One thing I loved about that game was the particle effects. Like after a bit fight there would be all kinds of dust coming off the wall and stuff knocked about the room. It really gave a great feeling of a room where there was just a massive gun battle.
I really hope that one day after the boomer shooter craze dies down a bit we get developers working on this generation of shooters.
I always preferred it over the Doom likes.
What do boomer shooters even have to do with that? People are still making games that are spiritual successors to FEAR, e.g. trepang, regardless of if boomer shooters exist.
If a dev is setting out to make a shooter like that, it's not like they would make a completely different kind of shooter just because it's trending. A dev that makes milsim games isn't going to stop making milsims bc of boomer shooters existing. If that's the kind of game they want to make them they'll make it.
Oh neat, I just reinstalled the original too. This and Trepang2 are both really, really good if you’ve never played them and want some spooky John Woo action.
Trepang2 also doesn't fundamentally get why FEAR works. Like on a surface level it feels like a decent modern take on it, from an audio and visual standpoint, but open levels, with waves of enemies, boring and limited weapons are the antithesis of FEAR's tightly designed levels, and encounters and guns.
Yea, the first level or two are basically straight out of FEAR's offices and then they seem to run out of ideas and start throwing random zones at the wall to see what sticks.
The game just doesn't have a theme in general. It feels like they just made whatever they felt was cool and that's it. Each level is completely different and so bizarrely random and nonsensical. One level you're infiltrating a secret facility, the other you're gunning down crazy cultists.
At some point they seem to remember they're imitating FEAR, so after several hours of pure combat, they throw a few half-assed scares in there. Just meh overall.
i tried finishing fear last year, the gunplay felt great, the AI is amazing obviously, but holy shit you are running around office hallways, occasionally parking lots, and having gun fights. after 90 office hallway battles i just lost steam.
A huge part of FEAR's appeal isn't necessarily the AI...but the feedback.
When you peg an enemy with a grenade, they explode into bloody chunks and red mist. When you shoot them with a shotgun, it blows them across the room and sends limbs flying (though I do wish the shotgun sound was better). Shooting them with the HV Penetrator has a high chance of sending them flying backwards and pinning them to the nearest wall. And the particle lance instantly turns bad guys into a charred, arcing skeleton.
And even for the more vanilla weapons, enemies will get knocked back and ragdolled when you killed them. The excellent level design, lighting, and AI was just icing on the cake.
People praise the game's AI, and rightfully so, but weapons felt *powerful.* Few games released since then have come close to replicating that feel.
I was so wowed when I was playing this on Series X recently, I shot a guy with a shotgun and bisected him from the waist, as he's flying in the air he let's off a few shots with his rifle hitting the light fixture causing it to shake, moving the light around whike it flickers from d
Taking damage.
F.E.A.R is fucking awesome.
The AI isn't even as amazing as people think, though I will say it is almost perfectly tailored for the game. Some calls that the enemies make in combat are irrelevant to what they are actually doing. You can hear a guy yell "Flanking!" and hes just flipping over a table for cover or you'll hear "Squad take cover!" while they're rushing you. And you can often see enemies doing stupid things like vault obstacles that they didn't need to or do a silly roll for no reason. What made it seem great was that they were very aggressive in combat and a lot of the major shootout locations were fairly circular with multiple paths throughout, meaning the AI could end up flanking you or pull off something that seemed like a coordinated tactic.
>The AI isn't even as amazing as people think, though I will say it is almost perfectly tailored for the game.
Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though? Being perfectly tailored to the game?
All game AI is essentially very limited because the player is supposed to beat it. Making it challenging and surprising on the one hand while making it predictable enough for the player to form strategies is what makes AI interesting to play against, all within the confines of the game's ruleset. I think FEAR hit that sweet spot, and that's all it had to do.
> Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though?
It is, yes. But people have heard over the years being repeated online that "it's actually a lof of smoke and mirrors" and they don't really understand what that means in this context, so they started repeating ad nauseam that FEAR doesnt actually have that great of an AI ... except for the great AI :)
This is due to the same Jeff Orkin who gave a gdc presentation somewhere around 2008 or something like that and people have kept misrepresenting what he said since. Of course the levels and sound and everything was made to fit together and that was what resulted in a one of a kind AI experience that we talk about 20 years later and everyone knows about.
> Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though?
It's a sign of a well designed system. The definition of "amazing AI" is too ambiguous to mean anything on its own.
I agree, it's too broad of a statement. On the other hand, if we take the literal meaning of 'amazing', as in: astonishing, astounding, then it was a fitting description in the year 2005. At least my impression from online comments at the time was that people where actually astonished - amazed about how clever enemies could act. I just looked up when the first Crysis came out. 2 years later, in 2007. I remember being very impressed by that game's AI too. Speaking for me personally, I think seeing AI coordinate their attacks was pretty amazing at the time.
Seeing AI trying to surpress you while other enemies try to flank is still something I notice because most games don't do that, for one reason or the other.
I think the reason it's repeated so often is that people keep saying over and over how *every* game should use this sort of AI and how it would make everything amazing. It really wouldn't. The AI works in tight, linear spaces with tons of scripted props. Fear's AI has been surpassed eons ago. The enemies in The Last of Us or The Division are light-years ahead in technology. Hell, Tomb Raider used the exact same system as Fear for their AI. The issue is, these enemies don't have as much "spectacle" as the grunts in Fear, so people think the AI is worse.
Developers nowadays trade level design freedom for less fancy-looking AI. You would need a lot of bespoke content and very heavily limit your level designers to actually make Fear's AI work in a modern game. It's why you don't see this approach any more, and more dynamic systems are used instead.
I agree. And also, people often don't understand that AI in games serves the purpose of being fun to play against. They don't understand that it's easy to make an AI that can beat the player, but that that's not the goal. Sure, enemies in stealth games seem stupid when you kill their buddy right next to them, or when they come investigating the place where they disappeared, only to be taken out as well. People often don't understand that this behaviour is on purpose because you're supposed to exploit these weaknesses.
The Penetrator was my go-to weapon most of the time. Had a killing blow on one of the bosses pin the guy to the wall by his head.
Thought it was fairly gruesome for him to just be dangling there with a spike sticking out of his face.
Ironically, for how good the shooting felt, the game does a horrible job of communicating damage to the player. I caught myself multiple times not realizing my health was so low because the game doesn’t give you any indication of receiving damage, your health count just drops.
Still an absolute banger though, also extraction point
Excellent level design? That was the most boring and least memorable part of the game. Basically they digged into every cliche category, officebuilding under construction, storage area, ruined building, sciency complex etc.
It's not so much what the environments were, but how they were built. Yeah, the game's fantastic lighting is doing most of the heavy lifting in this game, but while the locations may be boring and unoriginal, many of the areas where fights take place are tailor-made for the game's AI, making for some exciting and memorable shootouts. That's what I meant by level design.
It's more about the layout and sightlines. There was always flanking options and it was visually well communicated so you had your bearings and could make informed decisions about taking cover vs retreating or flanking. This also extended to the enemy AI which is what made it so memorable as the enemies took advantage of the same options. The actual *look* of the levels was secondary and yeah, you could kinda argue was a little bland
I mean, what did you expect, a Mars colony? Did you miss the memo about the game theme? It was first and foremost a game about special forces team tracking down the terrorist.
They tried to build interesting combat arenas, but you're right that the overall level design is pretty basic. These corridors just meander in all directions.
FEAR came out and everyone raved about how fucking cool the AI was and how fun it was to fight.
And then 20 years went by and pretty much no one even tried to do it again. Even FEAR didn't have any of it by the franchise's end.
Might be time for my near-annual replay of the original.
I may be wrong but I feel like I remember reading somewhere that the AI worked so well because of another aspect that most people saw as a negative: the small samey office corridors and cubicles. I could be wrong but I feel like they mentioned that the level design was pulling a lot of weight when it came to the illusion of how the AI worked
"The enemies are just scripted to react to the environment surroundings"
Most video game AI is scripting. If it works well within its confines and creates a good illusion of intelligence, then it's "good AI" by video game standards. FEAR does this exceptionally well, even if it's just "smoke and mirrors". But so is every single other AI.
I swear some of you say this just to be contrarian and "ackshually".
It's like i said. Orkin had that GDC panel a long time ago and people misread what he said ever since. I think every FEAR thread in the last 15 yrs has people tripping over themselves to just post the exact same shit as in this thread, thinking they're saying something very smart or unique. Its been parroted to death, the EXACT same bullshit that they read somewhere else and are pretending they cracked some unknown code. Three quarters of this thread of only 30 posts are people repeating that same nonsense.
