Red Faction: Guerrilla Q&A - THQ Gamers Day 08 Feature

Due for release in THQ's 2009 fiscal year, Red Faction: Guerrilla marks the first time that Volition's 'original' franchise features in an open-world space, following its younger sibling, Saints Row. But the Illinois-based outfit has made some major changes over Red Faction's two predecessors, with the switch to a third-person perspective and what's being touted as a strong single-player campaign to complement the series' established multiplayer roots.

Having undergone such changes, and only recently been unveiled at both London and THQ's Gamers Day 2008 in San Francisco, TVG caught up with Red Faction: Guerrilla's Associate Producer Jeff Carroll, and began by asking whether there was any concern within Volition with the switch from first- to third-person...

TVG: First of all Jeff, Red Faction: Guerrilla features some significant changes over the previous two instalments in the series, not least the switch to a third person perspective. How concerned was Volition of the fan's reaction to the change, ahead of Guerrilla's recent unveiling?

I think we were a little worried; we knew we were making a change. We knew that we had some really devoted fans. It [the change to a third person perspective] wasn't just a choice that was made internally, as we also did some focus testing on it. Besides that, when we expanded the world into an open environment and added vehicles, and especially made the switch to a destruction system that was completely physics-based, what you want to see is the area around your player. You want to know when the roof is about to fall in on you; you want to see when the wall next to you is going to explode; you want to see the enemies coming. Those issues went away once we made the switch to third-person.

In a first-person mode, it was really difficult to get such a sense of your surroundings. What we saw too as we first made the switch to an open-world, is that by moving over from a linear shooter, you weren't moving up to a wall and knocking it over just to see what was on the other side. Here, there's considerable more strategy. You can scout out a building and decide where to make that hole, so that rather than being a tactical decision, it's a strategic one.

TVG: The franchise has also relied on a strong multiplayer element in the past; can you talk about how the development of the single-player Campaign came about in Guerrilla?

Well, some of it was that we were able to leverage the knowledge we gained from working on Saints Row. We were obviously moving into an open-world environment, and we wanted to still provide some type of structure to the player as well as the freedom of choice. So we structured it around missions that drive the story, making sure that the story had a strong backbone to it, and once we had that established, we could map the environment. Each decision was still based around whether a feature would be enjoyable in a game, and secondly, whether it would still be enjoyable in a game that had destruction in it - and those aren't necessarily the same thing.

That's the sort of thing that we could answer after ten years of experience. We'd done Red Faction 1, we'd done Red Faction 2. We'd made mistakes in Red Faction 1, we'd made mistakes in Red Faction 2, but we've learnt quite a bit and we hope that with the decisions we've made, that we're at the start of a new type of genre. That once you've played this, it'll be challenging to sit down and play game that doesn't have the same level of destruction of this capability.

TVG: We've spoken to Greg Donovan, who is, as you know, currently working on Saints Row 2, and asked what he thought about some of the original's weaknesses. For instance, how players had to go through the Activities in Saints Row 1 to progress the storyline. Is this one of the lessons that the Red Faction team learnt from the Saints Row team?

A little bit. What we wanted to see were emergent missions that occurred and were optional. We had to make sure that the player, because they can destroy everything, that in cases other than the main missions, the nearly everything had to be optional for us - because the player could take out a location that would have otherwise spawned an activity. But we still wanted to add a number of activities that would emerge as they were going along.

TVG: With that in mind, how does the game cope with the destruction of buildings of significance to the campaign?

Well we do actually have some buildings that do re-spawn, that's just a necessity. So if a player takes them out, it's not going to stop them from progressing. But what we do is balance it so that we try not to make buildings that are going to be a necessity for a mission. We have those as 'targets', so you can take out high-priority targets at any time, during a mission or during the course of the game.

TVG: So in the context of the game, re-spawned buildings are just 'rebuilt' by the EDF (Earth Defence Force)?

Exactly.

TVG: And does the EDF respond to the increased threats on a building if it's replacing one already been destroyed? Do they add defensive measures so the new building is more fortified against fresh attacks?

You mean is there an escalation of building defences? No, they don't actually have an escalation like that. We realise that's going to be a challenge to balance this game, and we've been doing usability testing for the past year now. The escalation that occurs as the AI start to use their own destructible weapons, bring in their tanks, and use destruction against you. There's already a considerable escalation that occurs there, so whilst we had considered that as a possibility, we didn't want to balance that against the escalation already occurring.

TVG: As for the protagonist, is he still nameless?

No, his name is Alec Mason.

TVG: So I assume that as Mason progresses through the campaign, his reputation on both the EDF and Red Faction sides grows. Does he become increasingly targeted?

What you have happen are two over-arching statistics, 'Control' and 'Morale'. EDF Control is what you drive down to push the EDF out of the district, whilst Morale is reflective of your reputation in the game. So as it increases, you're more likely to have civilians to join you in raids; they'll become guerrillas, and they're more likely to riot as the EDF control starts to lower.

So the EDF will start to recognise you; you'll to switch to using the sledgehammer and being more discreet, rather than just walking around with guns.

TVG: Once a district is lost to the Red Faction, does the EDF try and get it back from them?

No, that's just lost to them. We have a large game, we're looking at thirty hours of gameplay. There's a tremendous amount of replayability, at least we hope there's a lot of replayability, because each time you play, it's different each time. There's certainly a number of tactics that you can choose to make too.

TVG: Can you talk about the multiplayer at the moment?

