F.E.A.R. 2 demo coming tomorrow

miskari said:
after playing the demo and reading a lot of the comments here it seem to me that the game has just been consolized way too much...as if its catering to a diff audience. I played the first game and loved it, but i couldnt' get myself to finish this demo, the controls seemed all weird and something was just off....maybe ill give it another shot later on
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I thought the controls were pretty good. My console-complaint is just with the flashing pointers to everything you might want to pick up, look at, etc. The aiming was fine for me. I was able to pick off snipers fairly quickly, and the mouse response felt fairly snappy. (maybe not Quake 3 snappy, but pretty good) Maybe there is some bugginess on various hardware in the demo or something that isn't exposed to everyone.
 
Am I the only one who can't get the game to save? If I die it loads the previous checkpoint, but if I quit the game I lose all my progress. I'd like to check it out, but I'm tired of starting over everytime.
 
Forceman said:
Am I the only one who can't get the game to save? If I die it loads the previous checkpoint, but if I quit the game I lose all my progress. I'd like to check it out, but I'm tired of starting over everytime.
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It's a 20 minute demo if you really take your time. Is saving really necessary?
 
J3RK said:
I thought the controls were pretty good. My console-complaint is just with the flashing pointers to everything you might want to pick up, look at, etc. The aiming was fine for me. I was able to pick off snipers fairly quickly, and the mouse response felt fairly snappy. (maybe not Quake 3 snappy, but pretty good) Maybe there is some bugginess on various hardware in the demo or something that isn't exposed to everyone.
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I have a feeling it has something to do with my mouse software or something (MX518), or maybe my RocketDock was interfering...I'll have to have a look at this. Hopefully it won;t be a problem cuz i really want this game to be good
 
miskari said:
I have a feeling it has something to do with my mouse software or something (MX518), or maybe my RocketDock was interfering...I'll have to have a look at this. Hopefully it won;t be a problem cuz i really want this game to be good
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I agree the mouse control ...was odd. It's very different coming from say TF2 or L4D (source). Definitely play with sensitivity/acceleration b/c the engine responds much differently. Hell, the first 10mins I was making inaccurate turns b/c I wasn't used to the sensitivity. Once I got used to it, however, the demo almost got too easy.
 
Finished the demo, I did like it, not bad at all. Alma made me jump when she jump on the screen:p Though I wish they had more scary element that doesn't involves nasty surprises, like Silent Hill stuffs

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had some weird lines coming out of light sources:confused:

Notice those lines coming out of the lights in these screenshot
fear2ssho9.jpg



Even the sky light source also do have those weird lines. Graphics are set to maximum

Anyone else seen them?
 
4th times a charm. I just shelved all my negative criticism of the demo and played it again as if I've never played a fear game. Know what, I really like it for what it is and will be buying this one. Again, I think I was the victim of inflated expectations. I hate it when I do that.
 
[H]adouken;1033664864 said:
List your setup and settings here.
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Ah, my bad i forgot those

C2D E6550
Galaxy GeForce 9800GTX+
2GB ram
Intel board, DG33FB
Windows XP 32 bits, all patches are up to date

None of them are overclocked

I'm using nvidia driver 178.24. I've been having some crashing problem with driver 180 and 181, both beta and WHQL ones, so 178.24 is the only working one for my system at the moment

The screenshot was resized from 1440 900 res, didn't have any AA turn on, and 4x AF

Could it be possibly some drivers issue?:confused: or just a bug with the demo
 
I heard someone having same issues and he said it was a result of the AF messing up the lines, try turning it off and play around with AF on your NVIDIA Control Panel to see if forcing it through drivers help rather than in-game (however, the guy with the problem said the in-game AF worked and NVIDIA driver AF messed it up).
 
[H]adouken;1033665168 said:
I heard someone having same issues and he said it was a result of the AF messing up the lines, try turning it off and play around with AF on your NVIDIA Control Panel to see if forcing it through drivers help rather than in-game (however, the guy with the problem said the in-game AF worked and NVIDIA driver AF messed it up).
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Thanks a lot. Disabling AF from the driver control panel fixed it
 
I just played through a bit of it. I like some of the new weapon selections. The HUD is annoying, that's just me though.
Makes me want to finish the first F.E.A.R. now.
 
