Yahoo! Exclusive: Fracture Webisode #1

Few game makers have attempted to tread the hallowed ground that LucasArts and Day 1 Studios let you mercilessly manipulate in their upcoming sci-fi action game Fracture. And for good reason - allowing players to terraform their environment willy-nilly raises all sorts of challenging issues when it comes to level design, learning curve and difficulty balance. How do you build a compelling game world when the players are given the implicit ability to blow it up? Answers to that question and much more can be found in the first part of our exclusive Fracture web documentary series.

WATCH Y! EXCLUSIVE WEB DOCUMENTARY NOW WATCH FRACTURE TRAILER NOW

We also had a chance to experience the mountains and pitfalls ourselves in a recent multiplayer hands-on. Set on a small, war-torn map, we were roundly spanked by about ten testers and developers as they demonstrated the copious particulars of terrain deformation in a brutal deathmatch.

By way of its devious earth-morphing design, Fracture takes everything you've come to understand about conventional fragging and turns it inside out. Every weapon in the game has some sort of effect on the ground itself in addition to its familiar properties. The sniper rifle, for example, can also be used to quickly form a small mound of protective earth, creating instant cover for a sniper. The dreaded Bangalore rocket launcher's alternate fire shoots off a burrowing missile that literally sends a shockwave through the ground until the user detonates the warhead. The four varieties of grenades pull double duty by damaging enemies while dramatically raising and lowering the ground.

The result of all this can best be described as user-controlled chaos. It's one thing to see a post-deathmatch level covered in debris, but it's quite another to see the level itself go from a nice, uniform piece of real estate to a warped, twisted mess pulled straight out of a Dali painting. Since you can no longer depend on the one consistent feature in just about every shooter ever - the trusty, immovable ground - your sense of security is constantly under threat. The simple act of shooting, lobbing a grenade and taking cover requires an extra layer of thought. Should you toss a tectonic grenade to raise the ground and buy a few seconds of cover to reload? Or perhaps a subsonic grenade will do the trick by dropping your foe into an impromptu pit? Take too long to decide and you could be stuck in a sinkhole yourself.

Though we only had the chance to play through a few deathmatch games, LucasArts assured us there would be a variety of other multiplayer modes in the finished product. Look for more info on those and Fracture's robust single-player campaign in future web doc episodes exclusively at Yahoo! Video Games.