THE MAKING OF RED FACTION
RED FACTION BROKE NEW GROUND BY ACCOMPLISHING SOMETHING VIDEOGAMES STILL STRUGGLE TO ACHIEVE TODAY: MEANINGFUL VIDEOGAME DESTRUCTION. RETRO GAMER SPEAKS TO LEAD DESIGNER ALAN LAWRANCE ON THE STRUGGLES AND TRIUMPHS OF DEVELOPING THE GAME’S REVOLUTIONARY GEO-MOD ENGINE
When you think of videogame destruction, Red Faction most likely comes to mind. Its inception came from Parallax Studio, now Volition, and its desire to create a fourth entry in its Descent series, “We felt making another Descent sequel just made sense. One of the key ideas we had was a destructible environment. That was a core idea from the get-go,” comments Red Faction’s lead designer, Alan Lawrance. While past games had allowed for limited pre-scripted alterations, or special triggered areas that would then add or remove certain geometry, Alan and his team sought to allow players to alter any level at any time. “We knew that destructible environments was a tall order because games hadn’t done it before.” This was a watershed moment for game development – fully destructible, unscripted level alteration far beyond the likes of Ghen War, Blood II and Duke Nukem 3D. The team’s ambition meant Red Faction would become a benchmark for videogame destruction in the years to follow.
During Red Faction’s initial development, it became clear to the team that Descent’s thirdperson perspective and jetpack controls were on their way out, and a new style was beginning to dominate the industry. “Around that time, FPS games were becoming more and more popular – people weren’t playing with joysticks like Descent had, they were using a keyboard and mouse, explains Alan.” The team embraced the new form and Red Faction became Volition’s first-ever first-person shooter, joining the likes of Alien: Resurrection and Halo: Combat Evolved by becoming one of the first console FPS games to use dual analogue sticks.
Some of Descent 4’s story elements were transferred over to Red Faction, including the main character of Parker and the setting on
Mars – Red Faction’s basic plot sees Parker join the miner revolution against the exploitative Ultor Corporation, leading the charge in their endeavour to escape to a better life. Although this linear, story-driven FPS with an emphasis on destruction was new territory for the team, they were efficient in ensuring that building Red Faction’s engine didn’t begin from square one, “We had developed a game called
Freespace, a space sim that’s nothing like an FPS, but when you develop a game with a custom engine, there are a lot of components that can be reused no matter what,” says Alan. Influences from Freespace can be best seen in Red Faction’s moments of vehicular-focused level design and combat, such as fighting other combat submarines to reach an underwater laboratory.
Red Faction is built on the Geo-mod engine, short for geometry modification, which allows the player to make real-time alterations to most of the game’s terrain – if there’s a wall, you can make a hole and shoot through it; if a car is passing over a bridge, you can shoot out its road and cause it to fall. It invited a level of player interactivity that hadn’t really been seen before in videogames, and was a remarkably complicated process, “It was what we called a real-time subtractive Boolean – we’d take a Geo-mod shape, like the explosion that’s intersected with the world itself,” Alan says. “There’s a whole lot of math that goes on and finding out where the faces intersect with the shape, and then which faces should be removed, which faces should be reconstructed to accept the mesh. And from that, you have a hole.” The engine’s mathematics took around four months, and was headed up by programmer John Slagle – once he had shown the team that such an engine was possible to integrate into a videogame world, the team got to work with designing around it.
However, when you make a hole in the wall in
Red Faction, you’re not just affecting the terrain – you’re affecting fundamental layers of the level’s design. “There’s a big ripple effect that affects more than just the geometry – it affects AI, collision, actual visual effects and many other systems in the game.” Alan concedes that perhaps the team didn’t fully grasp the scope that a singular Geo-mod alteration could have on
“WE KNEW THAT DESTRUCTIBLE ENVIRONMENTS WERE A TALL ORDER BECAUSE GAMES HADN’T DONE IT BEFORE”
an entire level. “It caught us a little off guard,” he admits. Take, for example, the seemingly simple action of rocketing a wall to create a hole in it, “An AI then has to adjust its pathfinding, or suddenly the player will have to be able to shoot through it, and then there’s also unexpected problems like AI getting stuck in a hole,” Alan explains. Red Faction’s world was rendered on a portal-based engine – essentially seeing through doors – so the game didn’t need to render the entire level at once, thereby reducing memory usage. However, a new hole is also suddenly a new, dynamic portal; something the game needs to both recognise and set up instantaneously.
“It’s a real load of math and computation to do this, and that was especially tough on the PS2 because you’re talking about a system with a hard limit of memory,” says Alan.
