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Red Faction: Guerrilla screenshot

VideoGamer.com: Are you guys planning on doing a demo?

IV: We're trying to do a lot of different things that will get people up to speed on the franchise. Providing that back story to the community if they want it. The game's fairly open in that if you've never played a Red Faction game you can still pick this one up and click right away. As far as a demo, certainly a demo is something we'd love to do. We want people to be able to play this. With us we're still figuring out what a demo means for our game. It's not just hard from an open world perspective. If you looked at the Saints Row demo it was huge and yet for Saints Row it was such a small slice of the game but by demo standards it was huge. With a demo you really want something that's 15 to 30 minutes of someone playing it, getting impressed, saying I'm going to buy this, and with our game that's really tough to do.

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This E3 area we thought was a very small slice of the game but we've seen people play it for hours because they just take that hammer and want to destroy everything. What's too much? What's not enough? What gives people a feeling of how the game will play out? We have to make all those decisions to decide what kind of demo we want to do. But it's something we'd love to do, absolutely. Pre-release.

VideoGamer.com: Regarding multiplayer, how many maps have you got?

IV: We've got quite a few maps. I don't want to get into specific numbers. It's going to be a dozen or more hopefully give or take. The maps are going to be very varied. We're still trying to figure out what kind of things we want to do. Some maps are better suited to different game types. We're going to try and ship with a fair amount of maps so that people can immediately have a lot of different places to play.

VideoGamer.com: What about multiplayer game modes?

IV: We've got a list of game modes that we're intending to do at ship. It's a mixture of classical game modes like Anarchy, which is basically death match, and CTF and things like that. And we've got some that are specific to Red Faction because of the destruction engine. We've got Siege mode, where some people defend buildings, some try to destroy them, which play out very interestingly because of the way our destruction system works. We've got the Damage Control one in there where people have different control points that you're repairing or destroying. That one's very interesting. A lot of people take to it once they get the strategic elements of it. We're going to ship with a good variety of game modes which I think people will really enjoy. They'll be able to play the classics and the unique ones.

VideoGamer.com: We noticed backpacks that grant different abilities - do they have a technical term?

IV: They're just called back packs right now. I'm sure at some point we'll come up with some fancy name for them!

VideoGamer.com: We saw about four or five during our play test. How many will ship?

IV: There will be more than that. Some of the best ones that we have aren't in the beta at all. Once people see the back packs that we don't have in there they're going to be like oh I wish they had been in the beta! But then they'll get to play them with the released game.

VideoGamer.com: How many players does it support?

IV: We can get up to 16 right now. We're going to try and maintain 16 players as our limit. You never know how it's going to work out in the end. Right now our beta can get up to 16 players and so that's what we're looking to support. That will be a lot of fun, eight on eight with destruction going on. You wouldn't believe how destroyed a map can get at the end of an eight on eight game!

VideoGamer.com: You've had to make some compromises though with the multiplayer compared with the single-player, like no cover system and no physics stress on structures...

IV: The cover was less of a compromise and more of a, it didn't make sense with multiplayer. When people first started playing multiplayer they were using cover a lot and then experienced players would just hammer through a wall and kill the people and say, why are you stood in cover? You shouldn't do that! And so we realised let's just not get people used to it in multiplayer. Let's pull it out because it just doesn't make sense with the destruction. But as far as the stress system, yeah that was one compromise we had to make.

VideoGamer.com: Are there any other differences?

IV: Well no vehicles, obviously. Other than that... The weapons will make appearances. Back packs are unique to multiplayer for the most part. The Jet Pack may make a cross over to the single-player but that will be the only back pack that will show up in there. Multiplayer has got its own unique flavour. But yeah the destruction, every piece can knock you down and kill you, whole buildings can still collapse and kill you. You can still bust through walls. There are some compromises but I don't think they significantly make multiplayer in any way a weak experience. I think multiplayer is a great experience, just as good as single-player. I think people are going to enjoy both just as much.

VideoGamer.com: There is a DLC option in the game's opening menu. Are you talking about what that might be?

IV: We want to make a mixture of multiplayer and single-player DLC. We do want to support people who do enjoy the single-player campaign by giving them more stuff to play with, whether that is additional missions, maps, vehicles, weapons whatever. We've tried to plan to give the system enough flexibility that it can accommodate whatever we want to do for single-player. For multiplayer naturally that might be additional modes or additional maps, stuff like that. Again, we tried to make our DLC system extremely flexible so we can see how people take to the game and then try and provide them with more of what they want. We've got some stuff planned already. It'll just depend on what we roll out and when we roll it out.

VideoGamer.com: That's great Ismael, thanks for your time.

Red Faction Guerrilla is due out for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC early 2009.

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