Red Faction: Guerrilla - THQ Gamers Day 08 Preview

After a break of five years, THQ and Volition are getting ready to return to the red planet with Red Faction: Guerrilla, heading to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC before the end of April 2009. Set fifty years after the events of the original title in the franchise, Red Faction: Guerrilla is a significant shift for the series thanks to Volition realigning itself as an 'open-world' exclusive studio. In other words, get ready for a game world that measures up to fifteen square miles of Martian terrain, with terraforming colonies reminiscent of the Wild West. There is one thing that'll be making a revamped appearance on the consoles however, Volition's GeoMod technology.

TVG recently got a ground-shaking sneak peak preview of the game right in the heart of London, and combined it with some hands on destruction at THQ's Gamers Day 2008 in San Francisco...

A Mars A Day...

From the outset of the hands-off presentation, there was no denying where THQ and Volition are redirecting the Red Faction franchise, with a brief video showing its new competitors: Battlefield: Bad Company and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. Switching the action to third person could have been derided as too much of a tangent by the Red Faction fan base, but after explaining the benefits of the move (namely that it allows players to see structures caving in on their heads) it's clear that the strategy was bold, but the correct one to make.

With the game 'Guerrilla' in its very title, there's little room to suppose the main crux of how gamers will play through the Red Faction experience. According to Volition, hit and run ambushes will mix with daring hostage rescues, and more intriguingly, two dynamics that should allow for some engaging unscripted experiences: 'Morale' and 'Control'.

EDF's control of the Martian colonies, and the reduction of that control, is key to stirring up the Red Faction insurrection. As the EDF's control of a sector is diminished, so the morale of the people in that area increases. Each sector is metered according to its Morale and Control levels, with both having an effect on the other, and also the player's reputation as a Guerrilla leader. As the people's morale increases, players could find emergent ambushes take place; they could also be more willing to take part in a guerrilla attack against EDF forces, and help in other ways too. The reduction of EDF's control rests with the demolition of highly-important buildings, which can get rebuilt over time if they still have some semblance of control in the sector. Remove all EDF influence in the area however, and they'll leave that sector alone for good.

There's no denying what the key mechanic is in Guerrilla however; it's total destruction, something that's carried the Red Faction franchise ever since it first began.

Four years in development, the latest version of Volition's GeoMod tech provides the main fuel for the fire in Guerrilla. Built from the ground up to take advantage of the multi-core hardware of the current-gen consoles, the newest incarnation is built upon the very real-life implementation of stress and mass on a structure. Multiple points across every building's walls and ceilings on Mars are checked by GeoMod, with real-time calculations as to the amount of stress and mass is being placed at that position. Weaken a random wall with a few throws of a sledgehammer, and you'll make a neat entrance or exit for yourself. Weaken a random wall that happens to be a supporting wall, and you'll overload the stress on the remaining structure, which will make it collapse in on itself. It doesn't follow the route of 'corpse replacement' like its contemporaries, replacing complete structures for demolished alternatives, or breaking it down into constituent parts. The walls fracture and break apart in the right places, and the ceiling crumples in on itself, all with the sort of physicality you'd expect from a demolition.

Despite lauding over the destruction of buildings and other bits of colonial architecture, which dot the fifteen square miles of Martian landscape in the game, actual terrain deformation won't be a feature. Whilst there'll be some with raised eyebrows and a cynical glint in their eye about Volition's potential pratfall, the official line from the Illinois studio, is that terrain deformation had little meaning in terms of gameplay. It's a fair point to some extent, but it does mean that the rock-blasting of the original won't be resurfacing, and may damage some immersive elements. Using vehicles, including 'Aliens'-style Walkers are available however, throwing in another few variables to rip down buildings and view GeoMod in all its rubble-making glory.

What was most telling about the London unveiling was that the demonstrated build dated back to November 2007, and to be honest, it showed. Fast forward by a few weeks, to THQ's Gamers Day 2008 in San Francisco, where Guerrilla was very much a hands on experience...

Mars Is There, Waiting To Be Reached.

So you're standing in front of a demo pod with a copy of Red Faction: Guerrilla's pre-Alpha build, with a gamepad, and the knowledge that the sledgehammer-wielding character on screen can demolish buildings piece by piece...what are you going to do??? It's not original I know, but the likelihood is that when you find yourself in a similar position within the next twelve months, you'll end up doing exactly what I did. That is to say, wallop the closest building with said sledgehammer. A test of exactly how accurate Volition's gushing of the latest incarnation of GeoMod was, the subsequent demolition proved far from unsatisfactory...in fact, it was all the more fulfilling when the stresses on the roof were weakened so much, they flattened me.

According to some THQ reps at Gamers Day, demolishing buildings with the sledgehammer is pretty much how most people spend their first 30 minutes in the Guerrilla gameworld. Which surely throws up something of an issue? What happens once that half hour is done, and the campaign to free Mars isn't quite as compelling as it should be? Won't it just render Red Faction: Guerrilla as little more than an impressively elaborate tech demo? The build at Gamers Day never answered the question, introducing gamers to a couple of emergent side-missions instead, and of course, the opportunity to bring down a few more buildings.

There's no question that the build on show was little more than the first chance for the gaming press to test drive the GeoMod engine's prowess in mass destruction - and boy, did it impress! Beyond that, Guerrilla visually seemed a much more solid affair than what was on show at London, with the depth of field and particle effects working with the tech, making for an immersive setting. There's also the always welcomed use of motion blur to some of the faster movements, together with HDR lighting. In short, Volition has re-written its effects tools for Red Faction (and we suspect by default, Saints Row 2 too), so that whilst the end product may not quite a hold a candle to some of the jaw-dropping stunners coming this year, it will at least hold its own.

Gamers Day also saw the introduction of Guerrilla's protagonist for the first time, one Alex Mason. After the rather generic-looking miner (a stand in model) at the London event, Mason's full-length reflective-strip jacket was certainly different, flapping about like an extra from the Matrix. Clearly, this is one character that Goths will take to their dark hearts. Between the setting and the character's vocation as a Martian miner and revolutionary, Guerrilla could almost be 'Total Recall: The Game', with plenty of action and probably enhanced acting abilities all round.

Besides the inevitable questions over the strength of the single-player campaign, there's surely some holes left unfilled regarding the multiplayer modes too. An intrinsic part of Red Faction in the past, the switch to third-person may make sense for the rest of the game, but could very well change the dynamic of multiplayer so it's far from the compelling experience it could be. Of course, we'll just have to wait until we get some hands-on time with the online mode, but it's certainly something worth pondering. One thing that Red Faction won't have, bucking the trend, is co-operative gameplay; with such a tech-heavy title though, that's perhaps to be expected.

We know that the multiplayer side of the game has been in testing for over a year now, so hopefully Volition is crafting the sort of online experience fans expect in a Red Faction title. Beyond the usual sort of gametypes, the studio is also planning a bunch of others 'original' to Guerrilla - not that they're talking about them at the moment. One is known to be 'Siege', and whilst the studio isn't discussing its finer points for now, it doesn't take an Einstein to figure it out. We can already see a horde of gamers attacking a base with their sledgehammers...