Red Faction: Guerrilla isn't just a great game. It's also a turning point, according to James Hague, the game's designer at Volition.

It's kind of like before 3D graphics really took off. You had these games with scaled sprites and all these fake 3D tricks, and everybody just thought of that as 3D graphics. But once true 3D came along, all of a sudden it became obvious that those other methods were just tricks. [Red Faction: Guerrilla] is going to do that. People may not notice it right away. They may play Red Faction and then play some other games, and then go back to Red Faction and then go back to other games, but at some point, they're going to realize that other games might be cool, but it's not destruction.

But Red Faction: Guerrilla wasn't always like this. In fact, until a few years ago, the developers at Volition had a completely different take on the physics of destruction. In my discussion with Hague, he explains the shift half way through the development process. He also reveals where to find singularity bombs, how much shorter the nano rifle could have been, how come you can't play co-op, and why on earth* a sledgehammer belongs in a shooter.

After the jump, read my interview with Mr. Hague.

* Well, Mars.

Tom Chick: How much overlap is there between you guys on Red Faction and the folks who just finished Saints Row 2?

James Hague: Both the Saints Row games and Red Faction were in development for a pretty long time. They were mostly separate teams. Red Faction has been going since 2004 and Saints Row 1 has been going since about 2004 and then they turned into Saints Row 2. There was a little bit of sharing. But the core teams were pretty separate.

TC: As a huge fan of Saints Row and now Red Faction Guerrilla, I see a lot of continuity between the games in terms of Volition offering a very generous and enthusiastic sandbox experience. Is this just something Volition does well? How does that turn out so well in both games?

JH: At the high level, it was a studio choice about five years ago that we were going to focus on open world games, period. That is it. In fact, we did a Punisher game at one point, and after that was over, THQ said, "You're not going to do any more games like that. We just want you to do open world." So that's what we've been focusing on. And obviously, we're all in the same building and we all talk. Some people went back and forth. The writer for Red Faction Guerrilla has previously done some writing for Saints Row 2. But our overall philosophy is that we're not going to win in terms of making million dollar cut scenes. It just seems like a waste of our time. We're not a giant company with ten thousand people slaving away trying to make the best non-interactive cut scenes ever. Our focus is gameplay. We want to give the player massive freedom. That was the whole goal of Saints Row 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla. We want to let the player play however they want. We don't want to put artificial restrictions on them. We don't want them to have to try to figure out what the designers were thinking. We just want them to play.

TC: In open world games, you've got something like Grand Theft Auto where they seem to want to really tell a story. They're very pre-occupied, for better or worse, with a narrative. But on the other hand, you've got something like Crackdown where they kind of don't even really try to tell you a story and they just give you loosely connected set pieces in a sandbox. Somewhere in between is you guys' approach. What's Volition's philosophy on balancing that massive freedom you talked about and the desire some players might have for a story?

JH: Gameplay is always going to win. If you had to choose between story and raw gameplay, it's always going to be gameplay. But I recognize that story is very important. People want a believable world. They want characters they can identify with. But if you go down that path too much, you start becoming a Hollywood director and you're not making something interactive. Trying to balance those two is very difficult. So for Red Faction, our goal was to keep things as open and free-form as possible. Then we started thinking about weaving a story into that. But we knew up front we weren't going to be able to tell a detailed linear story. We knew if we did that, it would stomp all over the gameplay.

TC: Specifically about Red Faction, on one hand you have a sci-fi setting that gives you license to play in a way that you can't in a real world city, in a real world setting. But on the other hand, you've got what some folks might think of as a limited situation, a near-future, terraformed mining colony. Was this setting a challenge for you guys or more of a blessing? Is Red Faction's setting a liability or an asset?

JH: It was definitely an asset. If you go too far down the road of science fiction, you can make the mistake of using it as the equivalent of magic. Here's all this stuff that we don't explain and we're going to have all these wacky weapons and all these wacky alien races and we're going to do all this crazy stuff without explaining how it works. But for Red Faction, we wanted to keep things more grounded in reality. We wanted things to be very physical. That's why we have the sledgehammer. It's very physical. You can relate to it. We wanted the Earth Defense Force to have guns that you can relate to, at least early in the game. Once you get further, things start getting a little more out there. But trying to keep things grounded in reality really helps. It also cuts down on the amount of exposition we have to do. We don't have to explain what a sledgehammer is. Everybody already knows. But some crazy other thing that destroys buildings would take more time, to get people used to it.

TC: Destroying buildings is a huge bullet point for the game, of course. This is obviously something you've all worked very hard to do, and it's something you should be very proud of. But one of the things that most surprises me is how seamlessly it fits into the world rather than feeling like a gimmick, like a bullet point for the back of the box. A lot of times, a feature this new, this highly promoted, would stand out like a sore thumb. I'm amazed that's not the case in Red Faction Guerrilla. The destruction feels so natural. Is that something that happened of its own accord, or was it a struggle to make it that way?

JH: We've been in development with this game since 2004. It's a ridiculously long time. Going back and thinking where I was in 2004, I can't believe that we're done with this game. That's a long period of time. And for the first few years of the project, we were focused on destruction as a gameplay mechanic. Everything in the whole game was based on destruction. When we started talking about combat, about missions, the first thing on the table was how to make it all revolve around destruction. So we'd be thinking about things like if you're fighting inside a building, you can shoot air conditioners that are hanging over people's heads, and it would fall of them. That sort of thing. But after a while, we realized we were forcing it too much. We were thinking of destruction as the primary game mechanic. And at some point, we backed off and decided what we really needed to be doing was just making a really good game, and then take advantage of what destruction gives us. So we'll have an extremely interactive world that lets the player do all sorts of stuff they can't do in other games, but the design team is not going to be fixated on destruction. Once we decided that, everything got a lot easier. We could have a mission where the mission is not necessarily to go blow up this building or destroy this tower. But the destruction makes it play differently every time. It gives you a lot of options for how you approach a mission. And the accidental stuff spices it up. You miss the turn and your vehicle tears through a building.

TC: As a design team, was that a hard adjustment to make? To let an enormously complicated feature fade into the background.

JH: I wouldn't say it faded into the background. We just stopped trying to force it. We bring in people all the time to play the game. Local college students and so on. We've been doing that for well over a year. And when people play, they don't talk about the "destruction". They talk about the "interactivity". They think of a game where you press something and it blows up. They call that destruction. And they call Red Faction Guerrilla's world "interactive". We weren't really thinking of it that way when we were designing, but that's a pretty good encapsulation of the philosophy.

TC: Do you guys find that it messes up how you look at other games? For me, after just a couple of weeks of playing Red Faction, it's weird seeing games that don't have that destruction, that interactivity. I can't imagine what it must be like for you guys having worked on the game for years. I shoot a rocket at a wall now and I expect the wall to break.

JH: I can't even do it anymore. There are so many games I can't even play now. Games where you shoot a rocket at a wall and it doesn't even scratch the paint. But even games where they have special effect destruction, where maybe you call in an air strike and it blows up a factory, but it blows up the same every time. It might as well be a cut scene. I just tune that out. That doesn't even count anymore. I've gotten very sensitive to games that have so-called destruction, but the destruction is irrelevant to the gameplay. I have a lot of trouble with that.

TC: Now this is very hypothetical, but what effect do you think Red Faction Guerrilla will have on other developers, on videogaming in general?

JH: I think it's going to get players noticing when something is fake. It's kind of like before 3D graphics really took off. You had these games with scaled sprites and all these fake 3D tricks, and everybody just thought of that as 3D graphics. But once true 3D came along, all of a sudden it became obvious that those other methods were just tricks. RFG is going to do that. People may not notice it right away. They may play Red Faction and then play some other games, and then go back to Red Faction and then go back to other games, but at some point, they're going to realize that other games might be cool, but it's not destruction.

TC: I want to throw at you a couple of things about the design that I really admire, and I'd like to know a bit about how they came about. One of my favorite things about this world you've created, this mining colony on Mars, is the balance and the differences between the three factions: the military, the miners, and the marauders. This is expressed in many ways, from their weapon to their vehicles to how and whether you end up fighting them. Tell me how these three groups came about.

