Why are games with destructible environments so rare?

[Jazz_]

I don't know anything about developing games but I assume that it must be something that it's very challenging from a programming standpoint? In most games the world is just there for ''scenery'', you can't really interact with it in meaningful ways, I remember my surprise when in Crysis I crashed my jeep against a tree, I got out of the jeep but right after the tree fell down and killed me, I was like ''holy shit, that was kinda neat, physics!''. Having the ability to manipulate the environment would also make for some emergent gameplay situations or creative ways to whack your enemies. Aand being able to burn forests down in some open world hiking simulator would be my gaming dream.

 

[spectre]

Yep, in a nutshell, it's just a lot of work, and some might say the gain is very little, unless the game is built around it or acts as a demo to show off technology (hello, crysis).
It's also puts additional strain on the engine and hardware, not to mention debugging the whole thing in the end.

Static models are much less work, you make them, set the lighting, and you have yourself a complete, rendered scene. When you start tearing them up, you suddenly need to calculate new lights and shadows as the destruction progresses, get new assets to reflect the devastation (holes, debris, chunks). Not to mention, coding all the physics to make it all fall apart in a believable manner.
There are also other things, like teaching the AI to cope with changing environment (I am not necessarily saying: use it in a meaningful way, basic stuff like making sure that it doesn't go tits up when a wall it wanted to use is no longer there - it's so much simpler with static environments).

The manpower needed is probably beyond the reach of indie developers, unless we're talking autistic savant level of committment. Though in my experience, guys capable of writing such a game engine would rather put in on sale than make their own games.
Possibly current AAA titles would have the means to make such systems more popular, but AAA development is very risk adverse and would rather blow that money on marketing, voice actors or any such shit.
Not to mention, your average console and at home calculator PC wouldn't handle a complex destructible engine, and that's plenty of lost sales, my good man.

 

[octavius]

Sadly it takes less time and resources to make a linear interactive movie and get Patrick Stewart to do the voice acting.

 

[adrix89]

God! I haven't played a tactical blowing things up simulator since Silent Storm. I just wanted that game to have proper modding support so that I had and endless supply of missions to play.

 

[laclongquan]

Try UFO Afterlight and UFO Aftershock, IT's not terrain destructible but it's tactical squad TBS so~

 

[Seethe]

I wish all games had the physics of Red Faction: Guerilla

 

[adrix89]

Try UFO Afterlight and UFO Aftershock, IT's not terrain destructible but it's tactical squad TBS so~

The destruction is the point. Blowing a whole building down or gunning down enemies through walls with a machine gun is all the fun.

I wish all games had the physics of Red Faction: Guerilla

I would be satisfied a few. Come on dammit its been years!
Learn something from Michael Bay! Explosions are cool! Explosions are Mainstream! Explosions is love! Explosion is life!

 

[Baron Dupek]

As people mentioned - you need to make it bigger feature, develop whole game around it. In creative way. And creative people don't work in the industry in general.

 

[Desert Fish]

Possibly current AAA titles would have the means to make such systems more popular, but AAA development is very risk adverse and would rather blow that money on marketing, voice actors or any such shit.

This.

Not to mention, your average console and at home calculator PC wouldn't handle a complex destructible engine, and that's plenty of lost sales, my good man.

Not so much this (unless you mean ancient hardware like XB 360 and PS3). We are currently getting diminishing returns by throwing more processing power and RAM on visuals. Spending a good chunk of the budget on destructibility and physics shouldn't be a big deal.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

As has been said, creating a game engine that allows for destructible environment is immensely taxing on system requirements...which is why most of them have retro graphics to begin with.

Another reason is that with destructible terrain you have to design the game around the feature and not the other way around.

Otherwise you get broken games like Monaco:

 

[ghostdog]

Destructible environment? Developers are so lazy and game engines so badly optimized that most recent games don't even have working mirrors.

 

[Neki]

Cause you can't romance destructive environment.(Citation needed)

 

[adrix89]

Cause you can't romance destructive environment.(Citation needed)

What are you talking about? Explosions are romance itself.

