Fracture isn’t just about terrain deformation but it’s the feature that we think has allowed us to innovate significantly within the game, whether we are talking about level design or weapons or even artistic direction.

When we pitched this to LucasArts we said that we wanted to build a game that would allow for a very unique kind of mechanic; one that would strike people as being very new. And I believe we’ve succeeded.

The idea is that the player has complete control over their environment. That sounds a little trite when you first say it but if you think about it in practical, gameplay terms, it starts to open up so many possibilities that aren’t available in other action-oriented games.

Let’s say AI is over there and they’re entrenched, they’re stuck in this area, and they’re putting you under a ton of fire. How do you want to attack the situation?

The way the Terrain Deformation has been designed, the game can conform to your own style. Do you just want to really quickly put up terrain in front of you as a run-and-gun shield or do you want to drop the terrain down and have dynamic assets roll over the top and crush them?

Perhaps you’re a little more contemplative and you like to tactically attack these guys by surreptitiously building cover and working your way around them.

Fracture allows you to do all this stuff. You can approach challenges as a sniper-type player or a classic shooter type player or much more strategically. Different ways yield different results and completely different experiences. That was always what we aimed to achieve.

Design Challenges


The game design has been challenging. We were very aware of the danger of just stringing together a whole bunch of linear events and so our challenge has been on delivering variety of experiences. We focused on two areas.

1) Building levels that would support a pseudo-sandbox environment where, tactically, you could make a number of different choices and the environment would allow you to be successful in different ways.

2) Creating AI that would be responsive to those environmental changes.

I think the real depth of Fracture is in the AI. You have to play it a couple of different ways to see just how responsive they are. In a classic shooter, the AI is entrenched and you have to go in weed them out. In Fracture the AI is reacting to the environmental changes you are making and weighing their options. They’ll bring the fight to you if they see advantage in that. The AI is incredibly important to the multiple nature of the experience.

Fracture’s Message and Weaponry

Another challenge for us has been messaging Fracture, because it is new and different. We don’t want to encourage the idea that it’s just about moving lumps of earth.

Where we’ve had success is getting that demo out there and getting people to play it. We wanted gamers to play Fracture and take-away the notion that this is not just about moving the earth up and down.  It’s about building tactics to defeat some very smart AI.

What we’re hearing from demo-players is that they are playing it again and again, and trying different approaches, different weapons which is what we intended.

There really is a ton of weapons in this game. A good portion of them are familiar and you’re going to understand the conventions. But there are some that are just crazy and fun and really show off Terrain Deformation.

I love shooters, I play a lot of shooters and I wanted to make sure that we had weapons that made sense to the shooter player. But we’ve also had a blast making weapons that will, for example, create a vortex and suck everything in. Or another that burrows underground, and destroy the guys from underneath. I can’t tell you how much fun it was to create that stuff.

Fracture is a unique game because it’s so focused on innovation. We were determined to offer something that had not been offered in this way before and that approach can be seen in every aspect of the game’s design.