FEAR Review | Cause and Effect | 2022 Review

fear is a pretty cool game in part because i think its success was almost accidental well success is relative i guess the developer monolith was absorbed under the warner brothers umbrella before the game even came out and after the franchise fizzled out they ended up making the middle earth games what a weird transition it gets even weirder when you find out that they've been further gutted by being forced into making a superhero game for wonder woman but what's the story with monolith well there are two types of first-person shooter developers from the 90s you were either a studio that was pushing the technology to make something that wasn't even possible years prior but would make extremely simple games where you were taking the existing technology to try and create something truly impressive and marketable monolith was the latter similar to raven look at doom 3 a year prior id was trying to push the envelope with it an fps rooted in horror i didn't get to play fear as a kid but i did play doom 3 and i'm not particularly nostalgic about those memories it's an impressive game in terms of technology especially compared to fear jesus just look at these character models a boy we've got a son catherine a beautiful healthy baby boy but that's just serving the purpose of having a character there it's not half-life 2 again released the year prior and eager to show off its character models at immense length yet fear sits at the big boys table anyways and that's because instead of focusing on amazing lighting physics or character animation fear is about the gameplay not that gameplay demonstrating technology is neat but the thing monolith was demonstrating was how fun it could be see fear is a complex game you can say it's a fusion of horror in action i would say it's firmly an action game that largely failed at its aspirations of horror it's in the title fear but each letter is punctuated as was required by the patriot act first encounter assault and recon that sounds stupid but that's likely the point the fact that it stands for fear is on the nose like it's compensating for not really being scary yeah that doesn't scare me what is she gonna do kill me i can quick load horror is a debated topic because what scares people is largely subjective you can objectively scare people by having a long streak of silence punctuated by a sudden burst of noise i'm not gonna do that to you because it's brutish i don't play a lot of horror games because obviously i a big strong brave man do not find them scary rather it's something they added to try and make the game scary that actually complemented the combat it's called pacing pacing is an often misunderstood or underutilized tool in game design take project warlock it is very authentic in that it copies the pacing of the games it is drawing its inspiration from which is to say it is room after room of combat and if it isn't you are lost fear pacing is more like you fight a squad then you recover from fighting while exploring eventually restock your resources and then you hear another squad coming and prepare to fight them you are given time to process what is happening but the key to making that work is that something also has to happen you try to do this in a game without good combat it's gonna fail but we know fear combat is good so now let's ask why is it so good i like to start with effects and aftermath i'd say the title but that's lame combat encounters and fear ended in crime scene get the mod that makes decals and blood permanent and you could play this game co-op where players take turns trying to guess what happened in the previous combat encounter just from the evidence when you're shot there is a blood spatter and bullet hole behind you that's the kind of detail this game goes for drywall is deformed dust gets kicked up blood goes everywhere rainbow six siege came out a decade later and still couldn't emulate all of this and it tried despite living in the digital distribution era where esrb ratings are effectively meaningless we still don't get games this bloody it's not gory and it's not trying to shock you just for fun blood is important as far as details go halo combat evolved of all games got that right its remaster did not i'm already running out of budget to reference other games point is when you end a fight and have to walk past all the bodies it's easy to get into the mind of the player character and step around the blood which isn't always possible because of how much there is and it's really fun to get into the headspace of the point man or the fear operative because of how visceral everything is at any time you can turn your head and ask the game to pass the popcorn because it's watching alongside you part of this is the level design which is not the last time i'm gonna say that industrial areas and abandoned apartments are fine but the office areas make an amazing setting for this game and it's personally my favorite section i do not understand people who hate this part of the game if literally the entire game was just being dropped off on the roof and having to fight my way through the entire building down to the ground floor i would still love it there's just so much that can get damaged in every fight glass panes cubicles clone soldiers the only part i would have to complain about in the office segment is the bizarro floor layouts i can imagine attendance was an issue given that to reach my cubicle i have to take an elevator to the 4th floor cut through several offices access a stairwell that only goes from floor 4 to floor 8 and then cross through 3 different people's offices just to reach my cubicle the weird layouts make more sense in industrial environments or in abandoned buildings where you can just block hallways off with rubble but the other area where level design is important is an artificial intelligence ai is an often misunderstood part of