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David Abzug, lead designer on Red Faction: Armageddon has said he’d like to see GeoMod 2.0 – the engine allowing all that lovely destruction in Red Faction – incorporate user-generated content.
Asked whether he’d like to see players using GeoMod to make their own destructive creations, Abzug responded: “Yes. Oh yes.”
In fact user-generated content is something the team considered for Red Faction: Armageddon, but dropped very early on.
“We made the decision early on not to be doing user generated stuff simply because of how much time we had, so we put that to one side early on in the process,” Abzug explained.
He proceeded to talk about the importance of destruction as a gameplay mechanic.
“GeoMod 2.0 is an amazing thing. When Red faction Guerrilla started getting made, the structure artists would build a building – and it’d look fantastic – but when they put it in the game world it’d fall over. They actually had to learn basic architectural concepts, as oppose to just what was in their imaginations – they had to build things that stayed together. Once you started actually applying physics to them.”
“A Red Faction building, in terms of processor and memory is probably ten to twenty times – at least – as complicated as a building in Call of Duty, for example.
“I think we’ve far from mined the potential gameplay from destruction. There’s a lot more that can be done with it. Picture a puzzle game using the destruction engine, picture a super-hero game, where when you knock someone through a wall, you actually knock them through a wall.
“The potential for a destruction-based engine is the difference between a hammer and a screwdriver. We’ve been making games with hammers – we have a screwdriver. It’s a whole ‘nother way things can be done.”
While there’s nothing to say that there are even going to be future Red Faction games, Abzug seems keen on the idea of giving players a bit of creative freedom. With inFamous 2 allowing players to create their own missions in an open world setting, user generated content is slowly starting to head down more interesting avenues.
