Red Faction Feature Preview

Volition, the developer responsible for the first North American PS2 role-playing game, Summoner, is working on an ambitious new PS2 first-person shooter that has the potential to redefine the genre. We had the opportunity to sit down with Red Faction's lead designer, Alan Lawrance, and THQ producer Rob Loftus to discuss what makes Red Faction so special.

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Red Faction tells the story of Parker, a well-educated man who decides to throw away his Ivy League education to pursue a blue-collar career as a miner on Mars. Parker signs on with the Ultor Corporation, a gigantic and mysterious company that seems to have interests beyond simply mining Mars. A horrible plague is infecting miners employed by Ultor, and a rebel faction rises up to accuse Ultor of unleashing the disfiguring disease as part of some terrible experiment. Parker gets caught in the rebellion and finds himself a key figure in discovering the truth about Ultor and the rebellion. But, like the mysterious red planet, the corporation that seemingly owns it, and the characters working for Ultor, Parker himself isn't exactly what he seems. Loftus elaborated, "Parker was actually a rather academic young man before he came to Ultor, which is a little strange. I mean, he's very well educated and has a great future, then he decides to go be a blue-collar miner on Mars for this huge, horrible corporation. And that's important - his decision and background will definitely be a factor in the story."

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Red Faction is obviously inspired by Half-Life, one of the first first-person shooters to immerse you in an evolving story. But Red Faction isn't simply a copycat - the game boasts one of the most amazing bits of innovative technology yet seen in games. Volition is calling it geo-mod technology, short for geometrical modification. Where other games will change wall textures to show grenade marks or bullet holes, Red Faction will actually change the geometry of the wall. If you shoot a wall with a rocket launcher, you'll take a chunk of the wall out. If you shoot a hole in a pipe carrying hot magma, the magma will spew from the hole. If you crash a tank into a sniper tower, the tower will collapse. Giving the power to the player to actually feel the effects of powerful weapons makes Red Faction one the most realistic first-person shooters yet. And Volition is making sure that you will use geo-mod technology. "The team's main goal is to take the amazing technology they've developed and heighten the realism the player is able to feel in a first-person shooter. We want to give players a story-driven experience that is not only immersive in a story sense but also in a gameplay sense - in that the walls and anything that could be realistically destroyed can be destroyed in the game," said Loftus.