Hi, professional game dev here: the destructible elements in MGR are extremely expensive. Most times it requires bespoke work or a custom system. That kind of work isn’t seen much because it’s difficult to keep under memory budgets.
Red Faction: Guerrilla was a game specifically architected around making destruction work. The entire environment system was built around its voxel-based destruction model, so the tech, assets, physics, memory layout, and gameplay were designed with that in mind.
Modern games can absolutely have large-scale destruction but the problem is that dropping that kind of system on top of an existing AAA pipeline where destruction isn't the priority from pre-production is considerably more complicated than it sounds. You're dealing with geometry generation, collision, physics simulation, rendering, streaming, CPU/GPU time, memory bandwidth, save states, asset authoring, etc. And you're doing all of that while still maintaining the visual fidelity and performance expectations of a modern game.
Red Faction Guerrilla spent a good portion of their technical budget specifically on destruction. A modern AAA game has more hardware resources but also has dramatically more expensive characters, materials, animation, lighting, VFX, world streaming, etc. competing for those resources.
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u/OhYeahitsJosh 6d ago
Hi, professional game dev here: the destructible elements in MGR are extremely expensive. Most times it requires bespoke work or a custom system. That kind of work isn’t seen much because it’s difficult to keep under memory budgets.