FEAR Alone Puts Monolith Among The Best

Earlier this week, Warner Bros. announced that it had cancelled Wonder Woman and shuttered developer Monolith Productions, flushing 31 years of history down the drain. It’s a monumental loss for the medium, ripping apart a pioneer that deserved to be heralded as one of the best, treated with the same respect as titans like id Software.

Granted, FEAR might not be as iconic as Doom, but it revolutionised enemy AI in video games. Instead of dawdling zombies stumbling over their own feet or mindless grunts firing aimlessly, it pitted us against an army of highly-trained clones who were eerily realistic. FEAR upped the ante to the point that we can still feel its impact today.

Turning your flashlight on in a dimly lit corridor stirs a nearby troupe into action, muttering commands to each other as they take refuge in dark corners, ready to ambush you. One might shout “covering fire!” and unleash a barrage of bullets while their comrade sneaks around to flank you from behind. Another may lob a grenade at you to flush you out into the open. Meanwhile, the rest of the grunts retreat to new vantage points, leaving you completely exposed.

None of this is scripted. The clones react dynamically in real-time to your behaviour, making every single gunfight a gripping set piece unique from the last. Their realistic mannerisms, how they can out-think and maneuver you, coupled with the meticulously crafted atmosphere, make FEAR a truly thrilling experience.

FEAR’s AI Goes Unmatched Even 20 Years Later

We’ll be celebrating, albeit glumly, the 20th anniversary of FEAR later this year. And yet it still feels ahead of the curve.

But most of the complexity is smoke and mirrors. Monolith created the illusion of thinking AI with a new technique it spearheaded, ‘Goal Oriented Action Planning’ (GOAP). As broken down by developer Jeff Orkin, the impressive AI deployed in FEAR can be split into just three parts: ‘Goto’, ‘Animate’, and ‘UseSmartObject’. That might sound complicated, but all it means is that AI moves around and plays animations to fulfill goals.

The ‘squad’ sees the player, so the AI sends one soldier to take cover (a static animation), while another is told to open fire (a looping animation). Monolith then employed radio chatter to make it appear as though enemies are actively communicating and thinking for themselves, rather than being puppeteered by an invisible hand. But even knowing that it’s all a trick doesn’t change anything because of how masterfully executed the illusion is.

Replaying FEAR all these years later, it’s still wildly impressive just how reactive the world feels. Every action you take is responded to, making each encounter as strategic as a multiplayer dogfight with real players, building on the strides made by Half-Life and Far Cry years prior. Monolith is often highly-regarded for the Nemesis system (even if WB locked it away), but FEAR proves that it has always been a trailblazer.

While FEAR is often labelled a cult classic, never matching the popularity of its peers, its influence is undeniable. GOAP has been used in hugely popular games like Tomb Raider, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and Just Cause 2. It even inspired a newer system called Hierarchical Task Network (HTN), which has been used in Guerilla’s Horizon Zero Dawn and Killzone 3.

FEAR was a major step forward for AI in gaming, and while it never became a household name like Doom, it’s still rightly heralded for its revolutionary enemy behaviour in much the same way Half-Life 2 is for its physics or Halo for pioneering dual-stick shooting. It’s an impressive legacy that cemented Monolith as part of the bedrock of the FPS genre, and even with Warner Bros’ callous closure of the studio, that legacy will never be taken away.

F.E.A.R.

Released

October 18, 2005

ESRB

M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language

Developer(s)

Monolith Productions

Publisher(s)

Vivendi Universal