Monolith Productions Inc. and WB Games Inc. are pleased to announce that we have purchased the F.E.A.R. name from Activision/Blizzard. Monolith Productions, the creators of F.E.A.R., have been developing the true sequel to F.E.A.R. over the last two years under the community selected title, “Project Origin.” With the name being returned home, the game will now be titled F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
Now that Monolith owns the rights to F.E.A.R., I imagine the only games that will have F.E.A.R. in the title are ones that Monolith develops.
Granted Monolith’s own sequels could still be crappy, but I have more faith in them than whatever was being developed over at Activision.
Or the 360 port done by that Chicago studio. I loved the PC original and played it from beginning to end, but the 360 port’s controls were pretty bad. They still retained the WASD digital movement and rigid slow walk versus fast run speeds for moving around, instead of converting it to a more gamepad friendly analog movement.
That’s what I’m wondering. They were pretty far in development, so I don’t think they’d just drop it. But if they remove the FEAR label, that’s going to drop sales of those games considerably.
Monolith is owned by WB. Activision bought Blizzard, Vivendi, and Sierra and Sierra had the rights to the name. Since Activision apparently has not interest in making future games using the FEAR title, they sold it back to Monolith/WB.
Do you mean additional sequels or are you referring to the expansions? If you mean sequels, then I would assume yes, those are done. However, I don’t remember any mention of them when Activision dropped a several other Sierra titles in development a month or so ago (i.e. Ghostbusters, etc.)
I love that the first FEAR expansion pack was named “FEAR: Extraction Point”. I always theorized that it was developed under the codename “FEAR: Expansion Pack” and they realized at the last minute they needed a less generic name and juuuuuust managed by a tapir hair to think of “extraction point”. Adam of course denied this vehemently at the time.
The subtitle for the second expansion pack, “Perseus Mandate”, is basically a parody of itself.
Yep. And now Monolith will have to spend even more time explaining that they don’t consider the expansions as part of the story. So it’s like they never happened, even though they have the FEAR name on them.
Activision only announced the fate of officially announced games. It didn’t say anything about unannounced games. We knew a F.E.A.R. sequel was in the works, to be published by Sierra, from some sources, but it wasn’t formally announced yet, so Activision didn’t mention its fate.
So yeah, for all we know, they sequel has been canceled, or maybe it will emerge one day under a different name.
It was originally scheduled for a fall release, but got pushed back to early next year.
I think it’s a good thing. I haven’t had any sort of hands-on time with it myself, but from what I hear the more recent preview builds were extremely promising - a real worthy successor to FEAR and not just a “big standalone expansion” that I was worried about. It’s the kind of game that would just get BURIED under the massive fall release schedule of bigger brands. They’re probably going to do a lot better if they spend 3-4 more months really making a polished game and getting in those features that are inevitably dropped at the last minute, and releasing in the Spring when they can be “the hot release” for whatever week they hit.
Or at least not have to compete against 6 other games coming out that month that each have bigger brand names, bigger marketing budgets, etc. Better to be the big fish in March or something than a little fish in October.
Not to mention that FEAR came out in a holiday season that was pretty weak for shooters. I’m pretty sure Quake 4 was the only major FPS it had to compete with that holiday season on the PC. That’s clearly not the case this year.
I’m so happy about this news. I played both expansion packs on the 360 and they were terrible. I couldn’t bear them, and it wasn’t just the bad graphics. I hope the Sierra FEAR 2 disappears in a shadowy mess of… shadows.