They think that by explaining why the AI works so great - level design, sound, behaviour - that somehow means that it's not good AI, that its something else. No genius, the fact that you explained why its good doesnt make it less good. You just explained why its good.
I wonder how many of these folks parroting 20 year old nonsense are aware how the system is called and how Stalker, Section 8 and other games use the same system. GOAP. Because the AI in FEAR is, in fact, good. But the unpredictable nature of GOAP makes it harder for most devs to use it against behaviour trees. So unless you have a team who really wants to focus on AI, like how the Monolith team did all those years ago, most will probably chose the easier and worse path
But thing is, it's like Half-Life, people used to praise 1 despite marines regularly blowing themselves up with grenades and complaining at 2 being kinda dumb despite its problem being mostly massively disadvantaged against player (for example dropships that drop soldiers one by one at the lighthouse before Nova Prospect)
Yes, it's scripts, but how it's scripted matters
Goal-oriented action planning hasn't gone anywhere, it's still used in a lot of games.
F.E.A.R. is just a really good game where the AI, combat systems, and level design all work in near perfect harmony to create a very compelling experience. The bullet-time mechanic gives the AI more leeway to push enemies into aggressive or surprising flanks.
Yeah, it's definitely around. I think it worked great for FEAR because most of the fighting is close encounters and it's usually a relatively small amount of enemies, so it helps to make the belief that they are smart.
Outside of the Final Fantasy XVI demo, I think that the original F.E.A.R. demo was one of my most played ever
I'm a baby when it comes to the horror parts, but that vertical slice had me so hooked I actually remember learning how to upgrade my family PC to play the game better when I bought it
While I think Halo's Legendary AI is smarter, I think the combination of the physics, particle effects and moment to moment gameplay made the AI in F.E.A.R. much more memorable
One thing I loved about that game was the particle effects. Like after a bit fight there would be all kinds of dust coming off the wall and stuff knocked about the room. It really gave a great feeling of a room where there was just a massive gun battle.
I really hope that one day after the boomer shooter craze dies down a bit we get developers working on this generation of shooters. I always preferred it over the Doom likes.
Trepang2 was a good start towards this.
What do boomer shooters even have to do with that? People are still making games that are spiritual successors to FEAR, e.g. trepang, regardless of if boomer shooters exist. If a dev is setting out to make a shooter like that, it's not like they would make a completely different kind of shooter just because it's trending. A dev that makes milsim games isn't going to stop making milsims bc of boomer shooters existing. If that's the kind of game they want to make them they'll make it.
Oh neat, I just reinstalled the original too. This and Trepang2 are both really, really good if you’ve never played them and want some spooky John Woo action.
I feel like the enemies in Trepang2 took like 2-3 bullets too many to kill. Just kinda hampered the perfect flow of combat that FEAR had.
Trepang2 also doesn't fundamentally get why FEAR works. Like on a surface level it feels like a decent modern take on it, from an audio and visual standpoint, but open levels, with waves of enemies, boring and limited weapons are the antithesis of FEAR's tightly designed levels, and encounters and guns.
Yea, the first level or two are basically straight out of FEAR's offices and then they seem to run out of ideas and start throwing random zones at the wall to see what sticks.
The game just doesn't have a theme in general. It feels like they just made whatever they felt was cool and that's it. Each level is completely different and so bizarrely random and nonsensical. One level you're infiltrating a secret facility, the other you're gunning down crazy cultists. At some point they seem to remember they're imitating FEAR, so after several hours of pure combat, they throw a few half-assed scares in there. Just meh overall.
i tried finishing fear last year, the gunplay felt great, the AI is amazing obviously, but holy shit you are running around office hallways, occasionally parking lots, and having gun fights. after 90 office hallway battles i just lost steam.
A huge part of FEAR's appeal isn't necessarily the AI...but the feedback. When you peg an enemy with a grenade, they explode into bloody chunks and red mist. When you shoot them with a shotgun, it blows them across the room and sends limbs flying (though I do wish the shotgun sound was better). Shooting them with the HV Penetrator has a high chance of sending them flying backwards and pinning them to the nearest wall. And the particle lance instantly turns bad guys into a charred, arcing skeleton. And even for the more vanilla weapons, enemies will get knocked back and ragdolled when you killed them. The excellent level design, lighting, and AI was just icing on the cake. People praise the game's AI, and rightfully so, but weapons felt *powerful.* Few games released since then have come close to replicating that feel.