God everytime I play the mech it's SO cheesy.

And te mech hud is ridiculously corny.
 
[H]adouken;1033675442 said:
God everytime I play the mech it's SO cheesy.

And te mech hud is ridiculously corny.
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Lol yeah the mech part is definitely random when you consider the rest of the demo. If they have mech vs mech MP in the full, I'm gonna be rolling.
 
Hornet said:
Ah, my bad i forgot those

C2D E6550
Galaxy GeForce 9800GTX+
2GB ram
Intel board, DG33FB
Windows XP 32 bits, all patches are up to date

None of them are overclocked

I'm using nvidia driver 178.24. I've been having some crashing problem with driver 180 and 181, both beta and WHQL ones, so 178.24 is the only working one for my system at the moment

The screenshot was resized from 1440 900 res, didn't have any AA turn on, and 4x AF

Could it be possibly some drivers issue?:confused: or just a bug with the demo
Click to expand...

There must be something terrible wrong with ur system if u cant install the 181.xx drivers. i bet its from the old drivers u get weird issues. today its important to have latest drivers.
 
I just realized this, but the mechs in FEAR 2 remind me a lot of the ones from the game TimeShift, only the ones in FEAR 2 are a bit smaller.
 
Yeah, I forgot about this thread. I've basically been tidying up my hard drive and found some screenshots of FEAR 2 in there, sor I'm posting them because I don't have anything to do, and because my friend Dean will want to see what it looks like but I uninstalled the game already and can't be bothered to send him the pictures over X-Fire. Ok, anyway, here:

fear2spdemo200901230025gu5.jpg


fear2spdemo200901230056qn4.jpg



Also, for whomever it was asserting that H-L2 looks better, there's this screen I took of Dark Messiah, built on the same engine, as far as I'm aware:

mm2009012620255732um0.jpg


That's your superior art direction for you there.
 
Haha, I take it you got in on the free Dark Messiah of Might and Magic key?

I just stopped at that very section the other night.
 
Yeah. I'm glad I did, I would happily pay for that game. Much better than I'd heard.
 
Wally said:
Also, for whomever it was asserting that H-L2 looks better, there's this screen I took of Dark Messiah, built on the same engine, as far as I'm aware:
Click to expand...

Just so that people aren't confused by the wording of this - I was at first. Dark Messiah runs on the Source engine.

FEAR 2 runs on Lithtech Jupiter EX
 
Hornet said:
Finished the demo, I did like it, not bad at all. Alma made me jump when she jump on the screen:p Though I wish they had more scary element that doesn't involves nasty surprises, like Silent Hill stuffs

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had some weird lines coming out of light sources:confused:



Even the sky light source also do have those weird lines. Graphics are set to maximum

Anyone else seen them?
Click to expand...

Same problem here.

At first I thought it was an effect. The lines may have been "shadows" from the blinds... but I later noticed that it was a problem. Disabling control panel AF fixes the problem.

Monolith, the developers of FEAR, have their own game engine that they use for all of their projects.

Let me start off by saying that I was a HUGE fan of the original FEAR. It was one of those rare games that was legitimately scary, as opposed to starlting you. Now as a fairly avid horror film viewer (you can thank my older sister for that) I’ve become somewhat immune to the typical “lets throw popups all over the place” scare tactics. For any horror piece to be successful, it has to pair these tactics with a legitimately creepy atmosphere. I found that the first FEAR was too dull and unimaginative in its level design to really take full advantage of the backstory.

The game starts you off with a nice introduction, much like the first game had. This time you’re treated to a silioque by whats-his-face, that guy in the red coat that pretty much made your life a living hell in the first game. This time around he’s telling you a bit about Alma and her life. You know the story: at the age of eight they took her in and turned her into a science experiment, before taking her baby (or babies, I don’t remember) away from her.

