Destructible environments

This is a major area that needs work in video games. If I take a bazooka to something like a wooden door(or anything), it should blow to pieces. Games like Red Faction promised to take environment destruction to a new level where it would greatly affect gameplay but it turned out to only be a very small step in the right direction with having a few walls you could take out.

Your thoughts?

I'd like to see this technology applied to something besides first-person shooters.

-Technosphile

Vigilante 8 was THIS CLOSE to make destructible environments actually mean something in the game.

The only problem with environment destruction doesn't seem to be implementing it, but rather keeping the level design in a playable state.

Maybe in a RTS like Command and Conquer game you could nuke an area and there'd be a hole left in the ground. If a tank went into the hole it might not be able to get out. What's to stop a player from creating a bunch of consecutive holes in the ground so the enemy ground troops can't attack his buildings for the remainder of the game?

Or in a platforming game, a player might accidentally destroy a platform needed to access the rest of the level.

It seems like environment destruction would cause more design headaches than it'd be worth. It'd be a coding nightmare with almost no real benefits gameplay wise beyond cosmetic effects on the level.

Those are good points. I think designers should design levels with multiple solutions/paths. If you destroy a platform, there should be some other way to get to where you're going. Of course, that's easy for me to say not being a game designer but I think it can be done, at least to a greater extent than currently.

I think that evolution in technology would help matters out as well. Also, some developers are still learning their way around the current batch of hardware. Maybe towards the end of this generation, or the beginning of the next, we'll see more destructible environments, and have it actually mean something to the game.

Punisher for NES! :D

Shooting that saxophone player in the background of The Punisher was always good fun.

Also, the Virtua Cop games had fantastic destructibility. I loved shooting up the computers in the first one.

Or the watermelons in VC 2! Easily the most memorable part of the game for me.