Volition: Destruction is painful, frustrating and expensive

Other developers tend to shy away from designing destrucible environments because ‘it’s expensive, it’s painful and it’s frustrating’.
Apparently, it takes ten-times the memory requirements to build destructable environments as it does ‘stable’ ones. That’s according to Red Faction: Armageddon’s Associate Producer Dan Sutton, who spoke to IncGamers about the difficulties of allowing players to tear down in-game structures.
“The biggest challenge is just building the game in general because it costs so much more to build these destructible buildings,” said Sutton. “It takes roughly ten-times the amount of memory that it would take to build a stable building, for example.”
When quizzed about why so few developers attempt to provide such environments for players, Sutton said:
“…it’s expensive, it’s painful and it’s frustrating to get that system going. But, once you have it it’s one of the most satisfying things you can have because I think most gamers appreciate that we’ve got something there that you don’t see in other games.”
Look out for our full interview with Dan Sutton later this week.