Everything Breaks

With the advent of fully destructible environments in modern computer games, sometimes the game world's destructibility gets taken a bit too far. Since everything seems to collapse as soon as anything touches it, planning vehicle paths, especially in Real Time Strategy games, becomes crucial if one doesn't want to lose other potential benefits of the scenery, such as (following the previous example) cover for infantry.

Related to Die, Chair, Die!.

Examples of Everything Breaks include:

• Red Faction's engine allowed for 100% destructible environments, and had a physics simulator that could deal with the resulting chunks going everywhere. Sadly, its level design all but completely ignored this, and the game was also passed over by the modding community.
  • This is taken to the logical extreme in the Red Faction: Guerrilla, where the structural integrity of buildings actually matters, and buildings would simply collapse after the designers put them into the game world before they hired architects to design them.
  • It must be noted that first levels of RF 1 allowed you to carve an arbitrary way through the rock, worms-style, but in 3D. You could even operate a drilling machine. Destructibility also worked quite well in multiplayer maps, leaving no safe place for campers, at least in PC version. In contrast, Red Faction Guerilla doesn't support destructible landscape at all.
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed introduces some new destruction technology called Digital Molecular Matter (or DMM) in which objects will break more realistically (glass shattering, wood having some bend/break to it and splintering realistically etc.)
• The X-Men Legends series allows almost all walls to be broken, although a majority of the walls just break to reveal sheet metal behind the breakable section of the wall. Occasional system crashes can occur if a character like Iceman using a huge Area of Effect attack (Iceman's was a volley of ice projectiles) inadvertently breaks too many wall panels at once.
• Company of Heroes features many destructible map items, namely walls and buildings. Planning the paths of heavier vehicles, such as tanks, which can knock walls over, is required to avoid destroying structures which could potentially serve as cover for infantry. Conversely, armoured vehicles can be used to create new paths and entry points for infantry.
  • Dawn of War 2. Take the above sentence. Remove 'heavier'. Or, for that matter, replace the word after 'heavier' with 'infantry'.
• Everything one sees in World in Conflict maps, apart from the terrain, can probably be destroyed (and even the terrain can still be cratered by carpet bombing). Trees, buildings and powerlines get knocked over by tanks, nuked by artillery, struck by bunker-busters, hit with napalm, nuked, etc. Some of the missions feature "defend this town" objectives, which often end, even when the mission is successful, with said "town" consisting of a few dozen rubble piles. This is remarked on by the voice-over in one of the interstitials, discussing how the US was forced to drop a nuclear bomb on a town they were supposed to protect.
  • Like in Company of Heroes, this fact is important to Infantry units which are easily killed outside of cover. There are even tactical aids available for the sole purpose of depriving infantry of cover, although they are certainly fatal to units hiding in that cover aswell.
• Again, everything that isn't terrain can be demolished in the Soldiers: Heroes of WW 2 series. In the latest version, Men of War, anything can be shot up, blown up, or run over. Makes street fighting easier when you've got tanks- either blow up a wall to expose to enemy, or just drive the tank through the building until it collapses.
• Not every inanimate object in Deus Ex was destructible...but everything that was all got destroyed in the same way. Cardboard boxes--wet cardboard boxes—would shatter if damaged.
• This is the entire point of the LEGO [insert movie here] series of games. When in doubt, break everything.
• Mercenaries allowed the player to blow up most buildings. The sequel allowed the player to blow up ANYTHING.
• Battlefield: Bad Company liked to show off your ability to reduce buildings to withered husks of their former selves.
  • Bad Company 2 goes a step further, allowing you to actually make buildings collapse completely, as opposed to just blowing out the walls.
• EndWar requires the player to keep his infantry in cover if he wants them to survive - Artillery and Tanks can blow up cover with enough time and effort, though, which is lethal to whatever might be hiding inside.
• John Woo's Stranglehold has some of the biggest amount of property damage I've seen in a game. The game fully expects this, and gives you a report of how many millions of dollars of damage you've done in the level.
• The Turn-Based Strategy game Silent Storm featured this, along with a huge array of WWII grenades. It was actually possible to screw yourself by blowing up and collapsing all the staircases to the upper level of a building containing a Plot Coupon. Moral of the story: Don't use heavy grenades indoors.
• Minecraft. Everything, from walls to dirt to solid rock can be broken. The only thing that doesn't count are fluids (like water and lava) and bedrock adminium.
• With heavy enough weaponry, one could destroy almost anything in the X-COM series of games. Buildings, fences, walls, space ships, corpses, you name it. Especially impressive considering the first one was released in 1994.
• In Freedom Force and its sequel Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich, almost every object in the game can be destroyed. This includes crates, trash cans, trees, lamp posts, dumpsters, cars, and buildings (usually every building). On most levels, the only thing that can't be destroyed is the terrain. Most objects can also be picked up and thrown by strong enough characters. Things like lamp posts, telephone poles, and small trees can be also be wielded by characters as giant clubs.
• Justified in Crush Crumble and Chomp Since you're playing a gigantic monster, the entire city is a destructible sandbox.
• Vangers is this in a world Made of Plasticine. Not literally.
• In all of the Worms games, pretty much everything is destructible. This is important for attacking enemy worms and providing cover for yourself and your team.
• Most of the scenery in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault's tank level is destroyable.
• Battle Tanx
• Otogi: Myth of Demons for the Xbox was one of the first games to let you level an entire building with a swing of your sword.
• Shattered Steel A voxel-and-polygon based mech game, allows you to make permanent craters everywhere with explosive weaponry. It is possible, for example, to dig a hole big enough to trap most non-flying enemies.
• In ZAR, Russian voxel-based shooter almost every weapon will make permanent dents, craters or trenches where it hits ground, useful for creating cover since you can't usually survive without it.
• In Star Fighter , a flying simulator for 3DO, RISC OS and PS 1 you can destroy nearly anything, burn trees and melt ground with your lasers.