We can talk a little about the multiplayer, but there'll be an announcement later in the year. We can say of course that the destruction you seen in the single-player campaign will be in the multiplayer campaign. There'll also be the same multiplayer capabilities across PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and we also have PC. We'll have the standard modes like Deathmatch and Capture the Flag, which destruction adds a dramatic difference to, since the level changes as it goes on.

But we also have modes that are specifically destruction based, and only Red Faction: Guerrilla will have those modes.

TVG: How many players are you talking about in the multiplayer - eight players per side?

Yeah, we've been testing multiplayer for easily over a year now, with full on sixteen players. We've also been doing some external focus testing.

TVG: What about the challenges in designing a game world set on a largely featureless planet surface like Mars, and its boundaries?

Well, there are places you'll reach where the features will go up so high that you won't be able to go further. But right now, we're twice the size of the original Saints Row, and we've added some rather dramatic features that will hopefully provide the same aesthetic sense as driving through the streets of Saints Row. What we've found is that what we thought would be hard at first has not been so difficult. People have been so focused on the gameplay; every building is a piece gameplay. Rather than just drive around the building, looking at them as you pass by, you spend more time circling them, investigating them and seeing what you can do if you're fighting in them.

So while you start to explore, people don't hit the edge of the gameworld nearly as often because you're just not driving through it just to get to the other side.

TVG: Can you talk about the technology that's driving Red Faction: Guerrilla? I understand that on top of a modified Havok engine, you're also using an updated GeoMod system?

Actually, Havok is handling the collisions, but everything else is handled by the proprietary destruction system. So whenever a bullet is shot or a hole is blown in a wall, we handle all the destruction. There's a proprietary stress system that's analysing all of the connections between all of the pieces, so if you blow a hole enough times into a building, it will come down without you being there, without you striking it again.

So all that Havok handles underneath are individual pieces flying through the air, everything else is handled ourselves. But Havok has done a wonderful job on working with us to push the edge on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

TVG: So technological barriers stopped Volition from doing Guerrilla in the past?

Exactly, we looked at doing this type of game on just the [original] Xbox, but we decided to wait until we could do it right. We knew what we wanted to do, to fulfil the promise of making everything in the world destructible. It's taken quite a bit of development, but we hope that we're here.

TVG: One of the things that have helped to enhance the current crop of games visually is the use of post-processing effects, something that Red Faction seems to be doing well with particle effects, together with lighting and shadowing techniques. How difficult has it been to fit all that in considering the extra work that's been put into the new GeoMod destruction system?

Well we re-wrote our entire effects system for this. We knew that in addition to the destruction system, we had a game where you're going to blow everything, and that needed to be beautiful. So the effects system was one of the first things that we focused on, in parallel with the destruction system. We knew that we wanted a tremendous number of particles on screen at one time; we knew that we wanted the smoke; we knew we wanted it so that when you bring a building down that it looked like the demolition of a casino in Vegas. We know what people see in the movies, and we knew that it had to make that identical. So we put in a tremendous amount of effort into that.

But then, as we continued, we still had to compete with other next-generation titles. So we had to bring up all the technology; we re-wrote our shader engine from the one we used in Saints Row; we added HDR and other effects like depth of field, and the fogging system. Because we were having so many polygons drawn on screen at any given time, we had to work out all-new techniques. For this game, we looked at each piece and pushed it to the edge. There have been times during the development where the programmers have thrown up their hands and said 'We're not going to be able to do this!" and then five minutes later, another programmer would come down and say, "Hey, I've got a 5% improvement, we can do this!"

TVG: One of the implications of switching the game's perspective from first to third-person, is that it puts Red Faction: Guerrilla in competition with two very prominent titles from EA Games this year, Battlefield: Bad Company and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Guerrilla is down for release during fiscal 2009, so can you talk about it's place amongst your rivals plans?

Well, we've been watching Mercenaries since the original, and we've seen the bits and pieces of Mercenaries 2. We've also seen the recent videos that have been coming out for Battlefield: Bad Company. What we find, what we'd like to do to challenge them, is to walk up to a building and blow it up piece by piece; to be able to arbitrarily make a hole anywhere; to watch that building fall down without your involvement with it; to see the effects system work with it, and to destroy every piece of manmade equipment in the game.

If they can do that, then we welcome the competition. If they can't, then we have the technical advantage. Even if they can, we've been doing destruction for quite a while, and we've learnt how to make gameplay work within destruction. So instead of just making a choice to blow up a building just for the sake of blowing up a building, we've been creating specific modes and specific missions that revolve around destruction.

We hope it's a blast; it's like being a twelve year old again!

TVG: Downloadable content is also something that most games have now; what sort of strategy are you going for in Guerrilla?

We are working on DLC, [although] it's not been defined yet what we're going to do for the single-player campaign. Certainly for the multiplayer campaign, we'll have additional modes, and additional maps being downloaded.

TVG: It's pencilled for a release in fiscal 2009; can you expand on that at the moment?

All we can say right now is that it's fiscal 2009. But we're excited about getting this out as early as we can.

TVG: One last question Jeff. Guerrilla may have the Red Faction brand on the cover, but with the various changes, it's essentially a new brand. It's been in development for four years now, so how much of a risk is the game for THQ and Volition?

At first, we thought it was going to be a significant risk. What we want is to be able to spend the time and the money to be able to do honour to what has been one of the most successful IPs for THQ. So over time as we were able to show it to the press and outside parties, we believe that we have a game that will satisfy them.

TVG: Thanks Jeff, best of luck with the rest of development.

TVG would like to thank Jeff Carroll at Volition and THQ for taking the time to answer our questions on Red Faction: Guerrilla. As you've read, the game is scheduled for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC during the publisher's 2009 fiscal year.