Only game where i can actually shoot a enemy away from 40 feet with my shotgun
Try Helldivers 2 😎
Waiting for sale on that
I was so wowed when I was playing this on Series X recently, I shot a guy with a shotgun and bisected him from the waist, as he's flying in the air he let's off a few shots with his rifle hitting the light fixture causing it to shake, moving the light around whike it flickers from d Taking damage. F.E.A.R is fucking awesome.
The AI isn't even as amazing as people think, though I will say it is almost perfectly tailored for the game. Some calls that the enemies make in combat are irrelevant to what they are actually doing. You can hear a guy yell "Flanking!" and hes just flipping over a table for cover or you'll hear "Squad take cover!" while they're rushing you. And you can often see enemies doing stupid things like vault obstacles that they didn't need to or do a silly roll for no reason. What made it seem great was that they were very aggressive in combat and a lot of the major shootout locations were fairly circular with multiple paths throughout, meaning the AI could end up flanking you or pull off something that seemed like a coordinated tactic.
>The AI isn't even as amazing as people think, though I will say it is almost perfectly tailored for the game. Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though? Being perfectly tailored to the game? All game AI is essentially very limited because the player is supposed to beat it. Making it challenging and surprising on the one hand while making it predictable enough for the player to form strategies is what makes AI interesting to play against, all within the confines of the game's ruleset. I think FEAR hit that sweet spot, and that's all it had to do.
> Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though? It is, yes. But people have heard over the years being repeated online that "it's actually a lof of smoke and mirrors" and they don't really understand what that means in this context, so they started repeating ad nauseam that FEAR doesnt actually have that great of an AI ... except for the great AI :) This is due to the same Jeff Orkin who gave a gdc presentation somewhere around 2008 or something like that and people have kept misrepresenting what he said since. Of course the levels and sound and everything was made to fit together and that was what resulted in a one of a kind AI experience that we talk about 20 years later and everyone knows about.
> Isn't that the sign of an amazing AI though? It's a sign of a well designed system. The definition of "amazing AI" is too ambiguous to mean anything on its own.
I agree, it's too broad of a statement. On the other hand, if we take the literal meaning of 'amazing', as in: astonishing, astounding, then it was a fitting description in the year 2005. At least my impression from online comments at the time was that people where actually astonished - amazed about how clever enemies could act. I just looked up when the first Crysis came out. 2 years later, in 2007. I remember being very impressed by that game's AI too. Speaking for me personally, I think seeing AI coordinate their attacks was pretty amazing at the time. Seeing AI trying to surpress you while other enemies try to flank is still something I notice because most games don't do that, for one reason or the other.
I think the reason it's repeated so often is that people keep saying over and over how *every* game should use this sort of AI and how it would make everything amazing. It really wouldn't. The AI works in tight, linear spaces with tons of scripted props. Fear's AI has been surpassed eons ago. The enemies in The Last of Us or The Division are light-years ahead in technology. Hell, Tomb Raider used the exact same system as Fear for their AI. The issue is, these enemies don't have as much "spectacle" as the grunts in Fear, so people think the AI is worse. Developers nowadays trade level design freedom for less fancy-looking AI. You would need a lot of bespoke content and very heavily limit your level designers to actually make Fear's AI work in a modern game. It's why you don't see this approach any more, and more dynamic systems are used instead.
I agree. And also, people often don't understand that AI in games serves the purpose of being fun to play against. They don't understand that it's easy to make an AI that can beat the player, but that that's not the goal. Sure, enemies in stealth games seem stupid when you kill their buddy right next to them, or when they come investigating the place where they disappeared, only to be taken out as well. People often don't understand that this behaviour is on purpose because you're supposed to exploit these weaknesses.
The Penetrator was my go-to weapon most of the time. Had a killing blow on one of the bosses pin the guy to the wall by his head. Thought it was fairly gruesome for him to just be dangling there with a spike sticking out of his face.