From here we’re taken into a desolate, destroyed city. The entire scene looked very post-apocalyptic, as you would expect given that a fucking bomb exploded in the darn place. You’re on a very narrow road littered with beaten down vehicles and bordered by tall, half-standing buildings. Paired with this desolate yet cluttered city street is a nice red overtone, creating a sense of personal angst. The developers mention that their story is very colour-driven, in that they use colour correction techniques to set the tone. A gloomy area will be cool blue, an angry area will be red hot, and so forth. It’s been a fairly common film technique for years, and it seems to be crawling its way into videogames. We walk along this path as Alma appears and disappears, before finally reaching a pit that snaps us back into reality. In an effort to *not* ruin the demo for you, I’ll stop recounting events here and try to talk about the game a bit more.

Game:

Wow. WOW. No, don’t go renew your subscription… I’m just gasping in awe here. The tried and true formula from the first game seems to be apparent here: atmospheric scene to fight scene to atmospheric scene, with Alma popping in whenever the heck she feels like it. What sets the gameplay apart, in large part, is the environment. The original FEAR pretty much confined your corporate tie-wearing ass to office building after office building after office building. Moreover, these offices were some of the blandest office buildings I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen bland – I’ve worked for the government FFS! The FEAR 2 corrects that by taking you all over the place in the abandoned city. Environments are rich and colourful, yet still maintain that clausterphobic feel to them. Everything in the world feels organic (except, ironically, anything organic as you’ll hear later) and it goes a long way to convince you that you’re actually in one of these places. All in all, the devs have done a great job of creating familiar places while pressing the fact that you’re in a city that just blew the f*** up.

The combat system remains more or less untouched from the first game. The martial-arts fighting is still alive and well in the game, as is the slo-mo feature. Gunplay feels very CoD 4 inspired, as every gun allows you to zoom in using ironsight scopes, real scopes, or laser scopes. The sniper rifles have been equipped with lasers that you (and your opponents) can see. This helps tremendously in reducing the game’s difficulty, as you can always find where a sniper is in the cluttered, noisy mess that is the destroyed city. Also new to the game is a “Doom 3-esque” PDA system, where you can pick up data from fallen soldiers and read the rest of their background story. Since when do gamers read? It’s a nice touch, but it feels a little tacky. The HUD had been completely redesigned from the first game, which allows these text scenes to transition well, but they don’t do much for me. Some people will love to read up on the backstory, but I feel that in a game like FEAR that actions speak louder than words.

If you’re like me and you got your ass kicked by the original FEAR then you are in luck. The difficulty in the game is far less punishing than it was in the original, despite the fact that the enemy AI seems even smarter. They’ll push objects down for cover, throw grenades to dig you out of your hiding spot, and use flanks/ambushes to keep you on your toes. You can carry a seemingly unlimited number of weapons in this game too, which helps to prepare you for anything. No more kicking yourself for leaving that rocket launcher behind in favour of your nailgun – you can keep them all on you. Your character has the ability to knock over things for cover, but the tactic seems futile as there is no cover system in place, and crouching still leaves your head exposed.

What would a FEAR game be without the horror element? Fortunately this is even better than it was in the first game. It seems that the developers were able to pick up on what worked well and what didn’t from the first game. The first thing you’ll notice is that audible cues are less frequent. You’ll still hear the occasional crescendo when something unexpected happens, but you won’t feel like you’re listening to a broken Mozart song every time a door flies shut. Visual cues, however, have increased. It feels like the horror events are controlled by your line of sight. Doors seem to be just about finished closing themselves by the time you peer over. The paint cans on the shelves fly at you when you least expect it, coming from just out of the corner of your screen as opposed to from absolutely nowhere. The colour correction effects make Alma’s appeareances more dramatic as your entire screen goes red for about a split second, causing you to jump and occasionally yell profanities.

