Some videogames pontificate on the deeper themes of love, loss, and control - ultimately causing players to see the world in a new light once they've dabbed the tears from their eyes. Other videogames grab a giant hammer - that, in some cases, is an ostrich that somehow migrated to Mars - and gleefully lay waste to everything in sight.
Red Faction: Guerrilla was most certainly the latter.
A surprise hit, Guerrilla sneaked under gamers' radars and smacked them with all the subtlety of the animal it's not named after. Thanks to Volition's Geo-Mod destruction engine, sending buildings tumbling down had never been more satisfying. Sure, the game didn't reinvent any wheels, but it definitely made them explode real nice.
This, however, raises a question: if your game isn't broken (well, minus the billions of space dollars in property damages), how do you fix it? Our magic videogame eight ball tells us "Make it bigger! Duh." But that's not quite the approach Volition's taking. Instead, Armageddon's ditching its colossal open-world for a more constrained underground setting. So long, freedom. Hello, linearity. How are the kids?
Frightened? Curious? We sure were. So we quizzed lead designer David Abzug on everything from the whys and hows of Armageddon's switch to a more linear format, to new additions to the Geo-Mod engine, to potential Kinect/Move support in a Red Faction game.
Read all about it after the break.
Interview by Nathan Grayson.
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