F.E.A.R - Fuck Everything And RUN

Duncan Hills Coffee said:
I finished off F.E.A.R. for the second time. I really enjoyed it this time around and I would love to start up Extraction Point. It seems to me that the expansions are the only thing worth exploring beyond the first game anyway. Funnily enough, despite playing it on Hard, I thought it was easier than my first playthrough on Normal. Maybe it's because I'm more used to the mechanics.

I did think the last levels were kinda trash though. After you kill Fettel the last two levels quickly devolve into slowly walking through corridors, shooting at ghosts while the hallucinations go into overdrive. I dunno, it's such a lame, anticlimactic way to close out the game. I would have preferred maybe one last blowout gunfight or an actual confrontation with Alma, just something to finish off the game on a high note besides the giant explosion.
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I've always thought that the fight with Fettel should have been a mirror match; he is your brother, your equal in skill and power. The two of you should have had a gunfight that would make John Woo glow with pride. Instead we get some ghosts to shoot and a final bullet to a waiting Paxton.

Boooorrrrrinnnggggg.
 
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No, it shouldn't have been a gunfight between you and Fettel. Unlike you his psychic talents are all about well, creepy psycho shit, especially with Alma's influence. It should have been like fighting Psycho Mantis, except instead of needing to move your controller to the other slot you use your physical talents and arsenal to out-think and out-fight him. How many of you ever used the proximity mines or remote charges? Playing cat-and-mouse ambush games with him and using slo-mo to get your attacks past his conjured barriers would have been a hell of a culmination to things.
 
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I'll throw my two cents for the final fight as well.

I think once you encounter Fettel, he does freaky mind things to you and makes you go through hellish versions of previous levels while throwing waves of Replicas after you. Start off with the usual guys then gradually throw in those big fuck off robots and the assassins (maybe have a whole section dedicated to them, like that one area in Half-Life). Afterwards, have one last fight with Fettel in an abstract arena while he tries to disorient you -- making fake clones of himself, changing the layout of the level on a whim, have his sound source be different than where he actually is, etc.

After you kill Fettel, you get brought back to the labs to a heap of dead Replica bodies. Perhaps at that point you would have to escape the facility already, to end on a higher note and not waddle around after the fight. But that would mean releasing Alma and destroying the reactor cells earlier.
 
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I've only played the first but it's great. Iliked the industrial urban/office environments to the levels, it really gave it a cool atmosphere that few other games have been able to replicate and made for some great close quarters combat especially with the cool melee shit you could do and the bullet time
 
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The first game is one of my all time favorites, even if I think it's too easy. Don't really care for the rest of the series.

My "favorite" part in the second game is where you can get instantly killed before the first checkpoint if you stand in the wrong spot during a scripted sequence, forcing you to watch the entire intro cutscene again.
 
The Bovinian Derivative said:
If you dont throw all your proxi mines at heavies or robots the moment they show up because you couldn't find a decent gun nearby you're (not) playing it wrong.
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Exactly. But aside from that, no clever trap laying or anything like that like you'd expect of such weapons.

Also, the stuff with Fettle indicates he's still in his cell, and is merely astrally projecting himself out somehow, which fits with a constantly disappearing guy who is psychically controlling an entire army and why he isn't resisting when you walk up to him. He's a bit busy with other matters. The rather mediocre ending aside, I thought that was an interesting twist to the game's climax.
 
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Gotta say, despite what some may think, the twist that you are actually Alma's son the whole time I found to be quite effective, and even heart-wrenching, as it really recontextualizes a lot of the visions and the like. Like, sometimes you'll hear a shrieking sound during some of them, and they at first seem like just a frightening and disturbing scream from Alma, until the reveal that it's really her cries for you upon being taken away from her immediately after giving birth to you shift it from horrifying to heart-breaking.
 
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LightDragonman1 said:
Gotta say, despite what some may think, the twist that you are actually Alma's son the whole time I found to be quite effective, and even heart-wrenching, as it really recontextualizes a lot of the visions and the like. Like, sometimes you'll hear a shrieking sound during some of them, and they at first seem like just a frightening and disturbing scream from Alma, until the reveal that it's really her cries for you upon being taken away from her immediately after giving birth to you shift it from horrifying to heart-breaking.
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During the end sequence, her instantly fatal "attack" is her trying to hug you.
 
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So what exactly went wrong with Monolith?

Their last first person game was Gotham City Imposters in 2012, which is still one of the more "WTF?" ideas for a game ever (a Batman multiplayer shooter without Batman?) and I guess the failure of that is what led to their restructuring into basically an entirely different developer, but why did they make Gotham City Imposters to begin with?
 
If you cant tell by my avatar, im something of a huge fanboy for this franchise.

Played all the games. Even F.E.A.R online!


1 is legit great, not as insane as 2, but it has some great atmosphere and delightful fights. Played and beat the ps3 version. I cant say I recommend it over the PC, as the surround sound design is kinda fucked up. Everything sounds like its right behind you, when its staring you in the face. Otherwise its perfectly fine. Exclusive shotgun is bitching, and the bonus level with playable Delta force is cool.

(The expansions are technically not canon, but there's really nothing that contradicts the main games too much, aside from one character that died being alive and well in 3.)

Extraction Point: VERY good. Definitely a step up from 1, as its really fucks with your head and makes you wonder how much of it is taking place in the real world or your mind.

