Interview F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

X-Power: I’d like to ask this since Monolith has been acquired by Warner Brothers a while ago. What are the differences between working with them and to publishers that have been longer in the gaming business, who’ve also had more experience with videogames?

Dave Matthews: That’s a good question. They actually respect us a lot; they respect us as developers. They know that we’ve consistently been able to create pretty visceral worlds and cool gaming experiences across many years. Because of that, they afford us a lot of freedoms. They have a lot of trust that we’re going make the right decisions. I think that might be one of the things that’s kind of unique about them and our relationship we have with Warner. I think if you look at some of the other partnerships that we’ve had, they might’ve been a little more stringer or they’ve had very specific requirements of us, but ultimately it’s been a great relationship [with Warner].

XP: One thing most people give Monolith games credit for, is how visceral the combat in most of their games seem. Could you give us a little more insight in how much effort the team puts into this to achieve such results?

DM: First off: we have two teams at Monolith that are constantly working on a couple of different projects and as a whole, we share so much between the two as far as our inspirations go. We watch movies all the time, we read books, comics, … If there’s something that’s really cool that’s a must-see – we saw High Tension: First Hit recently – it immediately spreads like wildfire around the office, because everybody’s saying “You have to see this!”. That kind of synergy that occurs is just getting people to talk time and time again; everybody starts to refine their thoughts and ultimately that would manifest itself in our development process.

XP: Co-operative modes like Terrorist Hunt in Ubisoft shooters or Horde in Gears of War 2 are steadily growing in popularity lately. Valve even created Left 4 Dead, which is solely based around this concept. Can we expect a similar mode in Project Origin, especially given the excellent A.I. of the franchise?

DM: I’m going to tell you that we’re not going to have a co-op mode, but I’m going to tell you why it’s an awesome thing. So, at the beginning of the development we really wanted to have co-op because we recognized it was a growing area. As we started to experiment with the horror aspects, we realized that type of horror that we had, that emotional triggered horror, gets incredibly deluded with a co-op perspective. Because we tailor certain experiences – if you see something out of the corner of your eye on-screen – it invokes a very specific response. If you have two guys that are dealing with that, you can’t necessarily craft that experience so that they’re both getting the same trigger.

Because of that, we decided that we wanted to make a single player experience. We felt the horror side was more important than going co-op.

XP: That’s understandable, but go further into that question: I didn’t specifically mean the single player campaign, as you raised a valid point. But rather you and a buddy (or multiple) versus the A.I. in a random environment. Like Horde in Gears of War 2.

DM: If you’re start getting into a multiplayer type, I can’t tell you everything what we’re going to be talking about. Very soon we’re going to have a whole announcement that talks about that aspect, so you have to be on the look-out for that. If I were to say it, I guarantee you that even with these walls that one of my PR people would jump through and stab me in the neck! So, I can’t tell ya.

Either way, be on the look-out as we’ll announce it really soon… I will tell you though, we’ve been working on a lot of different multiplayer stuff over at Monolith and when servers go up, multiple times a week, we’re still happy and eager to jump on to play it. We’ve been playing this stuff for over a year, so I hope that speaks something!

XP: Speaking of the A.I.: does the team have great pride in this because not many games succeed in providing intelligent enemies? And how does one even start designing clever A.I.?

DM: The A.I. in F.E.A.R. as well as in F.E.A.R. 2 is not scripted, so it’s all stimulus based. The way we can get great performances out of the A.I. is to educate them as best as we can about the environment. So the more we teach them about how they can leverage the environment in combat, they can make better intelligent choices to deal with the player as a combatant. As you said, we’re pretty damn proud about our A.I. and I think people will notice in F.E.A.R. 2 that we didn’t just sit on our laurels and didn’t just keep it on the level that it was, that actually we pushed it forward. Because you can start to modify your environment, as far as creating your own cover and those kind of elements, the A.I. is going to respond to you in like.

You’re also going to start to see that their knowledge of environmental hazards is a lot higher, so you can have incendiary grenades… Have I talked about that?

