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F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Progress Report
September 9, 2008 - The big news this week for shooter fans is that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Monolith Productions have acquired the F.E.A.R. name once again, which means that the unofficial follow-up that they were making called Project Origin is now an official follow-up called F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. It's complicated, yes, so let's just focus on the game, and what F.E.A.R. is about.
The original F.E.A.R. shipped in 2005 for the PC, and it blended incredibly kinetic gunfights with creepy atmosphere. In it, you played as the unnamed "point man" in a special military unit tasked with dealing with paranormal threats. And in the game, an incident dealing with a rogue military commander leading a clone army quickly escalates into something far more catastrophic.
F.E.A.R. 2 begins about 30 minutes before F.E.A.R. ended, and you play as Michael Becket, a member of a different special forces squad assigned to take a powerful business executive into custody. It's a simple task, but needless to say, it all goes to hell rather quickly when heavily-armed grunts bar your way. This executive lives in a stunning penthouse apartment that's full of priceless artwork and fine china. This is part of the design philosophy of having dynamic, changing battlefields, but it seems like more of an excuse to see lots of stuff shatter, like in a movie. Not surprisingly, the F.E.A.R. series was deeply inspired by cinema.
"We wanted to make a John Woo action scene as our core gameplay," explained lead designer Craig Hubbard. "We wanted to capture that sense of kinetic intensity and chaos that is achieved through particle effects and slow motion. When a gun gets fired in his movies, the air fills with paper debris, smoke and sparks. It doesn't necessarily feel real... it feels cooler than real."
You will have some teammates to fight alongside in the early part of F.E.A.R. 2, which is a slight departure from the lone wolf gameplay of the original. F.E.A.R. fans will likely recognize the name Jankowski. Spen Jankowski was one of the characters in the first game, and in F.E.A.R. 2 you get to meet his younger brother. (Hope he doesn't meet a grisly end like Spen.) And I may be wrong about this, but there's also a female commando who sounds awfully like Jen Taylor, the actress who voices Cortana in Halo. If it is, Halo fans will get a little giddy about that.
The penthouse level is all about intense firefights, but F.E.A.R. is also about creepy atmosphere and a scary little girl named Alma who melts flesh with her presence. "When you have Alma taking out Delta Force soldiers it makes the monster something that the audience hasn't seen before and doesn't know how to deal with," Hubbard explained. "When you are watching a movie like Friday the 13th you are thinking: 'How would I kick this guy's ass?' But when it's a little girl and there is no way to kick her ass it's unnerving. Like in The Shining with the little girls in the hallway; how do you deal with that?" There's a cataclysmic event in F.E.A.R. 2 that changes everything shortly into the game. Since F.E.A.R. is three years old at this point, it's not much of a spoiler, but a strange nuclear/psychic blast occurs, devastating the city and unleashing the paranormal.
As much as I liked the original F.E.A.R., I must admit that there was some repetitiveness to the game. Many of the levels looked the same, from the generic industrial/warehouse environments to the cubicle-filled office locales. According to Hubbard, there was a reason for that. "Rooting (F.E.A.R.) in present day really helps to ground those horror elements. I think recent Asian horror movies, probably primarily for budgetary reasons, all take place in apartment complexes and offices, places that you can relate to and that makes them much more effective," he explained. Still, it looks like F.E.A.R. 2 is going to mix things up a bit more in terms of environments.
Meanwhile, in F.E.A.R. you fought an army of clone soldiers from beginning to end; being clones, they looked and sounded exactly alike. F.E.A.R. 2 is adding a lot more paranormal to the experience. Sure, there are clone soldiers, but I also saw spectral foes as well as, my new favorite, remnants. Each remnant is special and unique, and they're formidable. They're basically puppet masters who were once human, but they're caught repeating what they were doing in life when the nuclear blast hit. The remnant I saw looked like a businessman trying to hail a cab. Remnants are tough because they'll animate nearby corpses to come after you; you'll see some kind of energy tendril that connects them to him. You can "kill" the corpse, but it'll just get back up again. And, no, there isn't a way to destroy the corpses so he can't control them, which means that you need to focus on the remnant.
Throughout this stage of the game you're being guided by a source on the radio only known as Snake Fist. He's knowledgeable about Alma, but he also has a fair bit of attitude. Finding out who he is sounds like it might be interesting. The bigger question is what's the deal with Alma? Having played the original as well as the two expansions on the PC, I'm hoping that F.E.A.R. 2 delivers some concrete answers.
At the very least, F.E.A.R. 2 is a pretty game. If you like technical details, Monolith demoed the Xbox 360 version, and the gameplay footage in this piece is taken from that platform. The graphics engine is a heavily modified and enhanced version of the original engine, and when I first heard that I was a bit disappointed. After all, it's been three years, why not a new engine? However, this might as well be a new engine, because it looks vastly better than the original game ever did. It's definitely a generational leap up. Just take a look at the before-and-after artwork accompanying this preview. One thing that I did appreciate was more use of color; the original F.E.A.R. was an extremely drab game in that department. The use of bright color here and there accents the gritty feel.
There's one other major difference between F.E.A.R. and F.E.A.R. 2. The former was developed directly for the PC first, while the latter is being developed for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 simultaneously. It'll be interesting to see what impact that has on the gameplay, but it is admittedly nice to see that Monolith is at least making an official sequel now, as opposed to an unofficial one.
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