game design largely because it's extremely technical and is boring to explain so it's easier to write it off as magic it practically is the ai lead designer later went on to get his phd from mit and his thesis was about guess what artificial intelligence so of course fear has amazing combat ai in a paper he wrote for gdc 2006 the year after fear which i actually do recommend you read jeff orkin accurately and correctly explained to the problem that was facing ai designers in the mid-2000s which is that players were satisfied with 90s ai which for the most part just detected and fought the player but that studios were having trouble keeping up with the demand for innovation the [ __ ] was that wait what was that oh i think i touched a can i watched one of our marines get hit shot the head and then it did that it made that noise and that was because instead of creating new systems they were trying to just stack more and more complexity on old ones it was like solving a traffic problem by shoving more lanes onto a road it was more traditional to use a finite state machine which would give the ai multiple states to be in peacetime combat if you detect the player etc orkin decided instead to use goal-oriented action planning or in essence instead of ai just being in a combat state where it tries to establish a line of sight and uses cover when it's not shooting the ai would have goals it would try to accomplish fsms are good enough for most games but leads to simple and replicable behaviors goal-oriented systems don't because the enemies basically watch what you're doing and react in fact orkan remarks that one of the goals of the system was to keep the ai fun because it's very easy to develop a system that just kills the player it's a lot harder to develop a system that creates adequate challenges to overcome that said fear and the hardest difficulty is not a difficult game at least for me so whatever restraint they put in wasn't for my benefit because i tend to cover my flanks move quickly and am very reactive it was hardly the masochistic experience that i was promised and i was hoping for pain it was pretty easy to run around meleeing enemies to sleep that's a weird choice to label the difficulty like that by 2005 it was out of fashion to make a big deal about how these games were going to make you their [ __ ] but just because sometimes combat encounters would end instantly didn't mean it wasn't fun by the way keep this between us i think the game overrode the difficulty down to just moderate but i did play perseus mandate on extreme difficulty which is much more of an accomplishment than fear one for some not so great reasons fears ai works because it's not designed for any one encounter instead it dynamically responds to whatever you give it are they in a meeting room they can flip the table over to create cover is there a way to get behind the player send the guy to go flank is the player trying to cheese you throw a grenade at them the only real fault is that they're only really telepathic when it comes to squad status so while you can sneak up on the first guy they'll instantly figure out what you're doing having ai this dynamic likely helps and submit that there would be less work put into any one area you could make the game longer which was good because it was all about the combat it was so easy in fact that another studio could step in and create expansions as long as a typical call of duty game however these proved a testament that the strength of the fear ai was in close quarters combat because when they tried to create larger environments you would see the ai behave more recklessly standing out in the open isn't as punishing when the longest sight line you have is 10 meters it means the ai is near brain dead during sniper sequences what is funny is that the premise of these soldiers would actually justify them just being ruthless killing machines this also started to be the era where games had to explain why they were happening why is the player character so capable why are we fighting these people etc well the first question is a twist for the end as to the enemies they are a battalion of clone soldiers controlled telepathically by one man our goal for most of the game is to kill that man to deactivate the soldiers and they make good on that promise at least until the expansions when we needed them to come back as enemies so really it seems like all the callouts and communications they make are pointless telepathy and all but monolith decided to add them anyway because they wanted the player to see the intelligence on display again it's like a mistake that worked out for the better why create the premise that the soldiers are controlled telepathically if this is how they operate you could just as easily say that the clones are slivers of fetal soul or something so everything else about them is normal if this was a standard boring shooter then i would make a bigger deal about that but it doesn't matter because that's how powerful good gameplay is now i'm not saying that good games can get away with having bad stories as long as it's just context for good action look at the darkness too and how much of its short run time it wasted on its bad story it's all about how intrusive those bad elements are to the experience this is the kind of game where helicopters getting shot down as a scene transition this is also the kind of game where less than 90 seconds later you can blow someone's kneecaps out from under them the fact that fear's approach to combat remains on top of the industry is indicative of the fact that the golden age of gaming ended when the 7th console generation began we have great combat effects and an ai that is fun to fight over and over the weapon roster also demonstrates lean efficiency every weapon fills the niche without overshadowing the others and the combat sounds amazing [Applause] the ammo economy however is almost non-existent