TVGB: With such destructive capabilities, one concern is that the horror aspect of the game may suffer. How do you balance the two elements?
DM: Good question. If you look back across our demos – we demoed at E3 and GDC we actually had a regenerative health system. Because we were playing with ideas about how to best maximize vulnerability, best maximize tension. And we experimented with all sorts of stuff in gameplay and ultimately we came back to a medikit system. We realized that if you are re-genning, you can come into a spot and you could hold up, back up and you could sit and wait. That can be tension filed, but it puts too much control back in player’s hands to define their fate. And one of the ways that you can create great tension is to remove some of that power, so as soon as you start to feel powerless, you’ve got tension. So ultimately, that is some of the defining factors of our philosophy. It’s a really delicate formula, we had to take a look at fear and see exactly what it is that makes tension in a game.
TVGB: Did you use your own engine?
DM: Yes, this is Monolith proprietary technology and it’s very different from what F.E.A.R was shipped on. So we have made advances in the bag of tricks we get to use. We have full HDR, ambient light occlusion, fast volume rendering. We have in-camera effects like depth of field, motion blur and we’ve improved our physics tremendously. All that translates to more visuals and more activity on screen. So I think you will probably notice if you go back and play F.E.A.R. and then see what you saw today you’ll see a lot more activity, that chaos of combat, you are gonna see that stuff heightened. It’s a huge step; I think we made significant advancements with what people experienced in the first game to what they see in F.E.A.R. 2.
TVGB: Sound design is incredibly important to create tension, what can you tell us about the sound in the game?
DM: Our sound department are really top notch. We have a composer and he plays the game, he analyzes it and he scores to it. Then we go on location shoots. This is something we have done at Monolith for generations of games now. We go to locations and we want to go to a school, we want to go to anywhere we can find like a ruined city, all that kind of stuff. And we’ll hire a location scout, to find those places for us. We’ll go out there with artists, level designers, and audio guys. Ultimately, we’ll examine the space and some of the things we can get out of it are awesome.
Anecdotally; we were out at one site and there was this dead bird and it was kind of stiff and mummified, it had been dead for so long. And we were looking at it like ‘this is fricken cool’ and we were taking pictures and stuff but no-one wants to touch it. We were like don’t touch this, it’s bad mojo, don’t disrupt it it’s been there for a long time. But then somebody kicked it. And as soon as he kicked it, it was like game on. So the audio guy has his mics next to it and they’re like stepping on the bird, crushing its bones and pulling on it and stuff – so ultimately you are gonna hear a lot of those sounds in the game. It’s awesome because it speaks of all the craziness that we’ll go to, to create the best experience.
TVGB: The game is out in February. Was it a deliberate move to avoid a crowded holiday season?
DM: Ultimately, there were certain things that we really wanted to have in F.E.A.R. 2 that we wanted to make sure were in the game right. So we didn’t want to ship half-assed. We wanted to take the extra time as we wanted to make sure this stuff is right on. And again, because Warner has a lot of trust in us, they agreed. I mean, we still come out around other stuff; Resident Evil 5’s coming out around us and Killzone 2. It’s not that we were afraid of the competition; it’s that we wanted to make the game we intended to make.
TVGB: The shooter market is pretty saturated right now, what sets F.E.A.R. 2 apart?
DM: To me I think competition is always a concern, but it’s healthy because you get to see how other people approach the same mechanics, and you can learn from it. It’s great. Great mechanics – it’s fabulous to learn from. If it’s bad mechanics – it’s fabulous to learn from. So to take all that and add to what you already know is a good formula.
I think another thing that really sets us apart is that there are a lot of shooter games out there that don’t have a secondary aspect of – I won’t say horror, you could insert something else into it – but in an FPS one of the big challenges is you have this high intensity of combat, but if you do that too long it kind of numbs you. So you have to create specific lulls and if you have those lulls in a straight up FPS, what do you put in that space? Having a horror aspect to it, it creates a great clearing and now we can get a nice ebb and flow between combat and horror. So we never really have dead spaces.
TVGB: And DLC plans?
DM: I’m not allowed to talk about DLC, all I can say that is that we recognize its importance (smiles).
TVGB: Has Monolith being part of Warner Bros. changed the way you‘ve thought about the game’s development?
DM: It really hasn’t. It’s awesome. They gave us so much autonomy, we never feel like they are trying to constrict us. They understand we have a really good history of making quality games and because of that they understand we have a good method, a good formula. And they just want to keep nurturing that so they’ve never really come in and said it has to be this way or that way. They really trust us to do the right thing which is great.
TVGB: So do Monolith see F.E.A.R as a trilogy, maybe even more?
DM: We have a tremendous amount of story that we would love to tell about Alma and about the universe. I think there is so much story that there is left to tell. We have dry marker boards full of story, so there is definitely a lot of story that we could tell. If the fans are into it, we’re into it.
TVGB: Can you see Warner making a F.E.A.R. movie perhaps?
DM: It would be awesome! The universe is so rich we have tons and tons of back story and we try and hint at it a little bit in F.E.A.R. and it created a lot of questions that we left unanswered. So in F.E.A.R. 2, we swept back through a lot of those questions and made very specific actions to answer a lot of those and then pose a few new ones because… as with every good horror or action film, we’ve got to leave a few lingering.
F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin is released in the US on Feb. 10, worldwide Feb. 13.