Perseus mandate: Very big guilty pleasure. Its' not as scary as the others and I understand the Nightcrawlers could have been a bit more fleshed out, but I really loved how it developed into an action packed cluster fuck, of everyone from Delta force, F.E.A.R, Replicas, Nightcrawlers, Armacham, Alma and nightmare spawn fighting each other. (Has an interesting enough ending to spin a sequel off of).


F.E.A.R 2: Im honestly surprised how much people dont like it. This is legit my favorite one. (Although I did play on console)

Beautifully destroyed environments, frantic gunplay, mechs, and increased presence of Alma that completely scared the shit out of me. If felt like every time I turned my head in this game, something was behind me and it was uniquely terrifying. Definitely has the best cinematic set pieces and mind screwy shit of the franchise.

F.E.A.R 3. Meh. It's plot actually does give a satisfying enough ending to the franchise, but its way too haphazard in level design. There's no flow. one minute your at the bottom of a blood red ocean, and the next min your in an airport. Scares are minimal, Alma lacks a presence. Final boss is lame. I mean the multiplayer was interesting, but it really hamstrung what they could do. Also the leveling system completely broke immersion.

F.E.A.R Online: I legit enjoyed this while it lasted. Yeah, it was a shitty Chinese counter strike clone with the engine from 2, but It ran well on my crappy computer and it was free. The flavor text and single player missions were fun if perfunctory. Fondest memory is a mode that was basically team death-match, but one guy was randomly a monster that killed everyone. For a month anyway, then the dev's buffed the shit out of the monster and made it unbeatable.


Hopeful we can get a semi decent sequel in my lifetime, but if anybody's looking for a really good FREE substitute, I whole heartily recommend Underhell.

Go in bind and get the fuck out of the starting ghost house. https://youtu.be/vJuw8uuG2Jc



Bonus: its quite the experience to actually listen to Alma's lines unfiltered. https://youtu.be/WRvrwECbSGI
 
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The Real Fizzicist said:
I want to play F.E.A.R. 1 but my computer doesn't like it and brings the frame rate to <10 fps after about 5 minutes of play. I got it off steam and my OS is Windows 10. Any help is appreciated
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Always check PCGamingWiki, the guide on steam the poster below you provided even links to it.
Win98SE said:
FEAR's AI is a thing of beauty.

It's a great system in the sense that developers essentially just program individual "actions" that have a list of requirements for performing them and a list of "post" states of said action. The planner strings together actions to reach the intended "goal" state of the AI. If you want the AI to shoot, you set its goal state to "shooting" and the planner goes through the list of available actions and finds the ones that ultimately lead to the goal state being achieved. In the simplest case, the NPC shoots immediately. But consider a more complex example where the NPC has no ammo: The action "shoot" has a requirement for ammo. No ammo means reloading, no extra ammo means looking for another gun in the environment, looking for another gun means jumping through a window to get to one, etc etc, and all of that happens just because some bit in the game logic says "NPC SHOOT NOW!!!!!!!!!" There's no need for level designers to spend a shitload of time scripting stuff like the window jumps in some of the office levels because it all comes down to the AI planner using a scoring system to find the most efficient set of actions to accomplish a goal - in some percentage of cases they'll use the windows, but in another they'll take a slightly different route. People call FEAR's AI emergent but it's actually very simple on a technical level, infinitely easier to work with than state machines that most games use. There are certainly limitations to the approach, but done correctly the results are unmatched.

Oh, and the game is good too.
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Don't know if it was patched/tweaked but sometimes the AI was hellbent on performing a certain action even if it made no sense. Everyone is familiar with the warehouse early on and the tipped over shelf they can crawl under. A couple of times I have killed everyone coming into the room except for a lone survivor that was gunning for those shelves so he could slowly crawl under them while I watched. Sometimes, in the office building, one soldier might decide that today is not the day for fighting, it is the day for parkour and he started vaulting through windows, then out again because he couldn't see the fight, then target another window and vault through that with the same result. The AI was fun in many ways.
Catgirl IRL said:
People have talked about the bland office environments, but I have to admit I quite liked them - the normal, every day backdrop for extreme blood letting and carnage. There's a thousand games where I can fight on exotic worlds, but very few where I can blow a man's head open and watch its contents splatter over the same filing cabinets I use every day.

Its funny, really. I always switched off when the game went into creept laboratory terriroty for this reason.
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I liked how it went from spooky warehouse game to office building with fat sys admin George Broussard.
 
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Who controls the IP of this series? I honestly think this game could be primed for some sort of re imagining. I think it would be cool if they ditched the whole evelyn thing and focused the concept of a First Encounter Advanced Recon team. What other types of stuff would a team like that deal with? Other supernatural phenomenon? UFOs, cryptids, ghosts? This game just kinda died but I think there is loads of potential.
 
wholetthegodsout said:
Who controls the IP of this series? I honestly think this game could be primed for some sort of re imagining. I think it would be cool if they ditched the whole evelyn thing and focused the concept of a First Encounter Advanced Recon team. What other types of stuff would a team like that deal with? Other supernatural phenomenon? UFOs, cryptids, ghosts? This game just kinda died but I think there is loads of potential.
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I don't know much about IPs and rights, but F.E.A.R. 3 was made by Day 1 Studios instead of Monolith. They layed off 90% of their employees due to some bullshit with Konami after the game's release and they were later bought by the same dude's who made World of Tanks.

If the devs actually hold the rights, I highly doubt the WoT guys will do anything with F.E.A.R. at this point. It's been nearly a decade since the last one with no news that I'm aware of. Feel free to correct me, though.

But hey, at least we have Trepang2.
 
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