 

[Soulcucker]

Physics engines and AI systems are already notorious when it comes to edge cases, adding destructible environments multiplies the chances for issues significantly. The best option currently is to go the Battlefield method where destruction occurs but it is isolated to specific spots so it can't snowball out of control. Risk aversion is the major reason why real destruction is avoided, Crysis 1 and Red Faction 1 are the rare exceptions. Also if a developer was to go this route and accept the bugs that come with such an approach you would find piles of Youtube videos showing how shit these games are for having said bugs, for any AAA developer it is a lose-lose situation (bad publicity and hard to execute).

 

[deuxhero]

The most prominent examples are in turn based tactics games (Jagged Alliance 2 or Silent Storm) where the options for interacting with stuff beyond moving on it and attacking it are non-existant.

 

[sullynathan]

Rainbow Six Siege handles destruction very well for a multiplayer game to the point that you can make a little hole in a wall to peek through and get the drop on your enemies. Handles destruction far better than any other multiplayer shooter I've played and its a recent example.

Other than Six Siege, you have Battlefield which does destruction on a large scale. These games are multiplayer though.

 

[Carrion]

Risk aversion is the major reason why real destruction is avoided, Crysis 1 and Red Faction 1 are the rare exceptions.

Even Red Faction 1 was filled with indestructible walls and bulletproof glass that you couldn't make a dent in with even the heaviest weapons. It's like they realized half-way through development that being able to blow your way through walls wasn't a perfect fit for a corridor shooter after all.

 

[Black]

I don't think that's a good question to ask in an era where game devs promise TOTAL FREEDOM yet put immortal NPCs on every corner, you know. They'd first need to learn how to walk before they learn how to run.

 

[Norfleet]

Risk aversion is the major reason why real destruction is avoided, Crysis 1 and Red Faction 1 are the rare exceptions.

Even Red Faction 1 was filled with indestructible walls and bulletproof glass that you couldn't make a dent in with even the heaviest weapons. It's like they realized half-way through development that being able to blow your way through walls wasn't a perfect fit for a corridor shooter after all.

The clear answer to avoiding excessive wanton destruction is just to set your game in some kind of environment that allows it to a limited extent, but only so far: A space statiion, undersea colony. or the like: Smash all you want, but punch through the hull and you all die, game over, problem solved.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Another reason is that with destructible terrain you have to design the game around the feature and not the other way around.

This, so much this. People with shit imaginations like to vouch for features like this because it's intuitive and realistic, without considering that such qualitative changes to the gameplay will utterly destroy the challenge. It's the same reason spellcasters break DnD. Being able to shoot fireballs is no big deal, you can balance the numbers. Being able to walk through walls, fly, turn invisible or even just make simple illusions at a distance utterly breaks the game. Environmental destruction is the same thing. You can use it to make pitfalls, cover, collapse things onto targets, block paths- there are way too many possibilities compared to only being able to make your targets lose hp.

 

[Goldhawk]

Because it's shitloads more work, causes the AI and physics issues people have mentioned before, but most of all it's because of the way lighting works in modern 3D engines. All the flashy lighting stuff you see requires static objects and some degree of pre-baked lighting so as soon as you start removing big stuff from the scene (e.g. a wall), the lighting won't update to match it (or you have to do without current-gen lighting tech, and then people will complain your game looks like ass). You can see it in the modern XCOM games; if you destroy an object the shadows they cast remain baked onto the ground ... and that's a strategy game where they've obviously designed the lighting so that's minimally noticeable. It would be SUPER obvious in an FPS or any game where the action is viewed close up.

Maybe in a few years lighting won't require baking and you'll see destructible environments appearing in more games.

 

[adrix89]

but most of all it's because of the way lighting works in modern 3D engines.

Deferred shading is centuries old tech now and that was made especially to solve the lighting problem. Shadows tech is also pretty good and there has been experiments with raytracing. It might not be enough for real time but it should be usable as an update.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

Developers like to make their games tightly designed 'experiences' where players are funneled through an amusement ride. And it all breaks down if players can near arbitrarily go through the walls.

