Bilson was tight-lipped on other details but did confirm the upcoming open-world third-person shooter would be far more "structured," akin to a "narrative" shooter. The sequel will still feature the destructibility Bilson says cost THQ "a fortune" to develop for Guerrilla, but will have a much greater impact on cities built closer together in the tight confines of the new underground world.
Although Guerrilla captivated most critics (netting a Metacritic average of 85 across three platforms) the third-person shooter failed to meet THQ's sales expectations. While Bilson said it would have been easy to scrap the characters and setting in the upcoming sequel and shift it into a new intellectual property -- effectively severing its connection to Guerrilla's poor retail showing -- he felt the quality in the previous entry was too great to abandon the Red Faction universe.
The strategy now, says Bilson, is to expose gamers to the series in order to prepare them for the future, citing the recent Red Faction: Guerrilla giveaway promotion as an example of giving the title the exposure it "deserved" at launch. "Giving away the stock now, on Red Faction, is getting more people exposed to the IP because we're going bigger on Red Faction next time," Bilson told us. "If the game wasn't so good, we wouldn't be giving it away at all."