pretty much the only scarcity was in the most powerful of weapons and grenades so there was never any tension or worry of running out of ammo in the middle of a fight and given how powerful the shotgun is it reloads way too quickly managing your supply of health packs is also a joke and i never decided to play it safe for fear of ever running out which is strange to say of a horror game there's no restrictions because the most powerful weapon in the game are the shotguns and rifles that most of the enemies carry the best way to stop me from running around with a spaz 12 killing a literal battalion of clones is to cut off my supply but that would make fear a bad action game i think the vast majority of these guns ever made are in the hands of these clone soldiers you'd think evil incorporated wouldn't spend the cash buying them expensive sport shotguns but half-life did it and this game is basically just about fighting the heck you marines that said the combat is not really where the horror is instead that's in between combat which is very often dark now needs to be stated the player character in fear does not utilize a flashlight he uses a headlamp if things ever get scary just imagine this guy wearing a headlamp the headlamp has a limited battery that recharges which i always find annoying it doesn't create tension it just means i'll sit somewhere until it recharges there's only a few times where you get attacked in the dark and a recharging headlamp doesn't make those encounters better what makes the headlamp actually tends to use is the fact that the ai can enter into a combat alert when they see the light generated by it so you're incentivized to not use your flashlight on the off chance that you might get the drop on a patrol the lighting in this game is amazing it's not just the occasional lamp that swings around in an explosion it's that there's so much dynamic lighting i'm surprised the flat uh the headlamp isn't also a dynamic light source at least without a mod darkness is actually dark it's amazing how often that can get messed up there were a few occasions in the expansion where there was unexplained ambient lighting which just goes to show how deliberate monolith was in fear 1. you can watch your shadow on the wall and make sure it isn't sticking around corners and on the flip side use the enemy's shadows to predict their movements my only complaint about the lighting is that it's used to signify where health and reflex boosters are located to improve your combat abilities but the game also uses normal green and blue lights as part of the environment yeah there's some player character progression in this game it's just raising your health and the duration of the slow motion which was reset anyways when you load up extraction point which is supposed to be a direct continuation the slow motion in particular is well obviously it's a selling point of the game but when i tested it a bit i found that the ai is also made less accurate when you use it it infinitely recharges and you get way too much meaning that it's easy to choose pretty much every encounter by using it if i was designing this i'd probably have a resource alongside the health packs for recharging your reflexes like downing massive amounts of caffeine you could probably beat this game on the hardest difficulty without dying just by overusing this power that might be the point since it's apparently just the unique power granted to us by being the paranormal girl's son which makes it so that we can do the video game protagonist things that other people in this setting can't although the perseus mandate protagonist also has it as well so who knows like this is about how long normal guys last in this universe our chances just aren't good the twist is that we are the product of an experiment that evil incorporated did involving this little girl that we see throughout the game well she's not actually so little anymore nor is she particularly happy about the experiment it is a fine premise for explaining where this military force came from why so many weird things are happening and why we aren't immediately killed like pretty much everyone else but i'm not going to pretend that the story was particularly good or compelling or that it's the perfect excuse since an extraction point the replicas began deploying in even bigger numbers than before fear was good about making it feel like you fought your way through the majority of them but obviously there had to be sequels part of the story's issue is the way the game uses its characters for instance you have jankowski he's a member of our team that goes missing early and appears in hallucinations throughout i guess to compel us to keep going but the game never conclusively answers what really happened to him because that's not important it's about the combat but then why slow things down by even involving him in the proceedings instead of just killing him early that's why i think the horror aspects of the game failed just in a way that happened to make the action aspects of the game better throughout the game you can find phones and alienware laptops filling us in on the story get it because that's what it took to run this game back then usually there was something to do while overhearing the phones like picking up armor and grenades stashed in the room but sometimes there wasn't and sometimes the phone call would be something like hey hope work is going well and you haven't been murdered love you in fact that was all you could find an extraction point i mean i guess it's realistic and they try to make it seem very tragic that most of these employees got thrown into a body pit at the bottom of the elevator shaft it is clear that while this is alma getting revenge for what happened to her that there's a lot of collateral damage along the way it's not like that guy generating tps reports even worked at the company when they decided to impregnate