Whatever happened to fully destructible environments?

Red Faction pulled it off on a ps2, easily the worst of the last gen hardware. One of the best things of that game was to have an all out battle with rocket launchers and admire the surrounding environmental destruction. You could destroy walls, pillars, even build huge caves from one part of the map to the other, though wildly impractical. What ever happened to this aspect of "next gen?" When you shoot a rocket at a wooden chair, that chair is not going to fly 20 feet. It is going to disappear into oblivion. With the power of the next gen consoles, why can't we evolve this aspect instead of completely getting rid of it?

Someone here clearly hasn't played Crysis. :)Dire_Weasel

Yeah and alot of new RTS games are starting to put destructible environments in them, the coolest I've seen in RTS is Company of Heroes.ElArab

Yeah that's what I liked about the Act of War games.

In all the games that say you can destroy the enviorment, you cant relly destroy everything in the enviorment. If it is inportant to the mission they're not going to make it so you can destroy that building or object.

Red Faction pulled it off on a ps2, easily the worst of the last gen hardware. One of the best things of that game was to have an all out battle with rocket launchers and admire the surrounding environmental destruction. You could destroy walls, pillars, even build huge caves from one part of the map to the other, though wildly impractical. What ever happened to this aspect of "next gen?" When you shoot a rocket at a wooden chair, that chair is not going to fly 20 feet. It is going to disappear into oblivion. With the power of the next gen consoles, why can't we evolve this aspect instead of completely getting rid of it?

rainman67

In addition to the games already mentioned in this thread, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction had quite a bit of environmental destruction (skyscrapers could be brought down) so I expect its spiritual sequel, Prototype, will be even more impressive.