Technical excuses are first and foremost just excuses.

 

[Goldhawk]

Deferred shading is centuries old tech now and that was made especially to solve the lighting problem. Shadows tech is also pretty good and there has been experiments with raytracing. It might not be enough for real time but it should be usable as an update.

Deferred rendering is plenty old but it doesn't have many advantages regarding destructibility; the primary advantage it has over vs forward rendering is you can have lots of extra lights in a scene for no additional performance hit. It's a big improvement over forward rendering in most regards but if you want those extra lights to produce something that looks nice then then you need to bake some kind of pre-computed lightmap for them, which means they need static objects to interact with. You can fake it with realtime lighting for some dynamic objects like units (obviously they can't be static objects because they need to move) and some props using modern tech like light probes, but if you set the walls of an environment (i.e. the things that reflect most of the light in a scene) to be dynamic objects the whole system starts falling apart. As I said, maybe in the future ... but right now if you want to make a game that looks decent then fully destructible environments will give you major headaches.

Developers like to make their games tightly designed 'experiences' where players are funneled through an amusement ride. And it all breaks down if players can near arbitrarily go through the walls.

Technical excuses are first and foremost just excuses.

The first point is true in many cases. Second point, not so much.

 

[DraQ]

• Destructible environments are quite a lot of work to implement.
• Destructive environments make a lot of other things so much harder to implement:

1. They make it harder for the AI to reason about the environment - even basic AI functionality such as pathfinding is much harder when the area structure is not something given.
2. They make it harder for the devs to reason about the player's behavior - just having destructible environment alone makes it much harder to set up all sorts of scenarios because the *player* is much harder to get to behave in a predictable manner (and a lot game devs are at best armchair movie directors).
3. They make it harder to reason about the behavior of game's content and mechanics - designing challenges that don't break when player breaks sufficient amount of stuff is a massive headache and may require a much more aware and proactive AI than what is the norm.
   
4. They indirectly make it harder to reason about the AI's behavior - making the above AI is obviously hard and if successful it makes it much harder to get the AI to behave in a predictable manner when setting up all sorts of scenarios.

So:

Yep, in a nutshell, it's just a lot of work

Yes.

and some might say the gain is very little

Fuck those losers.
The problem is not gain.
The problem is cost, largely of the creeping variety too. Destructible environments aren't a feature that can be developed in isolation. They can and will drag the entire game with them.

Static models are much less work, you make them, set the lighting, and you have yourself a complete, rendered scene. When you start tearing them up, you suddenly need to calculate new lights and shadows as the destruction progresses

You already need to recalculate lighting because of movable objects and dynamic light sources - fire, explosions, magic, portable illumination, etc.

get new assets to reflect the devastation (holes, debris, chunks). Not to mention, coding all the physics to make it all fall apart in a believable manner.

Even falling apart in an unbelievable manner is usually more believable (and fun) than not falling apart at all, and the required assets are going to be useful anyway - you're probably going to have more than just pristine stuff in your game anyway, so you can treat it as getting a running start in making sane, reusable assets.

There are also other things, like teaching the AI to cope with changing environment (I am not necessarily saying: use it in a meaningful way, basic stuff like making sure that it doesn't go tits up when a wall it wanted to use is no longer there - it's so much simpler with static environments).

Yes.

Risk aversion is the major reason why real destruction is avoided, Crysis 1 and Red Faction 1 are the rare exceptions.

Even Red Faction 1 was filled with indestructible walls and bulletproof glass that you couldn't make a dent in with even the heaviest weapons. It's like they realized half-way through development that being able to blow your way through walls wasn't a perfect fit for a corridor shooter after all.

The problem is corridor shooters, not destructible environments.

Another reason is that with destructible terrain you have to design the game around the feature and not the other way around.

This, so much this. People with shit imaginations...

...are content to spin in their shitty little hamster wheels.
Meanwhile *I* want to impose my will onto the game, make its systems agents of my purposes and face challenges suitable for such mode of play.
Incrementing integers in order to become better at subtracting integers does not interest me, nor, I imagine, any other unimpaired person.