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Lead Multiplayer designer at Volition Luke Schneider was kind enough to sit down with us and give us some insight and answers to questions on the upcoming much anticipated title: Red Faction: Guerrilla.
GA: The previous two games had different heroes. Why do you keep changing heroes every game instead of letting players get attached to one?
Luke Schneider: I wish I had a better answer for that, but basically Red Faction 1, I think, was the game that people really attached to in terms of story and we wanted to try something different for Red Faction 2, which I wasn't around for because I've been working on multiplayer. So when we went for Red Faction: Guerrilla, we knew we wanted to go back to Mars, we knew we wanted to bring back some of the main characters – not in terms of Parker himself but in terms of some of the other characters there. And then in terms of this one, there's just sort of a logic problem where we needed the game to be much later so we could say it's terraformed, and I think that makes sense because you can't terraform a planet in a couple years. So we didn't come back to Parker but there are some hidden characters within the game that sort of reference Red Faction 1.
GA: How did you decide to go third person?
Luke: Third person is actually a much easier decision because we had first person for quite a while and, for the destruction itself, it just didn't feel quite as tied to what you were doing because you would get hit by a piece of debris. And we wanted to make sure the character would interact with that so we'd ragdoll him. So basically you're pulled out to third person then put back in first person. It was also sort of a technical issue, like when we pulled the camera back, all of a sudden the destruction made sense in terms of how we were doing it and it just gives you a better sense of scale of destruction and it allows us to, sort of, make the destruction around you feel a lot more integrated with what you're doing. When you see pieces of debris hit your character, things come out of nowhere; you actually know what happened to your character. It just feels a lot more natural that way.
GA: You mentioned emergent gaming and unexpected things happening in the game. What was the most unexpected result of some of your changes?
Luke: Actually Wrecking Crew [multiplayer mode] is. You can place a singularity bomb down on this one level, or on any level really that has a smokestack with some explosive barrels in it. Those barrels will get sucked into the singularity as it's swirling around and destroy the bottom of the smokestack as they go off. And that actually sets loose the top of the smokestack, that gets tossed through the singularity and out the other side and it'll all just smash through an entire other building. That's just something we didn't plan for at all and was actually sort of a bug at first. There were technical reasons we couldn't keep [the destructibles] as high [in] single-player but for Wrecking Crew we kept it higher. With one singularity bomb I can just show how our destruction system creates this new way of interacting with the world. It's something [players] haven't seen in any other game.
GA: So you're doing a new-and-improved take on your [destructibles system] Geomod?
Luke: Yes.
GA: What kinds of changes are people going to see in Geomod?
Luke: Well, we're now outdoors most of the time and that means that you're going to see all the structures around you are destroyable. Everything that's man-made is destroyable, everything that's a natural formation is not destroyable. So we keep a very consistent feel in terms of what's destroyable and what's not. Because we have a very open world, we're not going to have that inconsistency of "sometimes you can destroy stuff and sometimes you can't." The way our destruction interacts with physics adds a whole new layer of gameplay. That's what creates that emergent gameplay I was talking about.
GA: When you were creating, you said it was going to be a really long, really rich single-player experience. Is it linear even though it's an open world? Are there some optional things you can do?
Luke: Yes. We have six districts, or six sectors actually, that you're playing through and you take those semi-linearly. There's a little branch in the middle in terms of sectors but within each sector you have three or so missions that you have to do. You can do the first ones in any order and the last one will unlock when you have control all the way down to zero. And how you get control down to zero is you can attack targets that are just within the world that are guarded by EDF (Earth Defense Force). There's no scripting involved, but they're some of the most fun parts of the game, where you just have to go in there, figure out how to destroy the structure and get out alive. We've also got guerrilla actions. We have nine or ten different faction types that – each of these things are optional, you don't have to do them – they give you different rewards. In addition to lowering control, you get morale, which will help the civilians and they'll end up helping you more, and you can also get salvage which will help you with buying upgrades.
GA: The previous Red Faction had multiple endings. Are there different endings for Red Faction: Guerrilla?
Luke: No, there is definitely only one ending for Red Faction: Guerrilla.
GA: How do you feel the idea of guerrilla tactics affects multiplayer? Or does it? How do you approach designing it?
Luke: Well it not only affects multiplayer, it affects single-player in terms of how we balance the game. As you get toward the middle of the game, we start to make it a little bit harder than you might expect to make sure that you're using guerrilla tactics. You get to learn the game and you get to spread out and see how it becomes this open world and then we start to say, "OK now you need to learn to use guerrilla tactics." You need to make sure you're using these hit-and-run tactics because if you don't, if you just charge in there with your vehicle, you're going to end up dying all the time. We force the player to use new tactics and new ways of using destruction and find new ways to think like a guerrilla. It definitely applies a lot in single-player but in multiplayer it's really about teamwork more or less and using the backpacks. Guerrilla tactics come into play in certain modes like Siege, where you just want to get in there, hit the building really fast and get out so you can take it out before they can repair it. So it does come into play in multiplayer but multiplayer does have a faster pace in general so it's not quite as geared toward the guerrilla tactics.
GA: Do the backpacks and weapons in multiplayer always spawn in the same places?
Luke: They do. By default, the weapons always spawn in the same spot. You can change how fast they respawn or if they spawn at all. For the backpacks, you can actually make them shuffle around or turn them off completely. You can customize the game to play the way you want. If you want a pure shooter, you can just turn off all the backpacks and just play with the weapons. It creates a new feel for the game where you're like, "I really have to think about which weapon I'm using and how to use destruction without having all these extra boosts."
GA: You were talking about a lot of unlockables. What kind of things will the player be able to unlock? I saw there were unlockable characters in the multi-player. Are you unlocking things in both single- and multiplayer?
Luke: For single-player we have only our upgrade system for unlocking stuff and then we have other little things that unlock but the unlocks and upgrades are totally separate. The single- and multiplayer unlocks are separate. We do have an achievement that ties the two together but that's for people who've finished the game playing with another person who's finished the game online. The [experience points] unlocks for multiplayer include characters, sledgehammers, including the ostrich hammer...the public was much more excited about that then we expected. We have new badges, we have [experience points] bonus events that let you gain [experience points] faster. We also have playlists and maybe one or two other ones I can't remember off the top of my head. We have a lot of unlocks but they won't unbalance the game. A new player coming in will still be able to compete with someone who's unlocked everything.
GA: What kinds of things do you envision for downloadable content?
Luke: I envision expanding all parts of the game. We think all parts of the game are very important. We're surprised how positive the reception has been to Wrecking Crew and it's very easy to support that, so we're going to continue to support every part of the game: single-player, multiplayer and Wrecking Crew. That's all we're saying for now. I love working on the game and I don't want to stop so I hope everybody buys the downloadable content.
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