Coming up in an interview published later today, Strategy Informer interrogates a Red Faction sympathiser over at Volition Inc.
Associate Producer Sean Kennedy tells us why Red Faction Guerrilla wasn’t possible until now, how Geo-Mod 2.0 tech is ”three to five years” ahead, and his thoughts on terrain game Fracture…
Asked if the new Red Faction has moved away from terraforming terrain because of recent titles like LucasArts’ Fracture, Kennedy laughs. ”Ha, Fracture! You can actually put that in your article!” Volition isn’t so insecure, it seems it was time for a change in the franchise anyway.
”Yeah, Geo-Mod 1.0 was about terrain deformation and it allowed you to endlessly dig through terrain and do all sorts of things like that. After doing two games of that, we knew we wanted to do a third Red Faction, but we didn’t just want to repeat ourselves.”
All this bubbling Martian angst had to wait though, only the next-gen consoles ”really had enough power to do exactly what we wanted, which was real destruction that’s realistic, physics-based and something no-one’s ever seen before.”
Kennedy said the team made ”a conscious decision” to hold off and wait, ”we didn’t want to just repeat the same game.” They could have scratched the itch but really it would have been Red Faction 1 with a ”next-generation, plastic look”.
”What’s great for us is, the first Red Faction came out in 2001 and years later no one has actually come close to doing what we did with Geo-Mod,” he continued.
Mentioning LucasArts’ terrain tweaking videogame Fracture again, Kennedy gives his two cents: ”its terrain deformation was up and down and then they attempted to build a game around that and (laughs) they didn’t really succeed!”
”We thought that was really amusing when they said, ‘never before have you been able to change the battlefield!’ Not since 2001, have you been able to do that!”
The driving force behind Volition’s new destructive kit, and ultimately Red Faction Guerrilla, was for them to ”do something that’s going to take everybody three to five years to try to come close to, so we made Geo-Mod 2.0.”
”And even the reaction from the industry itself, like at the recent GDC where we gave talks, they were like, ‘you have achieved something that we couldn’t even come close to!’ From top people in the industry, it’s a huge compliment.”
”It’s when you know you’ve done something right. You see the look on gamers’ faces, but when you see the look on (the faces of) people who also make games it’s pretty satisfying.”
We’ll have the full interview between Strategy Informer and Red Faction’s associate producer guy Sean Kennedy later today - stay tuned.
