Monolith's F.E.A.R

Sorry if this is a double-post, but I didn’t see the topic anywhere else.

I saw the demo of this at E3, and it was one of the best things at the show.

It’s full-on action set in a very real-worl environment, but has a truly creepy supernatural element. The screenshots don’t do it justice - when you see it in motion, the full per-pixel lighting and totally awesome grenade effects and everything really look as good as just about anything out there. Great audio, too.

And lemme tell ya, it’s a heck of a lot scarier than Doom 3’s skeletons with jetpacks and fat zombies. :)

Anyway, it seems to me that 1up certainly didn’t have an appointment to see it (wasn’t on the floor), because it’s not mentioned in their show stuff and I would have expected to definitely see it in the best of show page.

Did anyone else see it? Am I on crack for thinking it’s one of the best things at E3?

BTW - one thing I loved about it was that the demo wasn’t just some canned recording or anything. It wasn’t one of those “the one time our scripting or AI didn’t break” sort of setups. Six people just sat down, put on headphones, and watched a guy hit “new game” and play for 20 minutes. I was impressed how well everything worked, given that it’s probably a year or maybe more from release.

first look - http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/fear/513626p1.html
e3 story - http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/fear/516149p1.html

The new engine looks great, although it stuttered a bit in our E3 demo. It’s cool that they’re mixing standard counter-terrorist combat with what I guess you’d call anime-horror, but they’ve still got a long way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how it all comes together.

For the demo, I can’t understand why Monolith was stuck in the equivalent of a phone booth and crowded 6 people around a regular 21-inch LCD. At the least, they should have had a plasma screen set up for it. It seemed like a disservice to one of the few interesting new PC games at the show.

We had a plasma, but it turns out that the one we got couldn’t display 32-bit color, and FEAR doesn’t have a 16-bit mode, so it looked really really bad. We had to go with the crappy setup for the first day until we got a projector on Thursday.

Damn, I wish I would have known that. I would have tried to come back to see it on the bigger screen. Glad to hear it was sorted out.

I also enjoyed the various sites who misreported this as NOLF 3 and AVP 3 before the show. Great stuff. :|

Yeah, I saw it on the big screen. My pick for most impressive game of E3. (Though also the farthest out, with the possible exception of HL2. <grin>)

Alas, nearly all the really impressive PC games I saw were shooters. Which is great, I love 'em. But most of the innovative designs were on the XBox.

In a word: Stunning.

Alongside Black & White 2, Fear provided me with the most pleasant surprise.

I was impressed how well everything worked, given that it’s probably a year or maybe more from release.

Is it really that far out? I thougth initial previews said it was targeting a year-end release.

If anyone said it was coming out at the end of this year, they’re mistaken. FEAR is a Q2 2005 game.

From one of the previews:

You play the unnamed point man of a classified government squad named F.E.A.R. – First Encounter Assault and Recon – specializing in dealing with the supernatural.

A special forces unit tasked with taking down unknown/supernatural entities created by the team that did Aliens vs Predator 2? Count me in.