Volition's Greene: Reining In Red Faction Made It More Ambitious

Author: by Staff

Chad Greene, art director for Volition's Red Faction: Armageddon, tells Gamasutra that moving from an open world to a level-based structure actually made the series' famous destructibility more difficult. When asked if the new structure for Red Faction: Armageddon made it less ambitious than the open world Red Faction: Guerrilla, Green responded "it's almost the opposite." Said Greene, "We actually said, 'How can we improve destruction and destructibility in the world?' And we said, 'What if we went underground and we brought everything in tighter with more density and more shards of buildings, more destruction?' It gives us the ability to have 360-degree placement destruction." He also reveals that another reason for enriching the game's story and thus making it more linear was due to a desire to create a transmedia property. Earlier this year, THQ and the Syfy network announced that they are working together on a Red Faction film. "We've really started to think about story as being really important -- not that we've never thought about story -- but this title from the beginning was all about the story," Greene told Gamasutra. "There's going to be a live action movie that ties together Guerilla and Armageddon in the timeframe between. Having that storyline and being immersive, you feel for it, you want to help the people out, you want to be the character Darius, and it's important." The full interview with Greene, which delves into greater depth on the process by which the team made decisions that impacted the core gameplay of the latest Red Faction title, is now live on Gamasutra.