Red Faction: Armageddon dev explains lack of competitive multiplayer

Posted May 27, 2011 by James Pickard in News.

Further to yesterday’s comments on how he would like to incorporate construction into Red Faction, Volition’s David Abzug also explained to BeefJack why Red Faction: Armageddon has dropped competitive multiplayer in favour of purely co-operative modes.

“We went with a co-op multiplayer mode because we thought it worked better for our game [with] the Nano Forge abilities,” he said.

In the game the Nano Forge grants you a host of special powers, both offensive and defensive, in addition to a repair function to restore destroyed structures to their original form. David went on to explain:

“We have Nano Forge abilities that give different powers, for example, Impact – the first one you get in the game – that knocks things flying and blows holes in walls. Later on you get other abilities: Shockwave knocks your enemies up in the air and suspends them in stasis for a few seconds; Shell, puts a forcefield around you and blocks all incoming damage.”

The diversity between these abilities and myriad of potential combinations is what David feels encouraged Volition to focus on co-operative play, as he demonstrates by assigning them to a group.

“Now picture that in a multiplayer game where you take Shell so you’re the one we all gather around so you can pop it up when we need it. I take Shockwave to act as crowd control for the group. You take Commando so your weapons do more damage and you take Impact to knock things flying when they get too close. It makes it better to work together as a team.”

Red Faction: Armageddon’s horde style co-op modes do promote this mentality as you fight to survive against waves of invading aliens and defend structures from incoming assaults. As disheartening as it may be, a competitive mode could be quite chaotic with all those abilities firing off at once and a nightmare to balance correctly, so perhaps sticking to co-op was a wise decision.

It’s not long now until Red Faction: Armageddon is released on 7th June in the US and 10th in the UK, for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Our full review of the game will be available soon.

Tagged as Red Faction: Armageddon, THQ, Volition