JH: Well, in Red Faction 1, you were a miner. That really went over well. So for the guerrilla side, we really wanted that underdog feel. We wanted you to have hacked together weapons and garbage trucks and that little supply vehicle you see in Parker. We wanted you using home-made stuff that didn't feel like standard weapons of war. To make the EDF seem more menacing and professional, they've obviously got to have the slick stuff. The mass-produced weapons, the mass-produced vehicles. That was the big interplay. One side is desperate and improvised. The other side is very slick, very professional. And then somewhere in the middle of the project, well, we kept talking about having nomadic tribes. It made sense for them to have a more primitive feel. You hear them howling out in the Badlands. They have weapons that are a lot more brutal than the other sides. There was no magic to how the marauders fit in, other than we wanted a contrast. But in terms of the guerrillas, the Red Faction itself, we always wanted them to be a group you could relate to. I don't think people relate to mercenaries or someone in an army. The idea here was "what if your town got attacked?" How would you fight back?

TC: The word "insurgent" occurs a couple of times, but it's never used prominently. Was there ever any intentional political message or is all of that just accidental?

JH: It was accidental. The fact that you're blowing up stuff naturally has some people thinking there's some modern day message, but we weren't thinking of that at all. We just wanted players to think about what it would be like to have a small band of people fighting against a much larger force and having to use unconventional tactics.

TC: Was there ever a push to go with a more political message or is that something you guys actively wanted to avoid? It's certainly wide open for the opportunity.

JH: Not really. There wasn't a conscious decision to avoid it, but there wasn't a push either.

TC: Going back to the three factions again, I want to tell you about one of my favorite touches. There's an EDF outpost in the Badlands. It's a sort of walled fort, a frontier outpost. If you attack it, a lot of times the marauders will join in, or maybe they're already there when you show up. You end up with these epic three-way battles. Obviously, it was built intentionally that way. You knew some of us would find it and be really delighted at how it expresses the world. However, it's completely optional. You can get through the missions and never see that outpost. Is it hard to build a world with these touches when you know many players will miss them?

JH: We made a decision that we weren't going to hold people's hands. We weren't going to force you to do this raid, then attack this convoy, then attack this base. We didn't want to do that. In fact, in Dust, there's 380 control points that you need to reduce [to advance the storyline]. But there's almost a thousand control points in Dust. You could play through Dust twice and still not see all of it. From one point of view, it's hard to make content that someone may never see. But it give you that massive freedom. We've got people in the community forums saying "Hey, I went to that outpost in the Badlands and the marauders attacked" and other people say, "What are you talking about? I finished the game and I never saw that". It's all part of the overall philosophy of not forcing anything on you. As designers, it's really hard. I think it's possible to beat Dust without attacking the Dust Town Hall. And that's one of the coolest things in Dust. But it's our overall philosophy that we want the players - not us - to control the experience.

TC: There are a couple of other touches like this. Some of the more spectacular weapons are almost hidden. In fact, I don't think I ever used a singularity bomb in my first play-through. Similarly, the MOABs, the Mothers of all Bombs, someone could play through and never actually get his hands on one of those. What made you decide to remove some weapons from the normal progression and almost hide them as Easter Eggs?

JH: The MOAB, I wouldn't call it an Easter Egg so much as an extremely elaborate feature that we're not pointing fingers at explicitly. There is a radio tag almost at the start of the game. If you zoom the minimap out from the Parker safe house, you'll see the green dot for the radio tag.

TC: When you find your first radio tag, it does give you a message that if you find more, you'll get something cool.

JH: And the guerrilla handbook tells you right up front. But it's part of doing an open world. You have a lot of different styles of players. Some people just want to play the missions and be done with it. Some people want to exploit the game. Some people don't want to do missions, they just want to have fun. RFG is great for that. They can set up a roadblock and just blow everything that comes along. Just go nuts until you get a huge pile of fifty vehicles. Other people really want to get into the world and explore. The radio tags for the MOABs were for them. We wanted something in the world that really encourages exploration. Singularity bombs is sort of the same thing. I guess it is more an Easter Egg. There's a lot of them out there, though. I'm sure we'll see maps online soon.

TC: So there are specific places where they spawn? I didn't realize that.

