Yes, the graphics are dated but the gameplay is absolute fire and it has the best enemy A.I. of any shooter I've played by a long shot. F.E.A.R. is I dare say a true masterpiece of the shooter genre. I cannot think of a single shooter in the last 10 years that comes even close to how good F.E.A.R. is.
It truly is scandalous how game developers 20 years ago and longer were able to create timeless classics that still hold up today (as long as you can get them to run on modern systems) but game developers of today can't even create decent games with completely overblown budgets.
Comparing the diversity of games of the late 90s and 00s with today is truly soul crushing. The shooter genre alone was incredibly diverse. Call of Duty, Battlefield, Counterstrike, Half Life, F.E.A.R., Unreal Tournament, Quake, Crysis, Max Payne, Painkiller, Dead Space, you name it. And don't get me started on the now almost extinct RTS genre.
It really is painful to look back and see how with the end of the 00s the games industry has turned into one big copying machine trying to recreate one smash hit over and over and shitting out abominations that get worse with every iteration until a new smash hit appears and the cycle repeats.
And if shitty gameplay wasn't bad enough modern games also have abysmal performance and blurry, smudgy, shitty graphics with constant ghosting and other artifacts because every asshole uses Unreal Engine 5.
I just want to play good games. Fuck.
how does the enemy AI in fear compared to halo?
From my decades old recollection I think it might have been better. They didn't have the little touches like losing morale and running away like halo, but their combat tactics were very dynamic.
They wouldn't get stuck in a loop repeatedly peaking from the same piece of cover, they'd take some shots from one location and relocate constantly. And seemed like they were weighted to coordinate so that they would prefer to move from cover to cover when another was firing at you.
[Edit] oh and looking at some gameplay videos to confirm, they also had the nice touch that the last squad member standing wouldn't call out everything to a roomfull of corpses. Not shouting "grenade!" for just your enemy is an Einstein move for your average FPS grunt.
Pretty sure they did have morale-like variables. If a squad started losing men I think they started doubling back a bit and fortifying their position a bit more.
When you rush into a room and surprise them they also tend to try to retreat into a better position. Which is a very nice touch. They actually feel intelligent even though they arent.
Yeah maybe so too, I just know they didn't fully turn tail and run like the halo grunts would sometimes.
Oh yeah, they definitely maintained a certain level of persistence. But without being overly reckless like some game AI.
GOAP is what the system was dubbed. Goal Oriented Action Planning.There's published papers about how the AI worked, and there's been a few iterations of AI systems loosely based on some of its design concept.
Just like with anything though, GOAP may not fit well for some game AI needs. It's a very closed-loop kind of system, which wouldn't make it especially ideal for an open world environment like in an Elder Scrolls game, where you might want the AI to have more dynamic and overridable behavior.
I would say it's situational.
Keep in mind that in Halo there were sandbox levels with vehicles, and one of the cool parts abuut it is that if you drove a vehicle up to AI teammates, they would hop on with you, or drive it themselves.
Another neat thing was that if you drove a vehicle into an area with the enemy and disembarked, they would take that vehicle and use it for themselves and provide cover fire for their teammates to advance.
However, Halo required an entire subroutine of nodes baked into the level for the enemy AI to behave the way they did, and it could take up to eight hours to bake a level with all of the different ways an AI could behave in that level.
It's been at least 20 years since I've played Halo 1 so it's hard to say. Also Halo is very different game from FEAR. I'd suggest to check out Mandalores review. He sums it up pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z-oSpuIhw4
Both FEAR and Halo enemy AI is pretty good. I have to give the win to FEAR though but that's because the level design and the AI designer worked together. The AI in Halo has good movement and tactics that they'll use against you. However in FEAR they will use aspects of the environment semi-unscripted. They will pull down book cases to use for cover and crawl through low hanging areas to try and get the flank on you.
Completely different in a way that makes it real hard to compare, because they both fit so well into their respective games.
I'd say Halo is a little better purely because there's more variety of enemies so it feels a bit more varied.
The enemies in FEAR don't have the same character as they do in Halo.
Neither are bad though.