14 DAY TRIAL // The team at Volition who is working on Saints Row 4 says that it is impossible to create a game experience with the open world structure and all the possibilities of the Geo-Mod at the same time using the current generation of home consoles.
Jim Boone, a producer working on the game, tells VG247 that, “it’s literally impossible to apply that tech in the same way that we’ve done it to that kind of density that you would expect from a Saints Row game.”
“We talked about it a lot like, ‘Is there something we’re just missing? Is there some other way of doing it?’ and there’s just no way we’d be able to do it in the way that we’d want to,” he continued.
Geo-Mod is used by titles in the Red Faction series in order to allow players to destroy buildings dynamically, using the feature during battles in order to take out enemies or modify the battlefield.
Guerrilla and Armageddon could only accomplish this by reducing the density of buildings, which is impossible for Saints Row, a series that is set mostly in a dense urban landscape.
Volition is at the moment focused on putting the finishing touches on the most recent game in the series.
But Boone does believe that the power of the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony could allow developers to mix fully destructible building with urban areas.
He adds, “I suspect it probably would but I’m not certain – but here’s the issue: we would still have to make compromises to the graphic fidelity by still sharding it up and making it so they can break apart and all these pieces.”
Full destruction is only attractive to the Volition team as long as they have to make no compromises to the overall graphics quality of the title they are working on.
Saints Row 4 will be out on August 20 in North America and three days later in Europe on the PC and current-gen consoles.