You can now create or join your own rough and tumble CREW in preparation for slaughter in Max Payne 3 Multiplayer. Hit the CREW UP button on your profile page and you can browse Featured Crews looking for recruits or invite your mates to join your ranks to blast through Gang Wars and Team Deathmatch together, racking up XP and starting online Feud beefs come next week. Every Social Club member can belong to up to 5 Crews, so form your allegiances wisely.

The CREWS page also contains info on the in-game benefits Crew members get in online Multiplayer. You'll receive an XP boost whenever you fight as part of a Crew or battle against rival Crews and their members online. This means you'll effectively unlock bigger and better weapons more quickly than if you're flying solo. And because this feature is linked through the Social Club, you can represent your Crew across PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

The Emblem Editor is packed with thousands of shapes, colors and icons and tools to create limitless possibilities to properly represent your squad and to intimidate, psyche out or stupefy the competition.

• YOUR SOCIAL CLUB PROFILE PAGE –  Get in there and personalize your own Social Club profile page, complete with status updates, a display of your recent stats and accomplishments across your linked Social Club enabled games, and proper Friend linking with a Wall that updates your Social Club activity and lets you cheer and jeer your mates here at Social Club, as well as easily plan multiplayer sessions or whatever you'd like.

• UPDATE YOUR ACTIVITY FEED – Keep tabs on all your Friends latest accomplishments via your real-time activity feed. With the release of Max Payne 3, you'll be able to let Friends know each time you've unlocked a Trophy/Achievement, throw down the gauntlet for a multiplayer session, or see when a friend has added a new soldier to their CREW (come Wednesday). Head to your profile page now at the main Social Club dashboard to get started.

• ADD YOUR FRIENDS – You can search and add Friends that are current Social Club members and also find, import and invite mates from your Facebook, Twitter and gaming accounts too. Whether it's to join you to attend the latest Official Social Club Multiplayer Event or to make sure you've got strength in numbers for your Crew - you can now easily recruit up.

• LINK IN & LOG IN WITH FACEBOOK OR TWITTER – You can also link in and display your other profiles from Facebook and Twitter (as well as your PlayStation Network IDs and XBL Gamertags) direct to your page and starting Wednesday, you'll be able to share Social Club activity from your Wall to those networks. For new members, we’ve even enabled Social Club account creation (and sign-in for existing members) using your Facebook or Twitter username and password.

Crews go beyond traditional online clans by allowing players to join large public Crews or simply create a private Crew that members can customize. In this way, Crews help players keep the fight alive from match to match - and even across titles - through the Rockstar Games Social Club, which will keep track of Crew stats, including Feuds (more info on that below).

How will Crews be able to interact?

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.

Will the spirit behind Crews and Gang Wars – multiplayer with a user-generated narrative – appear in other Rockstar's forthcoming games?

We made a promise not to talk too much about forthcoming games until a little further down the track but, yes, crews will feature in Grand Theft Auto V multiplayer. We are firm believers in the potential of third-person multiplayer and the attachment it can create to character, stories and worlds. This is at the heart of what we're doing with Crews, and we think it opens up limitless new possibilities for the future. It's right at the heart of our goal to bring greater weight and context to multiplayer games while still staying true to what competitive multiplayer does so well.