The video game called F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon gets a bum rap, even though everyone knows it rules. The bum rap is that everyone thinks it's just the AI and the guyshoot that rule in F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon, when actually a ton else about F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon also rules.

You're on some kind of little X-Files XCOM squad, which is a great idea, and it's called F.E.A.R (First Encounter Assault Recon), which obviously rules, and this whole idea isn't taken seriously by anyone not on the squad, which is perfect. The intro is super succinct. It's got, I reckon, the best largely-audio-log-based story in any game, where the "audio logs" are all voicemail messages left on landline telephones, the least contrived approach to this ever taken. They're genuinely good performances of out-of-context tidbits from which you can piece together several stories of relatively mundane capitalist evil that frame the supernatural horror stuff really nicely.

A lot of folks reckon the horror stuff is clumsy or naff, or the occasional jumpscares are not scary, or they are scary in a cheap way, but I see it as pretty well-executed, and what I suspect is actually happening is that people have a hard time switching gears from awesome-feeling shootouts into spooky slow stuff. A horror experience is something you have to fully cooperate with, sort of the opposite of a challenging shooter. A game with basically the same horror stuff but none of the action movie stuff is Condemned, by the same folks, and that scared everyone.

One of F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon's side stories is the minor mystery of an entire part of town being abandoned (it's been poisoned by runoff from the corporation the game is about) and I always thought that would have been a perfect tie-in to Condemned (a game about a city full of ultra violent people being affected by something which might as well be the same runoff stuff), had Monolith decided they wanted a Shared Universe Situation, but Shared Universe Situations are a nerd-impulse best resisted, so this, too, rules.

F.E.A.R: First Encounter Assault Recon does the Silent Protagonist Who The Twist Is They're Central To The Plot thing, which doesn't rule now, because everything did it, but it sort of did rule at the time. The Twist is almost exactly the same in its content and delivery as Bioshock's, but earlier; I have a hard time thinking it wasn't an influence. It's also a story where the evil supernatural force thing turns out to be totally justified in its boundless wrath and rage, which always rules.

Besides all this, it really does have the best FPS AI and guyshoot ever devised, and constantly when you play it you see very cool little VFX or design touches that you don't see anywhere else, plus you can slide kick a guy so hard he goes through a wall, and it's like two bucks on Steam or whatever.

i was going to just comment on joe's post (good as always) but as usual when a comment gets past three paragraphs, i became filled with doubt before i finished it and investigated and discovered my convictions were false

minor F.E.A.R. spoilers below

i played fear when it wasn't yet over a decade old and it was the best horror game i'd ever played in my life. it did things that we didn't know were possible in games yet and nobody talked about it and i didn't understand why. if joe's right that people talk shit on this game i don't know why. it was a masterpiece and while i don't know if it holds up, there was nothing to complain about when it was new.

my comment was about the best scare in any horror game in history. and i'm talking about forwards and back because nobody is going to outdo this, or at least that's what i remembered. here is my memory of the scare

in the middle of the game, you're getting onto a ladder, like you've done 3,000 times already. this is a "you can see your feet" type of game (one of the sole two genres of FPS) so you have to animation-priority your way onto it. you press E, and your character puts their foot on the top rung, and the camera swings around in the standard getting-onto-a-ladder animation you've seen dozens of times already, which happens to end with your field of view below the level of the floor you were just on.

2/3 into the animation, as your character is past the point of no return and has to finish getting onto this ladder if you don't want to plummet to the floor, your camera sweeps across alma standing six inches away from you directly at the top of the ladder. but the animation is locked in, and just continues past her as you settle, and ends with her out of your field of view. by the time you can look up or climb up, it's been a quarter second; you know she won't be there. you still check, though, and you're still freaked the fuck out when she isn't there.

i remember being absolutely floored by this scene. turns out it didn't happen at all like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo7HA7Y89XI

yes, you animation-priority your way onto the ladder, but it's much faster and clunkier than i recall. when the animation ends, you're just staring at alma, standing dead still. she then begins to dissolve. here, in 2023, this has no punch whatsoever. she just... stands there and melts?? i am laughing, almost. what? i was scared by this?

well.

in 2006 or whatever when i first played this, i had never played an FPS with animation priority motion. i was used to half life, etc. where ladders were basically magnets that your character could slide up and down on. you couldn't see your hands or feet, so you couldn't see them reach out and touch things. you were not a person, you were a camera equipped with v_ models

fear felt so organic, so real, so heavy. i had learned, by this point in the game, that i could not get off a ladder without waiting through the animation. i knew that i was glued to that ladder as soon as i was on it, and it made me uncomfortable. i actively felt less safe and in control because i couldn't do absurd "air control" quake bullshit in this game. i liked that, a lot, i liked that my character had weight and physics and couldn't do a zero-zero jump six feet straight up and eight feet to the side off of a ladder.

but that was so novel that it made me actually feel even more constrained than i really was. i am positive that, at the time, i believed this scene played out exactly the way I said above, and that's because i was so scared of the way the game had manipulated me, had made me take an action that made me vulnerable which i had internalized up to that point as perfectly safe, that I saw things that didn't exist.

i told myself that getting onto a ladder was safe. more specifically, i told myself that turning my back to a place i'd already looked at was safe, because in 2005, videogames didn't know which direction you were looking.

in 2005 i had never seen an FPS that changed the world state or triggered script actions based on whether you were looking in a particular direction. this is of course very easy nowadays - it was easy then, too, but i had never seen it and i don't think it was common.