the point is while what's going on here is extremely simple as far as justifications for games go it's fine although i do find blowing up the vault a forced segment of the game that's a lot of damage to accomplish basically nothing i guess it set up the sequels the game flirts with the idea of confronting our nature as a rube but never makes any good on it the only point where it isn't fine is when it slows things down just to sell the imagery it didn't feel like alma was a dangerous paranormal force as much as she was just a prankster who always took things too far the only instance of this being creative is when it made it seem like the game glitched out and i fell through the map geometry only to land in a pool of blood that was cool hence why the expansions both reused the idea that wasn't as cool but yeah it's annoying in like most horror elements it doesn't work the second time which is a testament to how good the rest of fear is that this game is immensely replayable anyways just thinking about the cortana segments of halo 3 makes me not want to play that game casually and fear does that a lot more often i suggest you go to steam l wait to buy fear on steam you have to purchase the complete pack for 55 dollars because that's the only way they can rope people into buying the sequels as well now you could do that or you could go to gog and just buy the game you actually want given the rights holders are still in business it's weird that the franchise is being treated like abandonware what happened fear was really good and sold appropriately the problem was that in 2004 monolith was purchased by warner brothers but vivendi games the publisher that monolith had originally made their distribution deal with still owned the name fear monolith would immediately move on to develop fear 2 while vivendi handed timegate studios the license to develop extraction point and perseus mandate as expansions to fear 1. by the time fear 2 came out monolith had reacquired the name from vivendi to give you guys a bit of lore vivendi was a french media company sitting on top of sierra online and blizzard that in 2004 merged with universal interactive and then in 2007 would merge with activision into the activision blizzard we know today however actablez was not interested in many of the titles that had come as part of the agreement weird right vivindi spent practically the entire sixth consul generation consolidating intellectual properties only for activision to pretty much hone in on blizzard being the only thing they owned that was worth acquiring because world warcraft was massive so as part of that monolith and warner brothers got the name fear back and in 2009 would release fear 2 project origin however that didn't stop favindi from pushing to make their own standalone fear game which ended up being converted into fear 3 released in 2011. it turned out the entire staff had been put under intense crunch and milestone chasing while warner brothers would send them top-down edicts like that since co-op is popular that fear 3 needs to be co-op and then alongside that in 2012 they happened to release guardians of middle earth a [ __ ] lord of the rings moba to tie into the hobbit trilogy excuse me i was never into mobas but it's insane that this is a thing that nobody i asked had ever even heard of that's how we ended up with monolith who'd always prided themselves on artificial intelligence eventually creating the middle earth games and the nemesis system therein honest to god these stories of corporate acquisition and tracing the genealogy of video games are usually more interesting than the stories that are actually in the games themselves for the most part fear 3 killed the series by having disappointing reviews and sales and subsequently when warner brothers decided that lord of the rings was a more profitable franchise to focus on but of course sphere 3 was disappointing because monolith didn't make it but that's not surprising it's not a patrician video without publishers making bad decisions that end up killing their franchise at least this one doesn't involve bethesda now compare all that with what's in fear 20 years ago an evil corporation did something horrible to a psychic girl which resulted in the player character being born do we have psychic powers do we absorb the latent negative energy around us like our mother um no we just have advanced reflexes because the matrix was cool i don't know why fettle acts like we don't have memories it's actually been 20 years since our birth i assume we just got raised i mean how seriously am i supposed to take the story where the main corporate cleaner wiping evidence of wrongdoing is this guy despite double crossing us multiple times we still take a suggestion of blowing up the vault to kill a ghost i kind of like him i think it's the hawaiian shirt as fun as jurassic park references are it's an odd inclusion tonally and the game is aware of that because it changes the music to be goofy again this might be them trying to do some horror thing i don't understand that ended up not working out and then you have the expansions you might be wondering if extraction point and perseus mandate were made concurrently and extraction point is even a direct sequel how did fear 2 handle those story elements the answer is that they didn't care and made it a separate timeline disconnected from server what what the [ __ ] is this a ubisoft game yeah so while fear 1 received a few patches the expansions did not version 1.0 baby modding compatibility can be hit and miss for instance fear had a fixed user interface which means that at modern high resolutions it's absolutely tiny it also struggles with the frame rate on modern computers because directx 8 was created by sinners who didn't understand how usb drivers work those problems can be fixed easily on all versions but if you want the mod that makes all the bullet holes and blood