“We’re ahead of everybody by five to ten years in terms of destruction,” Red Faction Guerilla lead designer James Hague tells Eurogamer. “…we wanted to go toward fully-dynamic for everything. It’s a very different technical direction from where other people are going.” Judging by the insane super-hammer trailer that Volition have just released, he might just be right. I’ve been quietly sceptical about this, and I’m still rather expecting it to mess up, but that hammer… colour me interested. More varied destruction – presented by some dude I think might be from that program about big men breaking stuff – beyond the jump.
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Mack is the worst thing about Futureweapons.
Can we throw Mack at enemies and watch him chew on their ears?
Is anyone else thinking of an jungle dwelling creature that’s trying to divide numbers? Possibly involved in an unfortunate accident with some Dulux paint? And then discovering the answer to Maths and building some kind of explosive using rocks and body hair?
No?… Oh.
Despite Mack the presenter being hammy, I do like the concept of the videos; using an existing tv show framework (Future Weapons?) to introduce elements of a game. Although I do get the feeling it’s been done before, but I’ll be damned if I can remember when and for what.
For centuries the miners of mars have been forced to use sledgehammers to dig their tunnels? I think the guerrillas could probably be assuaged with the introduction of shovels and pickaxes.
Hmm, I thought this was set on Mars? The gravity still looks like 1g. Easy enough to fix though I guess (and I can imagine it might just look odd set on a realistic setting so they decided to go for a more ‘normal’ setting)
I have to second the idea that the buildings look a little /too/ flimsy when they explode. House of cards, exactly. No real sense of weight or structure from what I see in the video.
Also, yes, Freespace 2 with fully deformable environments and ships would be absolutely killer. Though I’ve yet to see a designer that’s put deformable vehicles into play.
Sure the things can break apart when they’re dead, but can you bust down the back door of an APC so you can shoot out the back of it while it’s driving around? Could you have the turret blown off entirely but have a member of the crew pop up there with a rocket launcher to make up for it? Can you weld off the armor plating and most of the hull, but leave the engine and controls working fine to turn it into a turbo-sled?
At least we’ve reached the point where these things seem possible and manageable. If someone had shipped a game with fully destructible everything (ala Voxelstein 3D), physical vehicles (like, for example, Half-Life 2), and real-time physics gluing it all together, maybe PhysX cards wouldn’t have been such a flop.
The buildings falling that quickly could be the realism they have for Mars’ gravity?
And maybe the people can just jump that high and stuff because they’ve evolved to become small stocky dwarf jumping rabbity martians
Wouldn’t buildings fall a lot slower on Mars, given there’s considerably lower gravity?
I briefly toyed with the first Red Faction. Once you got over the fact you could destroy stuff, it was rubbish.
At least it looks like they kept the hilarious ‘HELP I HAVE A MINE STUCK TO MY FACE’ animation where the AI runs about in an exceedingly camp fashion with its arms up and its wrists limp.
Good times!