JH: Yes.

TC: I've seen the enemies use them. That was my first exposure to them. I'm in a battle and suddenly there's some kind of weird black hole or gravity well and I'm all, "What is that?"

JH: It's an EDF weapon. Some of the places they're found are EDF areas. I believe there's one in the EDF base in the Badlands. But there are others that the guerrillas stole and stashed away. You'll find them in colonist buildings. It's very difficult to build a world. We spent years building this world. It's gigantic. It's bigger than Saints Row 2 in terms of area. So if we're going to go to all that trouble to build a big world, we want to put enough stuff in there to make it worthwhile. There are some spots out in the Badlands, for instance, with, well, I guess you'd say interesting Easter Eggs. The singularity bombs are like that. There's also an upgrade that hints at the singularity bombs even if you haven't found any.

TC: Is that the upgrade that increase the number of bombs you find in a singularity bomb stash?

JH: That's the Quantum Multiplier. That's some people's introduction to them. They go, "What? Singularity bombs? I don't know what that is."

TC: Tell me about the nano rifle, which is one of my new favorite guns of all time. It fits so well with the destruction system, and it's such a cool effect. How did that evolve?

JH: There was a definite nanotechnology thread in Red Faction 1, and especially in Red Faction 2. And because this is the next game in the series, we knew early on we wanted to do something with nanotechnology. We just weren't sure what. One of the early weapon prototypes was a nano pistol and at some point it turned into the nano rifle. Once we got it prototyped and we saw how cool it was, it integrated itself into the storyline more than we intended. It was just so amazing, and it had such a connection to the previous Red Faction games, so we decided to tie it into the plot a lot more.

TC: I really like how that worked out. In a way, the plot is a typical McGuffin chase. The bad guys and the good guys are after some item, a McGuffin, but in this case it's something that's actually very useful in the game. You're keenly aware of why the bad guys want it rather than simply being told the bad guys want it. That's a great touch. So one feature that a lot of Saints Row 2 fans are keenly aware is missing is that there's no cooperative multiplayer. Was that a networking problem, or a factor of resources, or scheduling? Why can't me and a friend play through Red Faction Guerrilla together?

JH: It was a scheduling and technical issue. We are maxxing out the console systems right now. I mean real bad. We have a dedicated guy optimizing for the Playstation 3 and we have a dedicated person optimizing for the 360. We've got those consoles running just about flat-out all the time. We've got physics going every which way. We've got an incredible load on the rendering because as buildings get smashed and broken up, you're seeing more and more stuff in the world. So if we said "let's do co-op" on top of that, you'd still be waiting for the game. It'd probably be a couple of years. The decision was that Saints Row 2 is the co-op game.

TC: The kernel of the multiplayer for Red Faction is the interplay of weapons and backpacks. How did that come about?

JH: We'd always been planning for multiplayer. You can go online and find people still playing Red Faction 1. It's held up really well. Just taking a mode like capture-the-flag and saying "now you can destroy the walls of the enemy base" just totally revitalizes how those games are played. So we knew because of the history of the Red Faction series that multiplayer was going to be a really big deal for us. Backpacks came up part way through development and again, it was because we wanted to have something physical that people could relate to. I know the backpacks look kind of outrageous but we didn't want to have magic orbs or power-ups. So we use the concept that you're physically wearing it on your back. You pick it up from an actual rack in the world. It was in line with keeping the game grounded in the physical.

TC: Much more tangible than selecting a class.

JH: Yes, we were trying to get away from classes. It's more like you pick up your class while you're playing. We tried to keep the backpacks from being not too outrageous, too. We wanted them to have physical tangible effects. Like the rhino doesn't just cause a beam to come out and destroy the wall. Instead, you actually crash through the wall yourself.

TC: How far out is downloadable content?

JH: We're working on it, but that's all I can talk about.

TC: Were there any weapons that didn't make the cut that we might see later?

JH: We prototyped a lot of different weapons, but I don't know if we'll bring any of them back.

TC: James, that's all I've got. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. I just want to say that I'm so tickled with the game and I'm so happy with how it turned out. You guys should be very proud of what you've done.

JH: Thanks. I'm glad you're playing it.