XP: Yes. You’ve discussed how, if you catch them on fire, they’ll drop their weapon to try and pat it out.

DM: Yep. There’s also a whole electrical aspect to it as well. So, their knowledge of combat opportunities and hazards within the environment has grown tremendously from the first game and you’re going to see that manifest itself in defensive as well as aggressive ways.

XP: Can we expect more straight-up horror moments (be it visual or psychological) in F.E.A.R. 2, since Monolith has experience with the horror genre thanks to the Condemned series?

DM: I think there was a lot of great stuff we took out of the first F.E.A.R., but again we couldn’t just sit where it was at and hopefully you’ve seen in the demonstration that we’re pushing forward on that. We realize that the horror aspect that creates tension is very different than the tension that you get from the shooting side. What’s great about that is, because they’re different you can almost put them back to back and have no lull or dead space in the gaming experience. And it all still feel really fresh and you don’t really get numb to it because they’re two different aspects.

If you look across F.E.A.R., Condemned, Condemned 2 and now into F.E.A.R. 2, we just keep building on the experience. We find things that work and then we try to leverage that moving forward every single time. So now you’re sort of starting to see the culmination of at least three shipped products that are very dark in nature, and in F.E.A.R. 2 that’s the efforts coming to fruition.

XP: Do you have an idea whether there’ll be a downloadable demo pre-release? If so: has it been decided what it’ll include?

DM: There are absolutely plans to release a demo. I don’t exactly know the date it’s supposed to come out, I know PR can give you that date eventually. But as far as all the cool content: we want to make sure people get a good slice of what the F.E.A.R. universe and F.E.A.R. combat is all about, so you’re going to get a good spread or a variety of different experiences. It’s not going to be just one level that’s kind of plucked out so that people can play it; it’ll be an unique experience that’s different from any of the levels in F.E.A.R., but it will be a great snapshot of what the sequel is all about.

XP: One thing I noticed about the melee combat, is that you’re mainly restricted to using the butt of your gun barring a few exceptions. This may sound clichéd, but have you considered adding more (optional or not) emphasis on melee combat, like partially being able to use your fists? Especially after Condemned.

DM: There’s definitely another melee component you’ll eventually get to in the game, where you can get attacked by melee A.I. and see how you have to deal with them. We haven’t taken all the great things from Condemned. We definitely picked a couple of cool things. But again it comes down to the ideas: if you bring them across wholesale, it ceases to be F.E.A.R. as you know it. So what things can we bring across and still add them to the universe, add to the essence of what F.E.A.R.’s all about without diminishing it.

XP: Just for the sake of curiosity: could you name a few movies or other media you’ve used for inspiration for combat, horror and so forth in F.E.A.R. 2?

DM: Hardboiled, The Killer; a couple of John Woo films. I’ll even say there’s a scene inside The Rock where the soldiers come up into the shower room inside of Alcatraz, and it’s like: the guys are up top, it’s all slo-mo, that delicate ballet that’s going on and stuff’s going everywhere, tiles being shattered, … That’s a great inspirational scene.

If you look at the horror aspects: Nightwatch / Daywatch, High Tension, SAW, … Not the gore side of SAW, but moments in the movie like when the characters wake up and have 30 seconds to do something, otherwise something bad’s going to happen. All of a sudden your stomach gets tight as a viewer; those kind of moments is what we’re trying to borrow from SAW. But there’s a ton of references on the whole.

We look at games too: clearly you can look at Fatal Frame, Siren, Silent Hill, … We were all eager to see Dead Space come out, so a lot of us were like “We need to play this!” as soon as it hit. It was interesting to see how we and they approached horror, and what the differences were.

XP: A few minutes ago you talked about creating very immersive experiences, at least in First-Person. Half-Life is famous for this, so could you confirm whether or not F.E.A.R. 2 will also stick to said first-person view throughout the entire campaign?

