GP: As with any horror, most elements are drawn from other horror concepts in popular culture. What movies, books or other games would you say have been your biggest influence whilst designing F.E.A.R. 2?
Dave: Japanese horror is still the dominant influence in F.E.A.R. 2. That idea of the vengeful ghost from classic Japanese horror films is still strong in our game, but I think people will start to see some nuances of other influences. Since we are so inspired by films, I can tell you that we looked at the Nightwatch and Daywatch series, High Tension, even Saw. Our inspiration from those films may not be from the most apparent or dominant in them, but we pulled some fabulous things from them that fit really well with the great recipe for horror that we had in F.E.A.R. When you are playing F.E.A.R. 2, see if you can catch some of those nuances.
GP: There's a lot of talk around the modifications you've made to the AI, in regards to proactively seeking cover, smarter targeting, flanking techniques etc. How did you make sure that the player wouldn't suffer cheap deaths? Have you upped the firepower to compensate for this enhanced AI?
Dave: In the first F.E.A.R. there were a few weapons that definitely made an impact with the community. So those items like the penetrator are making a comeback for F.E.A.R. 2. But early on we realized that we would not be able to just deliver another set of weapons alone. Coming back to one of our mantras of “variety”, we brought an armour penetration value to each weapon. For instance, the pump shotgun has a high damage value, but a low armour penetration value. This means it’s great for your standard troops, but starts to have less and less effect against those with heavy armour. Whereas a rocket launcher has a concussive element to its damage, all of these factors will play out in how the enemies will react to you and being hit.
This type aspect of your arsenal will have impact on how you approach combat against each enemy type. Depending upon how you use you weaponry, will ultimately affect the combat resolution. I think as you see the enemies leveraging elements in the environment, the player’s options in the combat volume, the weapons in your hands, and the various type of grenades that shape the space, you will see that F.E.A.R. 2 will require the player to make very tactical decisions about which weapon to use and at what time.
GP: The communities request for a mech suit made it into the game - were there any other suggestions that you seriously considered incorporating, but decided against?
Dave: Sure. Suggestions both by our devs and community. When making a game like this, there are many ideas that get left of the cutting room floor, some that went through a lot of iteration before we decided to stop working on them. There are many things that felt really good, but ultimately didn’t make it in either due to time, resource or the most common; it started to feel less like F.E.A.R. I didn’t mention any specifically as I’m sure we will leverage those for later.
Remember Monolith make a lot of games and we always learn from our previous work, and use that knowledge when moving forward.
GP: Are you able to reassure our PC gamers that this won't be a simple port, and they'll be able to experience the same ease of mouse/keyboard control available in the first F.E.A.R?
Dave: Yes, yes, and yes. We understand that our roots are PC centric from the first F.E.A.R., with that said, there are certainly a lot more variables involved when developing a multiplatform game, but the potential for rewards are much greater as a result. We had no input in the console ports of F.E.A.R., and looking back, if we had some say there are things we might have approached differently. Because we are developing all three versions of F.E.A.R. 2 in tandem, this allows us to take advantage of the strengths of all three platforms. We aren’t building the game on a primary SKU and porting to the others. Each platform is treated with a goal of synonymy, as an example, when a piece of art is generated we make sure that it works as intended on all three versions.
Our goal is to make sure that regardless of what platform you play our game on you’re going to get the best possible experience, and play the game exactly as intended.
GP: With all the graphical and physics changes this time around, were you bound more by the console hardware limitation? Or are we still a little way away from hitting that barrier?
Dave: I think each platform presents its own unique challenges. For PC a dev team never gets a chance to work again with the same exact hardware specs like on a console.
GP: What now for the team? A quick holiday followed by (hopefully) some DLC?
Dave: There are some great things in the pipe, things we can’t talk about yet, but rest assure it will match the expectation that Monolith is associated with.
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F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin will be released on the 13th February. We have a stack of trailers over at GP Downloads as well as the PC demo if you'd like to catch up on the story so far!
