Engine room: F.E.A.R. Factor

Logan Booker scares the willies out of Monolith’s Craig Hubbard, John O’Rorke and Kevin Stephens.

Logan Booker scares the willies out of Monolith’s Craig Hubbard, John O’Rorke and Kevin Stephens.

Programmers today strive to code games that are more visually impressive, physically realistic and thoroughly immersive than what has come before, while designers work tirelessly to comprehend the capabilities of current technology and how it can drive, and even improve, their narratives.

Over the past seven years, developers have been coming to terms with hardware transform and lighting, flexible shader pipelines and detailed physics engines, and what these technologies allow them to do in terms of storytelling. It’s only now, almost a decade after the introduction of the 3D accelerator, that its potential is being realised.

The ultimate goal of any game designer is to create a tale with multiple levels of interaction; a tale that sucks the player into the writer’s world. There, they understand, and even respect, certain principles introduced by the designer. They respect fictional laws, converse and even become attached to non-player characters, identify aggressors and develop solutions to problems based on in-game inferences, be they current or retrospective. It is at this point the game stops being a series of choices, and becomes an interactive, and perhaps memorable, experience.

This is exactly what Monolith’s latest creation, F.E.A.R., is. And it’s a goddamn terrifying one at that.

Totally mental

‘F.E.A.R. evolved from concepts we started working on right after Shogo [Mobile Armor Division], but we ended up doing the No One Lives Forever games instead,’ says Craig Hubbard, the lead game designer on F.E.A.R. Hubbard has worked on a number of Monotith titles since 1996, including Blood, Blood 2 and Alien vs Predator 2, all the way to Contract J.A.C.K. just two years ago.

‘We’ve stuck to our original focus, but everything else has gone through multiple iterations: premise, setting, story, characters, arsenal, and even core game mechanics,’ he explains.

F.E.A.R. stands for First Encounter and Assault Recon. According to Hubbard, the story starts after an unknown military force attacks the headquarters of a company that specialises in aerospace tech. In response, a Delta Force team is tasked with solving the problem, a task it fails at miserably. Cue the F.E.A.R. team, which consists of you and a bunch of other highly trained dudes, equipped to deal with situations that no one else can.

At the outset, the exact reasons for the assault are unclear, but that changes as the game progresses – if you can call finding a creepy young girl with pyrokinetic, telekinetic and telepathic abilities a logical enough occurrence and a perfectly acceptable explanation.

It may not come as a surprise to learn you’re not a part of an elite military force just because you look sexy in a beret. The protagonist has access to a supernatural ability or two of their own to help against what can only be described as insurmountable odds. In F.E.A.R., the player can slow down time at will, but only for a moment.

Although this game mechanic has been used in a number of titles over the years, the most notable being Max Payne, it’s proved to be an effective way of ramping up a game’s average difficulty. By slowing down time, the player can react quicker, killing more opponents and squeezing their way out of situations that would normally be fatal.

Hubbard admits that a desire for stylised fighting, much like that in Hong Kong action films, was a big influence. ‘The focus for F.E.A.R. is on intense close quarters combat. The three main technologies that bring this to life are the physics, the special effects, and the per pixel lighting,’ explains John O’Rorke, F.E.A.R.’s engine architect. ‘The special effects allow for creating all of the fine detail such as shredded paper floating in the air, sparks bouncing off of the environment, or dense smoke that fills a room.

The physics bring the environment to life, so when a box is shot it topples correctly, when a body falls against a locker door the door moves realistically, and when you shoot a light fixture it falls and swings around.’