The teaser trailer you see on the main page shows a lot of fast-paced or one-off destruction highlights, but one thing it was missing: Buildings collapsing spectacularly after taking a lot of damage. And another thing that was missing: Large towers falling over and smashing into stuff.
Both of these elements are now possible in the game, thanks to some improvements to the destruction system. A bug in the structure system was making large towers fall over in strange ways, and that has been fixed. Damage propagation from heavy impacts was also missing, but that has also been addressed.
Finally, I've also added the mythical "stress" system, which is not as mysterious and difficult as it sounds. In 2011, Eric Arnold, a very talented programmer I worked with on Red Faction Guerrilla, gave a GDC talk about the destruction and stress system in RFG. I just watched the video again on the GDC Vault and used his basic plan as a template for my stress system.
It only took a couple hours to make it work well once it was implemented. Previously, you'd have to take out every support in a building to bring it down from below. Now, tall or large buildings will collapse when they have a large amount of weight supported by a very small section.
Between all these changes, the destruction system is fairly complete and destruction and physics are interacting in more interesting and realistic ways. Destruction sound effects are coming soon, and I'm looking forward to showing off even more spectacular destruction interactions than what you saw in the trailer.