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Changing lanes: Infinite Crisis has finite buildings and environmental destruction

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When does a superhero not look like a superhero? When she’s fighting alongside and against nine other equally powerful, exquisitely balanced superhumans, of course. In the absence of an on-map common man for easy comparison, Turbine have looked about themselves for some way to telegraph the embarrassing strength of their nuke-‘roided MOBA roster.

The answer? Pull the map to the ground.

This developer diary about Infinite Crisis’ destructible environment should allow us a peek behind the curtain to see… oh god, there are three Jokers back here and none of them are Heath:

The important part is Turbine’s ‘catastrophic event’ system – a top-down translation of Battlefield 4’s *spit* levelution shtick that sees the map rejigged by errant explosions and whatnot.

“Catastrophic events are gameplay, and they’re things that you can master because you can anticipate them,” explains game systems designer Dan Parke. “We’re not going to surprise you with them, you know they’re coming. But they look amazing and they have a big impact on the map.

“They are things that cause you to rethink your strategy at a certain point. Whole parts of the map might become impassible – you might have to take a long route around routes that were really fast before.”

Better still, players will have some agency over how this stuff happens.

“You want to drop that rock on your enemy’s base and not have them do the same to you,” says Parke.

In practice, though, I worry the building death looks more like dad stepping on your balsa wood castle than proper brick shrapnel. What do you reckon?

Here’s everything we know about Infinite Crisis, including its Doomsday Device.

Thanks, RPS.