Red Faction Guerilla: Gameplay Preview & Interview at NY Comic Con

We searched far and wide for a video game that would be the undisputed eye-catcher of NY Comic Con 2009, and though the weekend is young, I think we found it.

Red Faction Guerilla from THQ delivers a non-stop smoke-em-up-multiplayer blast fest. This game is just that serious. Red Faction is a third person shooter that has a multiplayer component that will surely dominate your summer Playstation Online and Xbox Live
fantasies. It comes bundled with 20 multiplayer maps, allowing up to 16 players to go duke it out at a time.

Just don’t compare it to Halo. After four plus years of development, and a team that grew from twelve to a hundred, Red Faction seeks to leave games like Halo, Call of Duty and Gears of War in the museum of ancient history. Red Faction comes with a custom physics engine that raises the bar on destruction on shooter games, regardless of first or third person perspective.

What does that mean?

Jeff Carroll from Volition Inc, the development company behind Red Faction Guerilla, gave us a few answers.

“We started with the Havok engine, but that only handles the collision that you see. Everything else is a custom physics engine: all of the stress system, all of the construction that you see that breaks apart. It’s mostly a custom system.”

“In destruction it blows any game out there away. I challenge any game to have this level of destruction right now, especially in multiplayer. In multiplayer Red Faction gives you something that Halo and Gears of War just dont have. As you play, the whole world is modified. The level changes as the multiplayer game progresses, so the strategy and dynamics change as well.”

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

“In single player, we’ve got a much different game than Halo and Gears of War because of the open world aspect of it. There’s a lot more strategic components to it. Essentially, the replayability lies in its non-deterministic physics system. So, every time you play Red Faction, it will play out differently. Real world simulation. Real world reaction. Buildings will fall in different ways based on where you impact them — with an explosive or a hammer or a vehicle. And, that can change the dynamics of the mission very quickly.”

As for cooperative online play, we won’t be seeing that in this release. Carroll said, “We’re pushing the technology hard, so we didn’t include cooperative.”

Carroll is the producer handling the multiplayer component and has been working on the single player since the beginning. The team began with only twelve to twenty ppl during the initial two years of development, then ramped up to a hundred for quality insurance.

Red Faction Guerrilla by THQ (Xbox 360):

Red Faction Guerrilla by THQ (PLAYSTATION 3):

Red Faction Guerilla hits the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in June 2009.