permanent then that only works in fear 1 and extraction point and the mod that makes the headlamp a dynamic light source will only work in fear 1. this is all because monolith didn't actually make the expansions meaning they had to be separate versions of the game and time gate was experimenting and trying to address criticisms of the base game in their own design they made the level layouts more open because some people complained about the claustrophobic nature of a horror action game that was inspired by john woo movies a common talking point in the death of the fear franchise is that it started turning into call of duty which i would argue started with extraction point and was in full effect by perseus mandate for every one good level or detail that ep has it has five not so great things for instance in the subway section they improved the level deformation to not just chip tiles off the wall but have entire chunks of walls get destroyed when exploded but they forgot to really create good justifications for why most of the doors can't be opened fear always made it generally clear why you couldn't go through a door the expansions don't bother perseus mandate is a whole other beast fear in 2005 was amazing fear in 2006 was dated because of the generational transition in fact when fear came out on the xbox 360 it was released with updated hd textures hdr and an updated particle system it was even stated by the devs that it was better to release their game at the apex of the sixth generation than wait for the early seventh but fear in 2007 was extremely quaint this is a level and an expansion for a triple a video game released in 2007 i want you to bear in mind that this was released the day after call of duty 4 came out but it makes sense remember vivendi was responsible for this who was at this point trying to pitch themselves to activision this expansion is really bad you can at least say that extraction point is kind of like off-brand fear it at least has the same form of the original game so if you're just looking for more fear content it's fine perseus mandate is just a different product entirely well mostly there's a couple segments of this expansion which felt like they were made first that sort of mesh with the original game design it's the connective tissue that ties all those things together that really drags it down it's so much of a call of duty game that it introduces a new faction of mercenaries for us to fight instead of just reusing the existing replica forces which is basically proof that monolith nailed it out of the park with them yeah that's the best they can do with the merc call outs they take more damage than replicas and they use weapons that do more damage they also just don't seem as advanced in their behaviors which is easy to contrast because in some instances perseus mandate still uses the clone soldiers which of course were some of the better parts of the expansion because these guys take more damage and dish it out so fast the pace of fights slowed down drastically as i switched to just trying to nail head shots from behind cover there are also these commando guys that were extremely annoying to fight i also noticed that there were a lot more health packs and armor kits everywhere like they were trying to emulate regenerating health this was when i just started running past encounters where possible except these guys are bosses so it just locks the door until you're done pretty much everything that made fear cool is lost in this expansion and that's reflected in the review scores fear went from an 88 to a 75 to a 61. there are some weird contemporary criticisms of perseus mandate which is that it was called formulaic it's weird to complain that it's doing the same thing over and over with one that's not true and two that would have been better literally all you have to do is make more if you have a good thing going why would you want the expansions to change anything this is a winning formula which is just a sign that vivendi probably saw fear's original design as too dated ultimately it came down to the fact that the wave of strong first-person shooters that defined the turn of the millennia had come to an end between the original and its final expansion timegate studios went on to develop their own game section 8. the problem was that their publisher south peak which i had literally never heard of ended up in a lawsuit with them over the game that would eventually see time gate liquidated oh and to add to that while the lawsuit was ongoing gearbox decided to outsource development of an aliens game to timegate which ended up being colonial marines that sounds bad but the nearest i can tell is that the game's low quality was not entirely their fault just mismanagement due to the success of borderlands so back to back they had gotten screwed by multiple publishers vivendi who was trying to hold onto fear south peak who barely seemed to exist and would disappear not long after and a tag team of sega and gearbox and so in sphere 1. you've got your trap hang too emulating this kind of action and attention to detail but playing through the demo it's obvious to me that didn't really try to emulate the pacing of fear probably because it doesn't bill itself as a horror game it's more like a fusion of the action parts of fear and crisis it's been a minute since one of these hasn't it i mean if bethesda can delay starfield then i can push back actually talking about outer worlds to focus on more important things notably a skyrim video that people somehow haven't heard that i'm making or aiming for the funny 11 11 22 date that they had to abandon i just decided to cover fear one day as a short vacation thanks to the patrons for funding my bad behavior who get to see this stuff early

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 69,008

Keywords: Patrician

Id: hwrAJGo5ri0

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2022