but even moreso, getting onto a ladder in a half life era game wasn't an event. no game, to that point, had ever changed the world state based on your being on a ladder, because that wasn't an action. you didn't press a button to climb onto a ladder, it was a movement state, you could enter and exit "being on a ladder" by moving one pixel left and right, to contact or not contact it.

fear, however, made it a specific action which you had to commit to, an Event, a little micro cutscene you had to watch, and that threw me off so hard. i had accepted "this game uses an animation to put you on ladders," sure, but it had never occurred to me that that meant that the game was taking over my body when i clambered onto one, and what the implications of that were.

see, in all other FPSes, you couldn't do something like make an object appear behind the player, because game scripts couldn't seem to make anything happen at a resolution finer than a couple seconds. if clive barker undying wanted demons to spawn, they just kind of popped into existence and hung out for a couple seconds before doing anything. that, plus the seeming inability to tell where the player was looking that i had observed, plus the fact that this was a PC game, where the player could survey their entire surroundings by just whipping the mouse half an inch to the side on their desk, meant that i had simply never conceived of it being possible to introduce an NPC to the world without them either running in from another room, or spawning in full view of the player.

i had been subconsciously scared when fear took my instant mouse control away for those brief moments when clambering onto ladders. it had bothered me that i didn't get to choose where i was looking, so i couldn't survey my surroundings for attackers, but it didn't click that this unsettled me until i climbed onto that ladder and was stuck, mid-animation, staring at alma.

the reason i remember this being so slow and deliberate is because i was genuinely panicking, so time perceptually slowed down. the reason i don't remember her being visible at the end of the animation is because my animal brain said "welp, we just got eaten by a Predator i guess" and shut off my hippocampus in order to move my consciousness to the Penalty Box to watch my fuckup on looping Instant Replay

game of the year

(gravis did a comment on my FEAR post so long he made it a post, and now I'm doing that with that post, and this ends up being about all kinds of things)

Half-Life 2 (and maybe 1, but I don't think so?) had a trigger type called trigger_look, which was like a regular trigger, but it only executed if you were both standing in the trigger and looking at the specified entity. They used it heavily for Gman stuff - in HL2, if you walk backwards into an area you're supposed to see the Gman in, and then turn around, that's when he straightens his tie and walks away, he only does it if you're looking.

I remember thinking this was incredibly cool at the time, and it was, not for the ability to do that check necessarily, but for exposing it to level designers as a trigger type - a coder at Valve saw the problem of "player isn't looking when the cool thing happens" and provided LDs (who were the ones making all the scripted sequences) with an easy way to say "wait til the player's looking, then do it". It's a level of facilitation by code of LD that, these days, you're surprised (and often pathetically grateful) when you see it.

HL2, while I have my issues with it, was a rare case of a sequel seeing a lot of the core concepts that worked in the first one, which are hardly ever the ones that players notice, and digging deeper into those. The "do cool thing only when player is looking" stuff is everywhere in HL2 - if an NPC's bullet is going to miss its target and hit an explosive barrel, only do that when the player's gonna see it, otherwise the player doesn't know why the thing is on fire. The fast zombie only leaps at you when you're looking at it. The Strider only fires its big alt-fire cannon when someone's gonna see.

While the AI in HL2 was, for me, a big miss (and I did a youtube video about it) this "look trigger" stuff is, I reckon, a big piece of the oft-neglected puzzle of making game AI feel smart, a goal which I've come to reckon is basically at odds with how most games are produced (at least beyond indie, indie being usually not where a ton of AI work gets done).

There are a ton of games, real expensive AAA games, with what you'd call, if you were a person who writes AI, really good AI, but players don't note the AI, and have no stories to tell about it.

The last two Splinter Cell games are like this - the AI is doing cool, impressive things, and nobody is impressed; it comes across as serviceable. Nobody says it's bad, nobody says it's good. But the very first time you play a level of those games, you are impressed. You're impressed when you're hanging off the side of a building, and an alerted guy who thought he saw you running towards the window a second ago actually bothers to stick his flashlight out the window and check the side of the building. That's incredibly cool, the first time. It stops being cool the same mission, because they do it constantly, even if they never find you there. Suddenly we're living in a world where the outside upper wall of a multi-storey building is the first place you look for an intruder. Everyone knows that!

The issue is rarity: behaviours are cool because they're rare. AI looks smart when it deals correctly with an unusual situation. Like in FEAR, the way a scared soldier who's the last in his squad will throw himself onto his belly to crawl under a truck, and this only happens when there's a scared last guy in the squad and he doesn't think you can see him and there's a truck. You can easily never see this happen!

But the way big games are produced, if a thing is cool, it cost money, it continues to cost money to keep it working, and you better justify that investment by putting the Thing on the screen whenever you can. What's the point if nobody sees it, right? But actually, what's the point if everyone sees it all the time.

I reckon the best approach to making smart, reactive-feeling AI in a real-time game that people relate to, remember, talk about, get freaked out by (especially, but not necessarily, in an action or horror thing) is to really budget and stagger out your cool behaviours, the way some of your smarter games will handle dynamic dialogue (eg Left 4 Dead) such that they're genuinely rare - one-offs, even - and making sure that when they do execute, they have the player's attention. There was a pre-release interview about Half-Life 2 where some dev said the zombies were so smart, they could encounter a locked door, punch out the little window in the door, reach through and unlock it from the inside. That didn't ship, but imagine if it did, and then they made it super unlikely? Wouldn't that be the coolest fuckin' thing that ever happened to you?