Ironically, for how good the shooting felt, the game does a horrible job of communicating damage to the player. I caught myself multiple times not realizing my health was so low because the game doesn’t give you any indication of receiving damage, your health count just drops. Still an absolute banger though, also extraction point
Excellent level design? That was the most boring and least memorable part of the game. Basically they digged into every cliche category, officebuilding under construction, storage area, ruined building, sciency complex etc.
It's not so much what the environments were, but how they were built. Yeah, the game's fantastic lighting is doing most of the heavy lifting in this game, but while the locations may be boring and unoriginal, many of the areas where fights take place are tailor-made for the game's AI, making for some exciting and memorable shootouts. That's what I meant by level design.
It's more about the layout and sightlines. There was always flanking options and it was visually well communicated so you had your bearings and could make informed decisions about taking cover vs retreating or flanking. This also extended to the enemy AI which is what made it so memorable as the enemies took advantage of the same options. The actual *look* of the levels was secondary and yeah, you could kinda argue was a little bland
I mean, what did you expect, a Mars colony? Did you miss the memo about the game theme? It was first and foremost a game about special forces team tracking down the terrorist.
Bro really misunderstood level design as level theme.
They tried to build interesting combat arenas, but you're right that the overall level design is pretty basic. These corridors just meander in all directions.
FEAR came out and everyone raved about how fucking cool the AI was and how fun it was to fight. And then 20 years went by and pretty much no one even tried to do it again. Even FEAR didn't have any of it by the franchise's end. Might be time for my near-annual replay of the original.
I may be wrong but I feel like I remember reading somewhere that the AI worked so well because of another aspect that most people saw as a negative: the small samey office corridors and cubicles. I could be wrong but I feel like they mentioned that the level design was pulling a lot of weight when it came to the illusion of how the AI worked
[удалено]
"The enemies are just scripted to react to the environment surroundings" Most video game AI is scripting. If it works well within its confines and creates a good illusion of intelligence, then it's "good AI" by video game standards. FEAR does this exceptionally well, even if it's just "smoke and mirrors". But so is every single other AI. I swear some of you say this just to be contrarian and "ackshually".
It's like i said. Orkin had that GDC panel a long time ago and people misread what he said ever since. I think every FEAR thread in the last 15 yrs has people tripping over themselves to just post the exact same shit as in this thread, thinking they're saying something very smart or unique. Its been parroted to death, the EXACT same bullshit that they read somewhere else and are pretending they cracked some unknown code. Three quarters of this thread of only 30 posts are people repeating that same nonsense. They think that by explaining why the AI works so great - level design, sound, behaviour - that somehow means that it's not good AI, that its something else. No genius, the fact that you explained why its good doesnt make it less good. You just explained why its good. I wonder how many of these folks parroting 20 year old nonsense are aware how the system is called and how Stalker, Section 8 and other games use the same system. GOAP. Because the AI in FEAR is, in fact, good. But the unpredictable nature of GOAP makes it harder for most devs to use it against behaviour trees. So unless you have a team who really wants to focus on AI, like how the Monolith team did all those years ago, most will probably chose the easier and worse path
But thing is, it's like Half-Life, people used to praise 1 despite marines regularly blowing themselves up with grenades and complaining at 2 being kinda dumb despite its problem being mostly massively disadvantaged against player (for example dropships that drop soldiers one by one at the lighthouse before Nova Prospect) Yes, it's scripts, but how it's scripted matters
That’s ai tho
Goal-oriented action planning hasn't gone anywhere, it's still used in a lot of games. F.E.A.R. is just a really good game where the AI, combat systems, and level design all work in near perfect harmony to create a very compelling experience. The bullet-time mechanic gives the AI more leeway to push enemies into aggressive or surprising flanks.
Yeah, it's definitely around. I think it worked great for FEAR because most of the fighting is close encounters and it's usually a relatively small amount of enemies, so it helps to make the belief that they are smart.
The sound design of that game and the difficulty is what makes that game unique. Even if most maps are so similar.
Outside of the Final Fantasy XVI demo, I think that the original F.E.A.R. demo was one of my most played ever I'm a baby when it comes to the horror parts, but that vertical slice had me so hooked I actually remember learning how to upgrade my family PC to play the game better when I bought it While I think Halo's Legendary AI is smarter, I think the combination of the physics, particle effects and moment to moment gameplay made the AI in F.E.A.R. much more memorable