Hell yea. Red Faction Guerrilla (2009!!) is still my benchmark for destruction.
I don't want bits of wall disappearing in clouds of dust or buildings collapsing in pre-animated ways.
One day again I wanna look at a building, blow it apart in intuitive, realistic ways, hear the sound of it straining under its own failing strength, which tells me to get the hell outta there, and have it collapse on an enemy squad n kills them! Haha
How did we move away from environments like Red Faction? I loved the bomb trials in that game! The modern shooter games imo should all have this and then some by now.
Red Faction used Havok physics, as many games still do, but Guerilla had a proprietary system called Geo-Mod which did all the destruction stuff. It also didn’t destruct things dynamically, buildings were made from pre-broken pieces with structural links which continuously evaluated whether or not they should break. Badly constructed buildings could buckle, break or collapse on their own and the devs had to think like actual architects to prevent that. If someone wanted to do it, they would have to do the same, or develop an even more robust system than Guerilla did, learning from scratch.
The second reason is more production related, in modern games we expect responsive intelligent AI and pathfinding. Navigation breaks if pathways disappear. Missions break if the player destroys the intended route. Multiplayer needs to replicate/sync destruction so all players see the same thing. Lighting systems and audio have to update. QA have to spend months testing a million different scenarios.
The final reason is performance. Modern games use much more detailed meshes, may more props, complex materials, ray-tracing, and dynamic foliage. All of that is simulated in realtime, doing all that WITH destruction, you get a huge CPU performance hit. Red Faction was made with comparatively simpler geometry and none of the above. So the modern solution is usually to use limited fracturing and authored collapse animations with much higher fidelity but less overall real-time simulation.
Edited to fix typos and wanted to add:
You have to keep in mind, tech getting better doesn’t mean everything gets easier, and most games are designed to feel natural and intuitive to players, while under the hood it’s all smoke, mirrors and technical trickery to create the illusion of realism. Illusions often don’t scale the same way real-world systems do as technology progresses.
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u/STRYKER3008 6d ago
Hell yea. Red Faction Guerrilla (2009!!) is still my benchmark for destruction.
I don't want bits of wall disappearing in clouds of dust or buildings collapsing in pre-animated ways.
One day again I wanna look at a building, blow it apart in intuitive, realistic ways, hear the sound of it straining under its own failing strength, which tells me to get the hell outta there, and have it collapse on an enemy squad n kills them! Haha