March 23, 2009

GameZone Sits Down with Volition's Dan Cermak to Discuss Red Faction: Guerilla
by Steven Hopper

"The concept was giving the player choices but having destruction and allowing the player to pretty much do anything he wants that makes the game completely different."

The first entry from THQ and Volition’s Red Faction series to hit current-gen hardware, Red Faction: Guerilla marks a pretty big departure for the well-received series. Removing it from the linear first-person viewpoint of its predecessors, Guerilla opts for a third-person open-world look and plays similar to games like Mercenaries. The game is certainly different and will be a surprising change for fans of the series, but the impressive destruction engine is definitely a blast.

At a recent event held for the game in Las Vegas, GameZone was given the chance to sit down and chat with Dan Cermak, VP of Product Development at Volition, and ask him some questions about the development of the game, the switch to third-person, and what the future might hold for the Red Faction franchise.

What can you tell us about the storyline in relation to the other games in the Red Faction series?

Dan: It follows the first game, about 40 or 50 years after that. It’s staying on Mars, whereas the second Red Faction game took place on Earth. In the first one you were a miner who had gone to Mars thinking you’d get rich and it turned out to be hell, and Ultor was a big part of that, and in the end you ended up kicking Ultor’s butt with the EDF helping you do it.

Forty years later, the EDF have become overlords; Earth is so messed up that they need new resources, so there’s starting to become martial law and all these nasty things going on. The idea is that you come to Mars thinking that you’re going to work with your brother, but the EDF is just making life rough for everyone, so it brings it back into the original game from that.

The transition to third-person shooter as opposed to the first-person perspective of the two previous games will be the most immediately noticeable and surprising change for fans of series. Why the change?

Dan: It’s interesting, but we actually started out as a first-person shooter; we really did. But when you see destruction and you start playing with the game, you realize that you can only see so much. You need to see what’s happening above you and going on around you. If you don’t get that, you can die just like that and not know what happened. We wanted to give people more of a feel of why things are happening and it just came natural that third-person worked really well for that. So it was more a matter of giving the player more of an understanding of what actually happening all around them and it really drove the whole thing. So we did start it out in first-person, but it just was not as good.

Another big change from the original games is the addition of an open-world sandbox structure, as opposed to a more linear feel. Why take the open-world approach?

Dan: We made a conscious choice almost six years ago to go open-world. We decided that this is a place that’s just not a one-off game; this is going to be a genre. This is going to be something that other people are going to be doing, and it seems like there’s this huge audience that’s interested in open-world games.

We had a first-person shooter with destruction and when you think about it, most shooters are very linear, and destruction doesn’t work very well with that. We figured that when you marry it to an open-world structure, you’re going to get something very special, and we feel like we have. The concept was giving the player choice but having destruction and allowing the player to pretty much do anything he wants that makes the game completely different. You design differently, you think differently of how the game works and how the player plays it, because they’re the designer. It’s no longer a guy sitting back there going, “Here’s what I want the player to do.” It’s, “Here are some opportunities for the player to go crazy.” It’s a different way of looking at it.

With destruction being a big element in Red Faction: Guerilla, it opens up possibility for weaponry in some interesting ways. What was behind the choices for the game’s arsenal?

Dan: We really wanted to do this conventional weapon set, which is the EDF weaponry. We felt like we’ve got to have the artillery and the heavy weapon set. It feels really good to keep them conventional; it’s almost like you’ve got to think differently to take them on because they’re so powerful. And then, we took a look at the other side and wondered, what would a miner have available? What would they have that we could change and modify into a weapon? That’s really what drove that whole concept.

I mean, you see the walker; a walker is a mining vehicle, it’s supposed to do that kind of digging, but it becomes an ultimate weapon. A lot of the weapons you see on the miner side are converted mining tools, so that’s where we went with that.

The implementation of vehicles in the game is another big difference from the previous two games. What were some of the challenges of introducing vehicles to the gameplay?

