By John Walker on May 23rd, 2011 at 6:12 pm.
I know you. I’ve seen you around here before, right? You’re that person who wants to see a FEAR 3* multiplayer trailer for the Soul King mode. I knew I recognised you! Come on in.
Soul King, the somewhat despondent-sounding narrator of this latest trailer explains, is “the most competitive multiplayer mode in FEAR 3.” I’m not entirely sure what that means. Isn’t competitiveness in the mouse of the beholder? Should we try less hard in other modes?
You begin as a spectre, and then possess a body you want to fight with. Then it’s a competition to see who can kill the most enemies, and thus gather the most souls, and be titled the Soul King. So a bit like Pokemon, but with more claws. The possession mechanic sounds fun.
Why so sad, Mr Narrator Man? Someone give him a hug.
(Maybe he’s sad because he couldn’t think of a way to work in a “soul king”/”sulking” joke either.)
*Look – they’re lucky I can be bothered to capitalise it, really. I grew fed up with typing in all those fullstops at some point in around 2003. Let alone replacing the e with a 3, as if I’m twelve. Putting both in one title? Just honestly.
Huh, well, the art style is… interesting.
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That screenshot is jaw-dropping
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Oh I see, that’s it’s jaw, I thought it was a necklace. It looks like a demonic hugging granny.
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No no, clearly he is astounded at the size of his hands
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lasikbear made me laugh!
This game just looks sillier and sillier with each new screenshot.
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This is going to be such an average game. They’re still working on this? They just can’t make it good enough. I predict a 7/10 on Eurogamer.
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But it will read more like a 6.
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Well I didn’t think FEAR 2 was average, but FEAR 3 isn’t high up on my wanted list as I’ve got bills to pay and there just too much else out this year.
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Graphics look…really bad? Or is it just me? What’s going on? It doesnt even look like the same engine.
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Yeah, I cant see a single reason why I would want to play this over the original FEAR multiplayer, which was actually really good.
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It almost looks like the HL2 engine.
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You would think the 3 and the dot cancel each other out.
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so ‘Far’ then?
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Could it be my destiny to be Shaman King?
Shaman King!
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Missed a trick not using this music in the game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j2mzeyGZ8Y
Would’ve made it infinitely better. Like playing Hawaii Five-0 in TF2.
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Much better.
http://tubedubber.com/#QWtS8PavRQg:7j2mzeyGZ8Y:0:100:0:0:true
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65 on Metacritic, is my guess.
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hahaha, that sounds pretty accurate
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Well Metacritc’s a bag of monkey knackers anyway, they’re never consistant with the sources they use for evaluating total review scores.
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This might be heresy but not every shooter needs a multiplayer mode. Most of them are barren wastelands after a month or two.
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Exactly. Unless you’re really investing a lot of time and money into MP portion of your game, I can’t see any reasons to put it in to begin with (well, apart from having a check box ‘has multiplayer’ ticked would possibly score them a bit more sold copies). And by the looks of it, they’re not particularly doing their best.
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Triple signed.
Standard multiplayer in FPS’s shouldn’t be treated like a tick-box., there’s not point in just shoving it in there.
Even id software understand that know, which is why RAGE isn’t going to be featuring standard FPS multiplayer at all. Of all the companies you would have expected id to put in at least a standard deathmatch mode. But outside of co-op, the multiplayer’s actually going to be a combat racing game.
Even then I doubt the community for that is going to last any real length of time, but at least it’s something different and not just thrown in because MP is expected. These days you’re competing against FPS’s that are long established with huge featuresets, and sometimes outright dedicated multiplayer games with no singleplayer.
In all that, this is just another manshoot in grimdark corridors.
FEAR: Combat may not have the technical abilities of a new engine, but I would actually prefer playing that with its cleaner visuals than something purely bathed in darkness like this. FEAR had darkness in it but you could actually make out most enemies (and the environment in general) fairly well.
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Quadruple, nice points made, all of you.
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Soul king thrusts you. Thrusts you hard.
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Hmm, seems a bit violent.
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Consolised crap. Did you play FEAR2 ? One of the most boring games ever made. “Let’s take everything that made the first game good, and kind of take it out of the sequel, and then make a worse game!”
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yeah =/
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So the only thing that made the first game good was the ability to lean? Or is there something else they took out of the sequel besides the boring level design?
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But does the soul king has the SOUL TRAIN?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkleiqrWji0
(FORGIVE ME I WAS FORCED TO DO THIS)
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It would be much better if’n it started like this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA0TS9l_nJE
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Visually this is looking like quite a substantial step back from the first one. You can’t really ignore bad graphics in a game that’s supposed to rely so heavily on its atmosphere. Oh well.
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Until they decide to go for a purely horror angle or an all out action title, have a spooky corridor with a grumpy girl then in the next being able to blast away four goons in slow motion without batting an eye is always going to water the two down
Also James Brown is the only Soul King I believe
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Nothing is as ‘of its time’ as the F.E.A.R. series. Remember that year when horror involving little girls with poorly conditioned hair was in? That was a year or two before F.E.A.R. . And the leetspeak ‘E’ is just the icing on the cake.
Expectations are so low for this, it could actually pick up a few review points for sympathy alone.
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GAZE INTO THE FIST OF DREDD
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The surface area of the… soul… is incredibly large about the size of a football pitch.
A soul renews itself constantly… it dies in twenty minutes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CJdSN2FWGM
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Looks worse than Amnesia, which is quite an achievement.
I mean, Amnesia looked good enough for me, but if you have to compare a huge production like this to a comparatively tiny indie game and it compares unfavorably….well, then you have a problem!
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This possession mechanic was featured on Geist, for the gamecube, a very fun albeit underrated game.
In Geist, the multiplayer had you possessing the body of the class you wanted to be. You could also possess an object, such as traps or guns turret, to help you maim down enemies. My favourite one was possessing a body, finding someone, let them think they killed me as I left the body just before that, possess the crate nearby and explode their faces off.
There was also the possibility of temporarily controlling an enemy player, trying to force them to fall on traps. It was tons of fun.
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