Destruction: Blowing stuff up!
2005’s Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction was this writer’s first brush with meaningful in-game destructibility. Mercenaries and its sequel are criminally underrated games (or maybe that’s just the nostalgia talking). Nevertheless, they functionally enabled what videogames are supposedly all about: blowing stuff up. There’s nothing more catharsis-killing than shooting an RPG into a wooden wall and having nothing happen. 2007’s Battlefield: Bad Company, and the Frostbite engine remedied this with a glorious, dynamic destruction model that opened up entirely new tactical options. Couldn’t get into a building? Make your own door! Advanced destructibility is understandably hard to implement within a reasonable performance budget, but with ever more powerful hardware and the possibility of offloading physics to the cloud, destructibility could become integral to every shooter.