Dan: It’s always about feel. People expect a certain feel when driving; the vehicles always have to feel a little different and work differently. At the same time, they have a purpose. I play a certain way, I’ll put a charge on a vehicle, because I know it won’t blow it up the first time; it takes like three or four to take them out. So, the first time, I’ll take a building on with a vehicle; I’ll blow a hole through the wall and get that charge inside, and then tear the heck out of the inside. The physics side of vehicles and marrying that with the destruction was probably the most interesting challenge, but it’s worked out really well. I think the vehicles are kind of the super-system; they show off the destruction really well.

I’ve seen games where you drive into a building and you bounce off. But, this is just so different. The first time somebody drives a vehicle and hits a wall or a building and it breaks, they’ll be taken aback and then go crazy with it, and that’s kind of the point. That’s why I think the sledgehammer it so iconic; it works so well with destruction. And with vehicles, you can take a big mining truck through a building in a blink, and it’s just really satisfying.

I think that was the biggest challenge, but I think there’s always the other challenges, like they have to feel different and work well within the world of Mars.

What were some of your biggest design inspirations from other media, or even other games when creating Red Faction: Guerilla?

Dan: We spent a lot of time watching destruction in different ways. I think that was key, but it’s interesting though, believe it or not, that Saints Row was one of our biggest inspirations, and how they doled out the process of missions and activities were key, because we learned a lot from that. It was kind of a lesson, when we did the first Saints Row, and these guys incorporated a ton of that. But, we watched a lot of movies, a lot of the “Die Hard” kind of stuff.

You think about what is important in destruction, and if you watch destruction, this game has a stress system in it that is true physics driven, but what you need to do is give clues to the players. So we look at movies and see what matters, and it’s the sound, the explosion, the dust and how it falls, and all of that had to be dealt with very carefully. It’s amazing how many iterations we went through with the dust and just to get it right. You go to movies and you see, “Wow, look at how that thing blew up. Look at how the dust settles.” That was kind of what drove it; it wasn’t a matter of one thing driving the whole story, but a lot of movies inspired how things work in the game.

What were some of the major challenges when making the game?

Dan: It started out as, “Can destruction be an integral part of the game, or is it going to be a side feature? A cool feature that’s just kind of there and doesn’t really work?” For the guys, that was one of the biggest challenges early on. How do we do that and have people feel that it’s an essential part of the game? You see a building that’s blue, and you go “I gotta go blow that up.” It becomes part of the game, but that for me was the biggest concern.

Then, as the game really came together, it became a matter of how the player gets to choose. We were truly open world and things would just pop up, like radio calls for missions, and the player would just get overwhelmed, and we found that they were just doing the missions; nobody was doing the other things, because it was too much coming in at once. Now, we’ve changed it to a choice system where you can go in a do the missions you want to do. Giving the player a way of choosing was huge, and I think it made a big difference in the game.

Was there something that you wanted to implement into the game but couldn’t?

Dan: Oh, there are so many things [laughs]. We looked at a lot of different things, some of which we’ll hopefully be using in the future. We wanted to do bigger (more city, more missions, bigger buildings), but the physics behind the game and the engine are so intensive, it’s amazing. The calculations in real-time are constantly happening; if you damage a building and we turn it on so you can see the calculations, it’s insane. So, we couldn’t do the scope of cities and towns that we wanted to, we had to keep it pretty sparse, which is part of what we wanted to do more of with bigger buildings and more interior combat, but that just didn’t happen.

Do you see the series possibly returning to its first-person roots in the future?

Dan: I don’t really know. I wonder if it wouldn’t have a place if you did interior combat, but I’d still worry about what happens all around you though, it’s the biggest concern I’ve had. We’ll test it, just to see. But we thought about having both (first-person and third-person) in there, but the more we fiddled with it, the more we felt that third-person just worked better. I’m not sure that we’d ever go first-person again, because it’s a concern about information overload; I hate dying and not knowing why. I mean, that really sucks, so we’ll try to avoid it when we can.

So, I’m not sure about that; it’s something we’ve kept open for a long time before we figured that we’d have to stay with third-person. And you do design it differently, and the animations and all that are different. I think that if someone had compelling gameplay that worked with the destruction, then we’d love to do that. But it’s just a matter of what the player will feel more comfortable with.

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