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Bah, Minecraft is boring. Ace of Spades is much more fun and combines same build and dig tunnels, but with shooting and objectives. Multiplayer FPS is much more when you can build defensive structures and dig your way to the enemy base.

It also looks even shittier than Minecraft, which is saying something.

Bah, Minecraft is boring. Ace of Spades is much more fun and combines same build and dig tunnels, but with shooting and objectives. Multiplayer FPS is much more when you can build defensive structures and dig your way to the enemy base.

Hmmm. That does sound cool, and the mini-map is nice. Not so sure about the textures or the lighting.

Another alternative is FortressCraft, which is on the XBox. It has lasers, apparently

Bah, Minecraft is boring. Ace of Spades is much more fun and combines same build and dig tunnels, but with shooting and objectives. Multiplayer FPS is much more when you can build defensive structures and dig your way to the enemy base.

Unfortunately, such a thing would fundamentally change a game. Imagine a 3D FPS. You want to take out the enemy base. Hell, with enough time, you can just move the local mountain across on top of it, or tunnel up into it, or punch a window through the local mountain to make an inaccesible sniper-spot, or literally just flatten the whole place with artillery so you can walk through the ashes and collect all the pickups. It doesn't make for a fun game, necessarily, but it just one of many features that a good games developer can add to a game to make it more interesting.

There's no need to imagine such a game. You should check out Ace of Spades sometime. It's basically a Minecraft FPS, and it plays out very similarly to what you suggested, from what little I've seen of my friends playing it.

Red Faction used "scripted" destruction, to borrow the term from the OP. Any and everything that could be destroyed had been configured to blow up in a specific way, so while you could blow up this wall, you may not be able to blow up that wall if the developers forgot to make it destructible or simply didn't want it to be destructible. If you want truly destructible terrain, you need to set things like the durability for each object, its brittleness, a way to quickly calculate what the shape of the new object should be and whether it would have broken into multiple pieces, and a mechanism for dynamically applying a texture to the interior of those pieces once the original object has been destroyed.

One of my undergraduate professors was interested in destructible terrain and had done some research with subdivision surfaces in order to dynamically set textures for the interiors of broken objects, with the idea of applying it to gaming in mind. He showed us a few screenshots from games he had developed as a grad student that applied those concepts to an FPS he had built, and the results looks much different than the types of things you see in Red Faction.

The gameplay possibilities were also wildly different as well. If you've ever seen or played Ace of Spades, you know what a difference truly destructible terrain can have on gameplay. Now imagine a high-fidelity version of that, where everything isn't just cubes, and you can imagine the possibilities.

I'm not sure if you already know this, but there is a game out there like this already that's not without its own set of problems but still interesting. It's called Ace of Spades.

Ace-Spades.com

The game isn't attractive but it can be fun to play. It definitely needs improvement.

On another note, I help out on a site that keeps track of these indie game releases and Terraria is already losing steam (while Minecraft is already rising again in hits). A big complaint with Terraria is that people have already "beaten" the game. They've found all the armor, killed all the bosses. Building doesn't have the thrill that Minecraft building has. Also, whoever said Terraria is less buggy definitely did not play the Beta or the first final release. Just clicking "back" on the options menu was enough to crash the game.

Yes, Minecraft is buggy. Yes, Notch's code isn't great. Still, he has inspired an insane community. There is an entire world for Minecraft out there, with a culture of podcasts, "LP-ers" (Let's Play video makers), and people that run and play on certain community servers. These people are celebrities in their own right. Just watch when PaulSoaresJr logs in to a server and see him get mobbed by fans of his, or the amount of people who try to imitate things Coestar does in his world or on his videos. I can't even remember the last time I played a game with a community this dedicated.