Teardown

How Games Do Destruction

Real-time, gameplay-driven destruction is difficult because it must handle unpredictable physics, particles, and debris without wrecking frame rate or memory budgets.

• Modern game design is shifting from pre-canned animations to real-time, procedural destruction to enhance player agency, allowing for emergent gameplay like creating new paths or altering tactical lines of sight.
• Developers balance performance constraints by using asset swapping, as seen in Control and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, or real-time mesh slicing, utilized in Astro Bot and Rainbow Six: Siege.
• High-fidelity, free-form destruction is achieved through voxel-based systems, such as those in Teardown, which treat environments as clusters of independently removable blocks.