Technical:

FEAR 2 is built off of an enhanced version of the Jupiter engine, Monolith’s in-house game engine for all of its projects. Upon first booting up the game you notice that the textures and lighting look very similar to those of Condemned 2. What sets FEAR 2 apart is its use of per-pixel lighting effects to create ghastly apparitions, its HDR lighting on gun flares, and its use of colour correction. The PC version of the game features sharper textures and a softer film-grain. All versions of the game are fixed in 16:9, regardless of the resolution selected. Other than the lack of soft shadows and the plastic-look of organic matter, there is really nothing to complain about from a visual perspective. On the audio front, the game is great, as expected. The new HUD occasionally displays drops of water and blood, which make for a nice effect. The score sounds well written, and does a lot to add to the mood of the game. Sound effects are mapped well to objects, and area acoustics sound realistic. The guns sound powerful, and enemy chatter seems robotically realistic, as it should be since they’re a bunch of freekin’ robots. The only complaint is that the game occasionally hitches to perform what many suspect to be an autosave. It’s a quick 1-2 second pause that happens fairly frequently during firefights and rarely during suspenseful scenes. I’ll admit that it does hurt the game at first, but once you adjust yourself to it you’ll barely notice it. It’s really too bad though, since it detracts from the awesomeness that is the game.

FEAR 2 looks like it has nowhere to go but up from the original game. The world is organic, the atmosphere is believable, and the horror scenes are scarier than ever. Gunplay has been given a slight tweak to ease the game’s difficulty and provide a more familiar interface (feels very CoD 4-ish), and some new additional gameplay elements have been added to deepen the story. Despite the technical hitches, the FEAR 2 demo was a fantastic preview for the game that has effectively sold me on the game (I’m preordering on steam as soon as this post is done). There’s no doubt that the single player will be fantastic, and the tweaked combat system indicate to me that FEAR 2’s multiplayer might actually be fun. If you’ve stuck around this long I thank you, but seriously… go download this thing NOW. It’s one of the most exhilarating – though short – experiences I’ve had in a game as of late.

Oh, did I mention that you can pilot Mechs now? =P
 
Spare-Flair said:
Just so that people aren't confused by the wording of this - I was at first. Dark Messiah runs on the Source engine.

FEAR 2 runs on Lithtech Jupiter EX
Click to expand...

Oh, right. Didn't strike me, cheers. Bit cloudy, some drink in me.

Ta.
 
yes if you get the weird lines around light sources then go to your cards control panel and turn off AA and AF.
 
I loaded up FEAR1 and noticed it is way too demanding for the graphics it has.
 
Volume said:
I loaded up FEAR1 and noticed it is way too demanding for the graphics it has.
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way too demanding? my 8600gt and 5000 x2 could average over 80 fps on max settings(ss off) and 2x AA at 1280x960.

hell I just ran the benchmark on my current rig and got 125 fps on max settings(ss off) and 4x AA at 1920x1080.
 
[H]adouken;1033677908 said:
Yeah too much text, could've just said "I liked it" and made the same point.
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It wasn't really that, it was more "Wow. WOW. No, don’t go renew your subscription… I’m just gasping in awe here. The tried and true formula from the first game seems to be apparent here: atmospheric scene to fight scene to atmospheric scene, with Alma popping in whenever the heck she feels like it.".

Hnng.
 
played it. enjoyed it. thought the menus have too much "hai we're making a pc game for consoles" feel. i'll prolly get it.
 
noobman said:
You can carry a seemingly unlimited number of weapons in this game too, which helps to prepare you for anything. No more kicking yourself for leaving that rocket launcher behind in favour of your nailgun – you can keep them all on you. Your character has the ability to knock over things for cover, but the tactic seems futile as there is no cover system in place, and crouching still leaves your head exposed.
Click to expand...

I think this is dependant on the level chosen.

On the "medium"difficulties, you can only carry three weapons as I swapped out the shotgun for a missle launcher and the sub-machine gun for the laser.
 
One of the devs posted that the PC version will ship with patch 1.01. No details yet. probably just the basic stuff (key mapping, resolution)
 
Impressive demo. I will be picking this up when I have extra cash lying around. Runs max on 2x AA. And I didn't have any stuttering issues as some other people were complaining about.
 
Soft shadows are terrible in the original FEAR. They look really awkward and they have a massive performance hit.
 
F.E.A.R. said:
One of the devs posted that the PC version will ship with patch 1.01. No details yet. probably just the basic stuff (key mapping, resolution)
Click to expand...

Good, the key mapping for mouse needs sorting. Full screen widescreen, grain filter adjustment and stuttering autosave fix.
 
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