DM: Yes, absolutely. One of our tenets for making F.E.A.R. 2 is that we really wanted to push immersion. Everything you experience, you experience as the main character Becket. So if you’re jumping through a window, you’re experiencing it and you’re literally seeing Becket jump through it. If he’s planting his hand on a space to vault over it, you’re seeing that. If you’re flipping cover, you’re seeing yourself interact with that cover that way. Anything, even the goggles when we were explaining the HUD earlier: he actually has a set of goggles he puts on, and you see it kind of boot up. When he climbs inside the EPA, you see him physically climb in and pull down the hatch. All those things are geared towards immersion, and so we hit a cinematic aspect that’s continuing the story, interacting with the NPC’s, … All that stuff is first-person driven and we never leave the body.

XP: Would you say that F.E.A.R. 2 is more shooter-oriented than the first game, and less about horror? We saw that the spaces are now larger than in the first F.E.A.R., which was largely situated in confined area’s and narrow corridors.

DM: It’s simple actually, as part of a philosophy. So we still have tight environments – I’m not going to say we don’t – but as we get out into larger, open area’s… Think of it out of a shooter perspective: if you want to create a real tense moment, you can create fire channels or a hot zone. Even though the volume is really large, you can create great combat opportunities that kind of revolve around certain areas. Ultimately, you can leverage that same philosophy for horror experiences. It’s all about how you direct the player’s focus so even if it’s in a big space, you can still have a very intense experience with combat or even horror.

And while we were creating horror, one of the things that we realized is that one of the main tenets of what creates tension in people is breaking expectation. Let’s say you come into this room; everything in here looks completely normal. But if in an instant you can take something and maybe it’s as simple as taking a chair and throwing it to the ceiling or sliding it across… It’s something that’s not necessarily standard behavior. Your expectations break and they break in a non-assumed way, and as soon as that happens, inside your head there’s an emotional trigger that says “This is horribly wrong.” and at that point you go into a very defensive mode. So you can leverage that time and time again, so it comes back to this idea of breaking expectations which creates a heightened awareness.

XP: Could you provide further explanation about the technological improvements in F.E.A.R. 2?

DM: Sure. We’re not using Jupiter EX from the first F.E.A.R. anymore; we’re utilizing Monolith Proprietary Technology now. I’ll throw out a bunch of stuff we already have that’s new: HDR, motion blur, ambient occlusion, faster physics, vast volumetric lighting, depth of field and all sorts of other in-game camera effects, … We also have detailed normal mapping now. In the first game we had base normal mapping, so if you got close to something, you didn’t get additional surface detail. There’s more and more and more. And then there’s the fact that we’re now developing on all three platforms simultaneously, while during the first game we were only PC-centric and afterwards it was ported out of house. Because of how everything panned out, it forced us to change our “work clothes” and our pipelines.

Either way, the list is long and vast. I worked on the last 6 months of the first game and from that tech to this tech, there’s so many more cool things that we can do now to help build that real visceral world that’s full of horrific moments. It’s awesome to have all of that stuff at our hands.

XP: During the demonstration, I noticed some spikes between 60 and 30 frames per second. Do you know which framerate it’ll be in the retail version?

DM: We’d like to have it run at the highest frame possible obviously, but we also want to make sure that we’re getting the best possible experience. So if we have to lock it down to 30 because of all the bells and whistles that we’d like to show, we’ll take that extra time and the extra GPU cycles to put even more good visuals into it.

XP: A short question about the achievements in the game: will they be based more around simply finishing the game or about providing a meta-game of sorts for the player so they can do other things once they finished the main game?

DM: Sure, yeah –

XP: And could you give a few examples perhaps?

DM: [laughs] I was good up until you said that! Anyway… We have some that are all about progressing through the story, but we also have a bunch that are all geared towards encouraging exploration, learning a lot about our combat mechanics and experimenting with that. I can’t tell you any of them, because that’s some of the cool meat you’re going to get when you get the chance to play it.

Bottom line: we have trophies and we have achievements. The idea of us going to multiple SKU’s and developing simultaneously, is so that we can have synonymous experiences. Somebody is going to go exploring to find achievements, collectibles and things like that. And we want to make sure that on the PS3 and on the PC they have that as well.

XP: Alright, this concludes our interview. Thanks.