Red Faction: Guerrilla's Big Bang Theory Comments by Richard Leadbetter

The tech is extremely impressive, and does what it needs to very well. I guess the next step, if you want it to look a little more real, is to working some structural properties such as bending rather than the pure collapsing here that's a little like wet sand rather than concrete.

Great article, very interesting. Shame there was no PC angle though, but I expect that from EG :)

I guess we have BitTorrent to thank for the delayed PC version.

I'm not convinced with the tech TBH. I completed RFG and enjoyed it loads, but most of the time I found the physics doesn't actually work as it should (floating floors, whole buildings held up with a couple of sticks, ladders in mid-air etc)
Looks great when everything's exploding, but the whole ''take out the structural supports and watch the building collapse realistically' doesn't really work in practice.

Almost seems like a step back from the original geomod by being limited to just structures as well.

Oh, and where the hell is our New Game+?

Way to give us all the nice toys at the end of the game then leave us bugger all to do with them because we've levelled the planet already.

I would find it more interesting if RF would be compared to similar advances in games like Alone in the Dark 5 or the tech demo LucasArts showed off before Force Unleashed or Crysis. Biggest difference probably being others didn't focus gameplay around it and not having massive structures built with it.
Only looking at RF is too one-sided and doesn't show how far the general technology in gaming really is, contemporary gimmick or future.
Nonetheless I always enjoy Richard's articles.

advantage of these resources as the engine was built around the limitations of the consoles it was designed for.
Or it is designed to match the limitations my PC (and milions of others) have ?

Good read. Good fun game thanks to the destruction tech and multiplayer is a real blast with the powerup backpacks

Volition's last PC port was fucking atrocious, so I refuse to raise my hopes over this one

what

I wouldent mind seing what the mod comunity would do with the PC port.

2 mute09
On xbox 260 game runs pretty well. Not my PC preferred 60+ fps, but solid 30 - for sure. Explosions and destruction can sometimes be very spectacular - I''ve never seen anything like it in videogames.
Of course Crysis has much better textures, lighting, geometry, view distance, beautiful special effects, particle system and quite realistic physics, but when my high-end PC bows in horror on CPU_demo1 (the one with unlimited rocket launcher ammo and several exploding huts), I clearly understand that RFG has in some way more fun destruction physics because it runs on inferior hardware (xbox 360/ps3) with tons of limitations and still allows to blow much more shit up.
Yeah, it's not photorealistic, yeah, not that technologically advanced as Crysis, but it's still fun to play (blow up, destroy and crush) and watch (collapsing buildings and... well - more collapsing buildings), just in its own way.
I'd like to have more games like RFG which build gameplay around some fun feature and really make that feature work without crippling all other game aspects (plot, graphics, level design, framerate etc) too bad.

Really interesting article, but it's nit-picking time - RFG doesn't belong in the "First Person Shooter genre" as, well, it's not an FPS. I really wish it was, but the devs argued they had to move to third-person so the player wouldn't get lost in the carnage. I'm not convinced, but I would have preferred a linear FPS with an amazing storyline, brilliant set-pieces and rock deformation anyway.

Physics and nice graphics would have been nice and not unreasonable in this day and age. I was going to get this game but all the footage of it I've seen make it looks...well a bit shit in the visual department really. Can't put my finger on it though. Maybe inFamous has spoilt me a bit.

Also, I would have loved a more gritty Blackhawk Down feel to the game. The whole insurgence on a dusty red landscape could have made this fantastic rather than the slight cartooniness it seems to have instead.

Or you could, you know, just use Havok Destruction.

@ miiiguel; If you PC is limited you can buy a new one or upgrade with a console your stuck with a limited hardware spec

@Nephirion : that wouldn't change anything, PC is an open architeture, and therefor a dev has to think about every single one out there. Consoles do not suffer from that.
Anyway, I can't stand office-desk gaming, I do PC 10 hours a day for working purposes, don't do ludic on a PC.

@Nephirion : that wouldn't change anything, PC is an open architeture, and therefor a dev has to think about every single one out there. Consoles do not suffer from that.

Supposedly, that's what DirectX is for - unifying PC gaming architecture. The problem is NVidia keep making faster and more expensive graphics cards and convincing people that they're needed to play the latest games - which is just completely wrong.

Even a fairly old and fairly cheap PC processor is going to be much better at doing this sort of complex physics processing than certainly a PS3 and probably an Xbox 360 as well. In theory the PC game should be far superior.

PC gamers, however, know it wont be.

Excellent Article, this is more like it EG. I love reading this kind of feature.

:-D

Screw all the moaners, as Volition said in the article, fun comes first over realism. The Geo-Mod technology is a great achievement and while impressive in Single Player, it really is something else in multiplayer. Playing a match on Quarantine is fantastic when the heavily built up square area gets reduced to rubble by the end of the match.

mute09: Thanks for your intelligent contribution.

As a civil engineer i must say that some parts of it are very good indeed but in others it lacks some major physical properties of materials such as the plasticity of steel and lines of rupture of structures with multiple degree of freedom.

But even so, itīs great to see these improvements in a game.
Kudos to Volition!

possibly the best game engine this gen although games like gt5p may look nicer they sacrifice that for no physics/damage.just think what this engine wpuld be like in in a game like saints row3 or GTA and away form the boring redness of mars.

It is definitely a very impressive engine, although as someone already said, you do get huge buildings being supported on just a couple of tiny sticks on too many occasions. But generally though, brilliant, especially in multiplayer.

Wastelander I think you can put a lot of that down to the lower gravity of Mars.

I'm happy to wait for the PC version because, while the console versions are undeniably impressive in terms of physics, that has come at the expense of a smooth tear-free framerate but Volition have never been too bothered about that in the past. The god-awful tearing in the console demos I tried instantly put me off purchasing it on either of those platforms. Nice game otherwise though even if the physics and over abundance of red in the colour palette are really the only two things which make it stand out from any other third-person action game.

Even if the PC version is poorly optimised, my PC should still be able to run it fine because its far more powerful than either a PS3 or Xbox 360. Here's hoping that we still get a quality "port" though.

Darren, what console did you play the demo on? I have the PS3 version, and while I wasn't entirely impressed by the demo I bought the game and the engine runs amazingly well. The frame rate is really high and I don't see any tearing, really. This and Burnout are both built on absolutely wonderful engines that work great on the PS3, give it a shot.