As the team realised early on, making your entire game world destructible isn’t the most feasible of objectives, especially when you’re developing a linear story-driven game, “If you let the player go anywhere at any time in any direction, that’d be a different kind of game, more like a sandbox than a linear FPS,” Alan continues. Initially, every area in Red Faction was destructible by default, with designers like Alan manually defining certain areas as indestructible in order to ensure players could progress unimpeded. Although they knew that having an entire world that could be altered at any moment would be revolutionary, “The idea was something we struggled with a lot, because the more destruction you allow, the more scripting complications you created by ensuring a player follows a linear path.” What the team compromised on was a sense of meaningful destruction – playerbased alterations would therefore be predicated by a reason: a hole in the wall could surprise a group of soldiers, or a gap across a bridge can prevent enemies from reaching you. They had blended destruction into Red Faction’s game mechanics and overarching narrative, ensuring it never became a momentary gimmick.
Red Faction would go on to become a runaway hit, selling over one million copies within a year – the Geo-mod technology was lauded as a groundbreaking innovation in videogame development, championing Red Faction as a technical marvel. So, with so many classic titles receiving celebratory remasters and franchise-restarting reboots; why hasn’t the original Red Faction received similar treatment? “I think it would be hard to be rebooted because I think the techniques of destruction have moved on from the Geo-mod concept,” says Alan. “Just look at Red Faction: Guerrilla – it didn’t use Geo-mod. It used what I’d call precomputed destruction.” Guerrilla’s
engine focused instead on ragdoll physics simulation, with a ‘shardifying’ process – it was a completely different direction for Red Faction’s
destruction. “It didn’t evolve from a Red Faction
engine – it was actually a different game that never saw the light of day at Volition,” continues Alan. “They felt that the visual of a building collapsing with thousands of debris pieces would be more satisfying than making holes in the walls. But actually, a lot of people really enjoyed doing just that – making holes in the walls.”
One of the reasons that Alan believes the Red Faction franchise saw stagnation in the years following was down to the change in creative direction after Red Faction 2 – “I think they should’ve doubled down on what made Red Faction so groundbreaking, rather than going forward in a different direction. Guerrilla and Armageddon weren’t even first person, so at that point, is it really even a Red Faction game without the notion of destruction?” he ponders. Red Faction: Armageddon’s disappointing loss led to THQ outright cancelling the Red Faction franchise in 2011. Since then the once iconic, groundbreaking title has laid dormant, with only a digital re-release of the original and a remaster of Red Faction: Guerrilla by new owners THQ Nordic in 2018 giving any indication that there still might be some interest in continuing the series.
At the time, Red Faction’s developers seemed incredibly excited about Geo-mod’s potential future in not just their own franchise, but its effects on the industry as a whole – and yet, despite the titles of ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘revolutionary’, nothing happened. Ultimately, that may be because of the very challenge Alan faced when designing Red Faction, “How do you marry gameplay concepts with destruction and have them complement one another?” Instead, developers seemed to pivot away from focusing on experimental new gameplay mechanics, and an obsession with visuals seemed to take over. “I think in some ways, it’s easier to make the game pretty than to make it fun. So that’s where visuals get more value or perceived importance, and so development effort often goes toward that – which I think is backwards. Gameplay should always come first.” It’s difficult for franchises like Red Faction to be resurrected in the current state of the industry, where epic, expansive open worlds that look photorealistic are touted as the pinnacle of videogame development – and yet, these worlds struggle to innovate on 21-year-old ideas.
However, that isn’t to say games have completely abandoned meaningful destruction – titles like Minecraft and Teardown are great examples that Alan himself mentioned as reminding him of the ideas they tinkered with in Red Faction. “I think the idea of destruction in gameplay is still out there – no one did anything with what Red Faction brought to the table for a long, long time but now we’re starting to see these ideas emerge again.”
It’s clear that Red Faction has left a strong legacy within the videogame industry both playerside and developer-side – it remains one of the shining examples of how marrying innovative game design and story can work to push the boundaries of development in the pursuit of something memorable. “I think the Geo-mod engine was definitely groundbreaking technology – » [PC] it created “It’s over Takeda, something I have the high that ground!” was challengingly new and original. I think when people think of destruction in games, Red Faction comes to a lot of people’s minds, so I think it has a legacy of being of the first videogames to allow destruction in a meaningful way.” But for Alan, what’s truly meaningful to him is the impact it left on those that played it, “It’s just amazing to hear from people on Twitter, Red Faction subreddits and Discord mentioning they played it as a kid, and that they still remember it today. It’s one of the reasons why I keep doing what I do, because I know there’s people out there who see my work, and it means something to them.”
“IS IT EVEN REALLY A RED FACTION GAME WITHOUT THE NOTION OF DESTRUCTION?”