Xbox 360 maxed out by Red Faction: Guerrilla

Mike Bantick
Sunday, 04 January 2009 08:39

Your IT - Entertainment

Call it bad programming, or good hype building, Rick White, producer of the upcoming Red Faction:  Guerrilla believes developers have reached the hardware limits of the Xbox 360 gaming console.

In an interview with gameplayer, Volition producer Rick White has spoken about the history and inspiration for the upcoming Red Faction: Guerrilla.

During the discussion, White makes comment about how busy the game will be in terms of polygons and processing, suggesting that the Volition programmers have pushed the Xbox 360 console to its hardware limits.

“Yeah, we’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down. “   White said.  “We evaluate every little change in the game, and then we run our tools on it to make sure it isn’t going to break the game and then we move forward, so it really is about pushing the engine as far as we can, and pushing the hardware as far as we can, and then looking at what is the next set of hardware that’s going to come out. Where can we take it then? You know we’re already thinking about if we had XYZ X number of years from now, what would we do with our engine? “

So is this a limitation of the hardware or the Red Faction engine?  White believes new hardware will be needed to realise the vision of developers in the near future.

According to White; “I think as the consoles grow, be it the 720 or whatever, it’s going to increase our ability to deliver a better looking game with more destruction, or more dense environments. I mean, one thing we have now, because we’re throwing so many polys around we’re not as dense as Saints Row 2. One thing that you could see with a more powerful console with more dense environments.”

The original Red Faction released in 2001 told the story of life in a terra-formed Mars environment during a worker revolution.

The game featured technology known as geo-mod, enabling the first person shooter to show off destructible environments for the first time in the genre.  There was a follow up Red Faction II game with the forthcoming Guerrilla being third offering of the franchise.

Unlike the first two however, Red Faction Guerrilla will be played from a third person perspective with a more open world style.

The games release should be early this year on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC