FEAR 1 is a shitty game

[Morenatsu.]

Fear is the inheritor of Blood 2/Shogo, not Blood.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Fear is the inheritor of Blood 2/Shogo, not Blood.

Blood 2 was the inheritor of Blood, I might not like it, but Blood 2 is the closest I've gotten to a proper Blood fix. Unless you're aware of some hidden gem of a spiritual successor I've missed, by all means, preach it if you have.

You're one of few FPS enjoyers with a modicum of taste in this joint, other than schru and Ninja Destroyer, we know that the release version of Unreal is the only playable version and they fucked the game over with the patches. We also know that nothing will ever give us quite the same high as Blood did. The guy responsible for it, Nick Newhard, only had ideas for one game and the rest of the team were catching lightning in a bottle, being just in time to make good use of the talents of someone like Kevin Kilstrom, a couple of years before and the fidelity wasn't there, and afterwards 3D ruled, becoming increasingly bad since people from the demoscene and the like weren't leading the charge anymore.

Nothing will ever probably come close to that perfectly distilled Build vintage, but I'm talking about genealogy here, and sometimes kids turn out more retarded than their parents. Certainly Monolith went more retarded with each passing game at some point, going from the glory days of Captain Claw and Blood to finally arrive as the Warner Bros. Zionwoman live-service sweatshop somehow. Nevertheless Blood 2, beyond the IP and setting, did retain something from the first game, the lethality, and some other things as well. You can trace a straight line from the dynamite chucking and shootdoging cultists to the flanking and grenade throwing clone soldiers of F.E.A.R. for example.

Not that I want to labor that point too hard, the question was really if F.E.A.R. or Condemned was like Blood and the answer is pretty self-evident there, but I do think there's a hint of previous greatness hidden away somewhere in F.E.A.R. even if it is very hard to see much of it at that point.

 

[NecroLord]

Blood is truly something special.

 

[pOcHa]

Fear is the inheritor of Blood 2/Shogo, not Blood.

Blood 2 was the inheritor of Blood, I might not like it, but Blood 2 is the closest I've gotten to a proper Blood fix. Unless you're aware of some hidden gem of a spiritual successor I've missed, by all means, preach it if you have.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/death-wish-for-blood

 

[Semiurge]

Sterile corridors of industrial plants, office spaces and a bunch of slo-mo jump kicking and enemies ragdolling. A long haired ghost kid that shows up randomly, a room coated with blood over there. A fat coder who stabs you in the back.

That's about all I remember of "F.E.A.R.", Condemned was a lot more memorable which means it's the better game.

 

[NecroLord]

What a wonderfully original opinion!

 

[Morenatsu.]

Not that I want to labor that point too hard, the question was really if F.E.A.R. or Condemned was like Blood and the answer is pretty self-evident there, but I do think there's a hint of previous greatness hidden away somewhere in F.E.A.R. even if it is very hard to see much of it at that point.

I posted without reading first

 

[ciox]

Rare.

 

[Fargus]

Rare.

I wouldn't mind this tag. But then half the codex probably deserves it.

 

[Kabas]

Perseus Mandate, the last expansion. Strangely enough, I like Perseus Mandate better than Extraction Point. A lot more action and less pointless horror stuff.

The only reason why Perseus Mandate was not that terrible is because the core gameplay and the feeling of shooting is just that great in FEAR.
They did try to bring it down by introducing HP spongy ninjas. Fuck them.

 

[Fargus]

Perseus Mandate, the last expansion. Strangely enough, I like Perseus Mandate better than Extraction Point. A lot more action and less pointless horror stuff.

The only reason why Perseus Mandate was not that terrible is because the core gameplay and the feeling of shooting is just that great in FEAR.
They did try to bring it down by introducing HP spongy ninjas. Fuck them.

My thoughts exactly. I still prefer to just play FEAR\EP for the complete story where pointman loses to Fettel at the end and awful sequels never happen.

 

[NecroLord]

Perseus Mandate, the last expansion. Strangely enough, I like Perseus Mandate better than Extraction Point. A lot more action and less pointless horror stuff.

The only reason why Perseus Mandate was not that terrible is because the core gameplay and the feeling of shooting is just that great in FEAR.
They did try to bring it down by introducing HP spongy ninjas. Fuck them.

My thoughts exactly. I still prefer to just play FEAR\EP for the complete story where pointman loses to Fettel at the end and awful sequels never happen.

Yeah, what an ending...
Really kind of a cliffhanger ending. It makes me wonder whether they truly wanted the sequel to continue from there.
Instead they made FEAR 2...
Ugh.

 

[Fargus]

Perseus Mandate, the last expansion. Strangely enough, I like Perseus Mandate better than Extraction Point. A lot more action and less pointless horror stuff.

The only reason why Perseus Mandate was not that terrible is because the core gameplay and the feeling of shooting is just that great in FEAR.
They did try to bring it down by introducing HP spongy ninjas. Fuck them.

My thoughts exactly. I still prefer to just play FEAR\EP for the complete story where pointman loses to Fettel at the end and awful sequels never happen.

Yeah, what an ending...
Really kind of a cliffhanger ending. It makes me wonder whether they truly wanted the sequel to continue from there.
Instead they made FEAR 2...
Ugh.

Originally it was just Project Origin because they wanted to make a sequel but lost the rights to franchise. When they got it back they tied it to FEAR franchise.

After that the tragic mistake that was F3AR happened with cover based system in a FPS game and iconic faceless Pointman turning into some churka neanderthal. And thus FEAR franchise died.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Really kind of a cliffhanger ending. It makes me wonder whether they truly wanted the sequel to continue from there.
Instead they made FEAR 2...

I'm pretty sure devs are on the record with the fact that F.E.A.R. 2 was originally supposed to be a console targeted spin-off kind of game, that's why you don't play as Pointman, and their publisher cancelled the actual F.E.A.R. 2 which was being built for PCs first and would have continued the story of the first game, sans expansions not made by Monolith. The Monolith guys have been constantly been shafted by their publishers, even back when the Blood devs hadn't yet merged their Q Studios with Monolith they were fighting 3D Realms tooth and claw to retain creative control over their project and could have ended up as a 90's equivalent of Wrath ironically enough, unless Jason Hall hadn't been best buds with Nick Newhard and done him a favor, giving Blood the time, budget and creative freedom it needed to flourish with the merger and the new publishing deal with GT.

The same GT that then would fuck them in the ass by making them rush it out the entirely unplanned sequel to Blood out the door before all the shit on the publishers side hit the fan. Blood took from 1994 to 1997 to get made, and they crunched out Blood 2 for a November 1998 release. It's incredible they managed to achieve as much as they did under the constraints, going from having developed the swansong and peak of 2.5D shooters that took so long to get perfected that it came out the same year as Hexen 2, Dark Forces 2, and Quake 2 while they were still using sprites, to making something that could compete with contemporary games with their Lithtech engine in like a single year.

Newhard had zero interest in making a sequel, and so we got Jay "Fuck That Loser" Wilson as a lead on Blood 2, who is a good mapper but pisspoor at just about anything else and always seem to be left holding the mess of someone else's making. He got a lot of the blame for why Diablo 3 turned out so shit despite having little to do with any of the monumental fuckups that led to it being handed to him after they shut down the original Diablo dev studio. Heck, Kevin Kilstrom remained on Blood 2 and even if he didn't make models to scan into the game it was dripping with style.

I don't know whose baby F.E.A.R. was but I imagine he was working on the cancelled sequel when they turned the lights off and turned the sequel team into an assisting part of the console F.E.A.R. spinoff game devs. Not that it matters much, singleplayer PC shooters were drawing their last breaths at the time and even if they did follow up the story directly it wouldn't have been a good game since just about all publishers around would have wanted a console kiddie game first and foremost. Games with a good story with dogshit gameplay always ranks low in my book.

F.E.A.R. 2 just like Blood 2 also got one of the shortest and worst expansions I've seen, while the originals got proper new campaigns/episodes. The more things change the more they stay the same.

 

[GamerCat_]

I saw a lot of potential in FEAR as a kind of more extreme X-Files. Relatively conventional mundane responses to supernatural phenomena. The setup of FEAR is that you're a SWAT team who respond to things that are a bit too weird for regular cops. That's awesome. And what we ultimately got out of that premise is The Alma Show, in which all you do is fight soldiers and get bothered by bad 2000s jumpscares.

I really appreciate Condemned as a kind of expansion of this idea even if it's not called FEAR. You're a relatively normal cop who has to deal with some increasingly abnormal stuff.

FEAR is such a brilliant set up. It can be scaled up or down, made more intense or more subdued, if you get an audience on board and understanding what's going on you can go any number of ways from where they started. This could have been the American answer to Resident Evil. Imagine if FEAR 2 was about monsters, or zombies. Why couldn't it have been? Just say Alma spooked everyone at the end of 1 and hasn't been seen since. Pointman is back or not, who cares? Depends what you want to make.

FEAR is weirdly bound to its settings, you spend most of the game in a few mundane and repetitive environments. Such an emphasis on place is kind of dull and boring in an action game, but in a slower game, something like Condemned or Resident Evil, such a building commands more respect. You take the mundane details more seriously when you're playing a game about objects and figuring things out rather than shooting. A slower pace makes you actually appreciate the fine details that make up such a space. An office is boring for a shooter, but fine for something more detective like. The great loss I see here is that Condemned and FEAR didn't synthesise into a Western Resident Evil that played into our strengths more (those being production values, action, and the idiosyncracies of American taste as opposed to japanese). FEAR could have been The X Files with assault rifles. But of course the west took so long failing to do this that Japan have now beaten us to it and made first person action Resident Evil games.

The closest thing to what I wanted FEAR to be is 'The X-Com Files' for OpenXcom. Mundane responses to extraordinary phenomena. The presentation being distant and isometric has its own charms in addition to drawbacks. It's cool, but the more visceral and direct approach to this premise is money on the table if you ask me.

And as for appraising FEAR1 itself. It's cool. I like these high production value, relatively short 2000s shooters. Not necessarily as shooters. The act of shooting and the game of winning gunfights in FEAR isn't particularly interesting. But the aesthetic realisation of gunfights is cool. It's all about noise, chaos, and clone soldiers screaming in their cool distorted voices as they get blown away in slow motion. FEAR is a movie game, but a pretty solid one. Wish things went better for Monolith. I know they always meant better than they were allowed to do.

 

[NecroLord]

The weaponry in FEAR is also pretty cool.
I like the Nailgun and that Railgun type weapon that turns enemies into charred skeletons.

 

[goregasm]

I only played this very sparingly back when it released on xbox 20 years ago, perhaps for an hour or two.

It didn't really stick with me, I probably went back to playing The Warriors or something, so what do I know.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Slow motion was an error.

 

[NecroLord]

Slow motion was an error.

It's necessary on Hard difficulty due to enemies doing high damage and being pretty accurate.
I try not to overuse it though.
Even though there are lots of medkits, you might find yourself running out of them at critical times if not using Slow-Mo.
Most important is the coolness factor in using Slow-Mo.
John Woo would be proud.