The lights are on
Today's THQ news revealed a little more about the company's financial dealings, but on Monday we'll be getting a full rundown of which studios have purchased THQ's remaining IPs. Where do you want to see each series end up?
You can find a full rundown of which franchise were available in the auction right here, but the big names that were still up for grabs are Homeworld, Red Faction, MX, and Darksiders. Lot 5 contains a variety of smaller titles that could be interesting if they find the right home, including Full Spectrum Warrior, Destroy All Humans!, and Drawn to Life.
My favorite series out of the bunch has to be Red Faction. I remember being fascinated by the ability to blast through the environment in the original Red Faction, and although Red Faction: Guerrilla didn't have destructible terrain, the ability to raze entire buildings and structures was nothing short of revolutionary. I still don't know how the physics-based destruction on display in the series didn't catch on, but I hope someone picks it up and makes the next-gen Red Faction of my dreams. If I could choose any developer to take the series on, I'd like to see Ubisoft Montreal pick it up. Between Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, the developer has proven it's an expert at creating immersive open-world action games.
As for the other IPs, I think it would only be right if Crytek USA picked up Darksiders, and I sure wouldn't mind playing a Destroy All Humans! sequel from Traveller's Tales. It would also be interesting if either EA or Activision picked up the rights to Full Spectrum Warrior and gave military shooter fans a more strategy-oriented offering, but that's probably just wishful thinking on my part.
Where would you like to see the remaining THQ IPs end up? Share your picks in the comments section.
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My personally favorite of this list has to be Frontlines Fuel of War. I just love the size of the online battles back in the day and I would love to see it go to a good home. I think Dice can be one of the only studios that can revive it because of their experience of big, open military battle games like Battlefield.
Red Faction should go to either Crytek or EA as those are the only two that have an engine that could actually support the series right now. Furthermore, I want the series to go back to a FPS. It was better as one. Guerilla was a decent game, but the original just had so many better features to it.
Red Faction. Someone please just get it right since Volition apparently can't.
I'll help with why physics-based destruction hasn't caught on yet:
First of all, developing such systems takes quite some time and a lot of devs don't want to spend the money/manpower to develop what many consider an eye candy feature... especially when "Fake" destruction like that if BF3 will make most people happy.
Also, the current gen of consoles really lack the processing power and RAM to pull off such systems for most games. Yes, Guerrilla did it but on a limited scale. In Guerrilla there were no large buildings, only a handful of buildings would ever be on screen at once, and other parts of the game had to be scaled back (graphics and AI the most noticable). So Guerrilla's system wouldn't work for Battlefield or Call of Duty, at least in this generation.
Now I LOVE the concept of dynamic destruction. Hell, I still play Guerrilla because of the destruction and wish more games has such a system. However I think Guerrilla was a generation ahead of its time. Since it seems the next wave of consoles will be closer to modern PCs, its likely dynamic destruction will be a more common feature in the next-gen. I also expect more off the shelf game engines to add dynamic destruction out of the box... making it easier for developers to add on the fly.