this game was supposed to be released 5 years ago though. it was supposed to be a launch title on the xbox 1. so the fact it's been delayed 5 years was never a good sign. it looks whoever did most of the good work on crackdown 1 likely left the company and it never recovered from there. it was the same with driver. driver 2 was a mess and driver 3 was unplayable.
Crackdown 3 was never an Xbox One launch title. The first release date was "2016". It was then delayed, with plans to make it an Xbox One X launch title. Two more delays took it to February 2019.
The developer of Crackdown 1, Realtime World's, went bust in 2010 when "APB: All Points Bulletin" flopped.
I bet the development of Crackdown 3 is an interesting story, all the same. Six different studios worked on the game. One of those studios was Cloudgine, which was founded by the guy who started Realtime Worlds. Cloudgine was bought by Epic Games last year, so they missed most of the last year of development (which could explain, in part, why their cloud physics stuff seems to be half done).