Red Faction Preview
This game promises to be one of next year's most ambitious first-person shooter.
Eschewing fancy offices and a parking lot full of sports cars, Champaign, Illinois-based Volition prefers to make outstanding games with as few distractions as possible. The creators of Descent: Freespace and FreeSpace 2 have a reputation for excellence, and they are currently applying their talents to Red Faction, a first-person shooter with some decidedly new twists. Recently, we were lucky enough to spend the day at Volition's offices, in the company of lead designer Alan Lawrance, director of product development Philip Holt, THQ producer Rob Loftus, and several other team members to get a close-up, in-depth look at the shooter that has the potential to redefine the genre as much as Half-Life did.
Red Faction is the story of Parker, a miner on Mars who works for an evil, tyrannical (is there any other kind?) mining conglomerate known as the Ultor Corporation. After a plague breaks out among the miners, they decide to rebel against their squalid living conditions and bring down the Ultor Corporation. Red Faction follows Parker as he tries to escape the mining colony and get off Mars, find the cause of and cure for the plague, and solve the mystery of his own secret origins. It's a compelling story, and Volition has a full-time writer working on it to ensure that Red Faction immerses you not only with a graphically rich environment, but also with a gripping plot.
The project that became Red Faction actually started out as Descent 4, but Volition felt that rather than work on another sequel, it would be less confining to try something in a different genre and incorporate several new ideas for the first-person shooter. The centerpiece of this approach is something called "Geo-Mod," a deformable terrain system that goes far beyond any of the interactive environments found in other games. Instead of changing some textures or applying decals to textures as a result of weapon effects, Geo-Mod actually changes the geometry of the world in response to various factors. If you shoot a wall with a rocket launcher, it will take a huge chunk out of it. If you crash a vehicle into a structure, the structure may collapse or at least inflict serious damage. You can even use weapons like the rocket launcher to dig tunnels through the world. "This introduces a whole new set of challenges for the level designers," Philip Holt said. "Where you used to be able to just hide things behind a locked door, in Red Faction you have to deal with a player who can pull out a weapon and take down the wall next to that door. Geometry modification affects all levels of the game."
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