After establishing a name for themselves with a string of important—albeit relatively niche—successful shooters like Blood and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division in the 90s, Monolith Productions🌠 set to work on an ambitious horror-oriented project for the seventh generation of consoles.
The end result would be 2006’s F.E.A.R.—or, for the pedantic amongst us, First Encounter Assault Recon—a thrilling shooter which reviewed well and cemented itself as a staple of early Xbox 360 era gaming. It would be followed by a worthy sequel in 2009, and then a tremendously unpopular co-op centric flop in 2011. However, the F.E.A.R. name would shudder one last gasp in 2014 in the form of F.E.A.R. Online, a team-based competitive MMO shooter.
In a way, F.E.A.R. Online was something of a trendsetter in that it laid some of the groundwork for free-to-play competitive online shooters to follow—that groundwork being an example of how not to make a game. Featuring PvP and PvE elements, this outing in the horror FPS franchise felt like a husk of a title; a Call of Duty wannabe which felt a lot more like early days of Crytek’s Warface. As with all slapdash free-to-play titles, it featured a tacky, obtrusive ticket system whereby players had to pay a virtual ticket to enter an online match. Players could only have a maximum of three tickets, and new tickets could only be earned in eight-hour increments, meaning that players unwilling to spend any actual mon♋ey on the game would be left out in the cold for long periods of time—not a particularly successful method of growing and maintaining a player base, to say the least.
Furthermore, for a game that literally had the term “fear” in the name, F.E.A.R. Online was remarkably tame. With scarcely more than a very vague connection to the previous games, it felt akin to a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil title as seen through the lens of a bloated military shooter—think Resident Evil 6, but even more vapid and directionless. Additionally, though it featured a quote-unquote “fear” gameplay mode, it only darkened the PvP maps and threw in a few comp🍷letely unnecessary jumpscares. If there’s one gameplay element that doesn’t belong in a tactical multiplayer, it would have to be jumpscares.
Beyond all that, F.E.A.R. Online wasn’t even developed by Monolith. Rather, it was handed off to Inplay Interactive, a Korean team that would go on to produce such hits as LEGO Incredibles and LEGO Marvel Superheroes 2. To be perfectly honest, an online-only entry in the F.E.A.R. series was likely doomed from the start, but handing the IP to a team with infinitely less experience with the subject matter was a recipe for further disaster. Monolith was pretty far removed from the franchise by the time the title debuted, but if one team could be trusted to rescue this disaster, it would have been them. After all, they proved their worth in the genre with the massively successful Gotham City Imposters—oh wait… no, they didn’t.
This wasn’t the only horror-centric title too be desperately rung through the multiplayer shooter ringer, either, as Capcom’s Umbrella Corps, which debuted two years later in 2016, was met with a similar reception. A ham-fisted attempt at dressing up an underdeveloped tactical shooter as a Resident Evil title, it was considered to be one of the series’ lowest moments, though, fortunately, it was relegated to spin-off territory. In fact, F.E.A.R. Online and Umbrella Corps share quite a bit in common, as they both featured similar gameplay styles, attracted a small, dissatisfied player base, and were totally abandoned within a year of their respective releღases. The only real difference is that Capcom didn’t contract an external team to do their dirty work.
At the end of the day, the F.E.A.R. name was already mostly dead when the online variant dropped six years ago. A relic of a bygone generation of gaming, we haven’t heard from Alma, Beckett, or The Pointman for quite some time, though we’d have to imagine that, as remake-happy as the industry has been over the past few years, that’s likely to change at some point. Of course, we don’t expect the franchise to tackle another multiplayer mode ever again, and we can only hope that some developers interpreted F.E.A.R. Online as the cautionary tale that it was.