F.E.A.R. 3 Announced! April 9, 2010

Back in 2005, I was a huge fan of what Monolith Productions was working on.  They had first grabbed my attention with the ahead of its time (perhaps a bit TOO ahead of it’s time) Sanity: Aiken’s Artifact, which while got some great reviews and was the first game I can think of that was using the DLC payment model, it was a commercial failure and was quickly forgotten for the next game Monolith released, No One Lives Forever.

No One Lives Forever was a commercial and critical tour de force that I enjoyed tremendously.  A sequel and an expansion pack was released for the game, but after the expansion pack Monolith turned all efforts to this new PC franchise they were creating, First Encounter Assault Recon, or F.E.A.R.  That first F.E.A.R. game revolutionized first person shooters, had incredible artificial intelligence, and could show that an action game could truely be scary.

The second F.E.A.R. game, which was cross platform, was a solid game, but not the major seller of the first.

Monolith is out, replaced by Day One Studios.  John Carpenter, famous for directing such cult films as “Escape from New York” and “The Thing” is going to serve as a project consultant.  If The Spoony One has anything to say about that, espessially after the terrible “The Thing” PC/Xbox game, he might have a problem, espessially if he has to dust off his fuse box counter.

This game is going to focus on branching cooperative play, something the first games never featured.  There will be multiple protagonists with differing stories, and that alone sounds pretty interesting.  F.E.A.R. 2 really brought nothing new to the game’s formula other than slightly better graphics and widescreen support (something F.E.A.R. 1 didn’t have at launch).

I’m looking foward to it, this is going to give me an excuse to finally play through my copy of F.E.A.R. 2.