite lets artists build rugged Atlas Mountains terrain without the old polygon budgets that forced simplified cover. Lumen handles the dynamic lighting that makes shadows and sightlines matter. Without that stack the adaptive system stays a tech demo. With it the team can fill levels with usable geometry that never looks like a shooter arena.

Layla and Cross Must Survive Together or Not at All

The story follows Layla Qassem, a gun-for-hire on a recon job that collapses into a fight for survival. She must work with Delroy Cross, a Tier-One operator from the other side and the last person she would choose as an ally. Voice work comes from Claudia Doumit and Ricky Whittle. Their ideological clash supplies the heart of the narrative while the battlefield supplies the pressure.

Cross operates as a fully autonomous AI companion. He marks targets, lays suppressing fire, covers healing and eliminates threats without player commands. Minkoff argues that giving orders turns a companion into a tool and kills the emotional bond. The game must stay difficult enough that the cutscene line “we have to fight together or die alone” feels earned. When the player is breezing through, the characters’ dependence rings false.

That design choice ties directly back to adaptive cover. The systems create the same high-stakes tension the story needs. A full Minkoff on Adaptive Cover as analog system interview spells out how the mechanics reinforce the theme of two people forced into reliance.

The Founders Bet Their First Studio on This System

Taylor Kurosaki and Jacob Minkoff left Infinity Ward in 2021 after years on Call of Duty campaigns. Before that both spent long stretches at Naughty Dog on Uncharted and The Last of Us. They founded That’s No Moon to take the swings that established studios with locked tech stacks and IPs rarely attempt. Crossfire is the first result.

The studio assembled veterans from Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, Bungie and elsewhere. Smilegate owns the Crossfire IP, known mainly in Eastern markets as a multiplayer shooter. The Western single-player reimagining requires no prior knowledge. Console versions publish through Smilegate; PC goes through Team K1, a Tencent subsidiary. The Xbox Wire announcement details positioned Adaptive Cover as the feature that changes the player’s relationship to the environment into an active skill.

Innovation here is both ambition and necessity. Without a famous brand or proven engine pipeline of their own, the team has to stand out or disappear.

Fourteen Layoffs Hit Two Months After the Reveal

Crossfire debuted at Summer Game Fest in early June 2026. By early August, multiple LinkedIn posts from former staff confirmed 14 layoffs. An associate environment artist, a procedural technical artist, a senior environment concept artist and a producer all described the cuts. Reports put the number consistently at fourteen.

What We Know

• Layoffs announced via staff LinkedIn posts starting around August 6, 2026.
• Affected roles clustered in art and production.
• Studio still actively promoting the game and releasing the Crafting Crossfire series.

What’s Unconfirmed

• Exact remaining headcount or total studio size.
• Whether further cuts are planned.
• Any official statement linking the reductions to budget, scope or schedule.

Mid-development staff reductions on a debut AAA title with no release window raise the usual questions about scope control and burn rate. The video series continues regardless, and the official accounts keep posting gameplay of the cover system. The bet on adaptive cover now carries extra weight: the remaining team has to deliver a system that feels revolutionary enough to justify the gamble.

Mastery Replaces the Yellow Paint of Old Cover Shooters

Players who come from Gears of War or The Division will find the old muscle memory of snapping to cover and checking the next crate useless. Success demands reading slopes, estimating sightlines and committing to movement that keeps the body low without a UI prompt. The autonomous companion helps, but only if the player creates the openings.

That shift is the disruption. For twenty years cover shooters taught players to look for the obvious safe spots designers had placed. Crossfire asks them to invent the safe spots from the terrain itself. If the animation, enemy AI and level geometry all hold up, the genre gains a new baseline. If any piece falters, the organic freedom becomes frustration.

The first Crafting Crossfire episode makes the studio’s intent plain. The adaptive cover system is not a side feature. It is the reason the game exists in this form. Whether That’s No Moon can finish what it started under current headcount will decide if that intent reaches players intact.