Half-Life Cry Of Fear (Release thread)

Quote from PogoP

Why don't they just use a more modern engine? I find these mods really visually jarring, when you have super high res, normal mapped textures on low poly geometry. It's kinda like using a high-res texture pack for Minecraft.

It's not a bad thing, it's original, like an amish riding a horse on a highway or a hipster wearing 70's clothes ! helps getting it downloaded :derp:

Looks cool, I hope it's not as boring and ugly as Paranoia.

It's out now, you shits. I've got 11 minutes ETA on my download from moddb via gamefront. If you look at the mod comments you can find links to .torrent files, too.

Played up to after the second boss. This isn't as good as Afraid of Monsters. The levels are more constrained- less room to move around and dodge or run, and smaller in general. Instead of opening doors, you use them, it fades to black, and you appear on the other side- a survival horror standard, sure, yet pointless here. They also stretch out the equipment to make things more survival horrory, you have to knife fight zombies for like 45 minutes before you find a gun, but AoM, despite giving you a pistol before you ever saw an enemy, and a shotgun at the start of the second level of the hospital, was terrifying. Cry of Fear has significantly more light, and with the smaller environments, provide less unknown areas you feel compelled to keep an eye on. Also, boss fights with a health bar on the screen and everything. Kinda takes me out of things.

However, the monster designs are great (except for the first boss which is lol), and it can be very immersive. A++ sound design, just like AoM. I'll keep playing, but I'm not going to be keeping myself up past my bedtime to play it more tonight. Hopefully, like AoM, it massively opens up after the initial environment. When I started AoM I never would've expected the woods/countryside areas in the second half. Hopefully Cry of Fear with similarly surprise me.

Quote

Jetsetlemming : The doors fading to black is done so they could add more detail in each area without having to optimise like a bitch, you couldn't have the mod look like it does if everything was seamless that and they're Silent Hill nerds

Maybe time to change engine

The limited inventory + despawning of things you drop on the ground really kills this mod for me. I already had to give up my hunting rifle after the third boss, and shortly thereafter I once again, due to key items, have to either get rid of my healing syringes, or get rid of a gun permanently, just to grab a key item and progress. This is shitty design, this is a shitty situation to be in, and this is a shitty decision to force upon the player. I shouldn't be forced to give up my shotgun so I can grab a goddamn fuse.

Quote from D3ads

Sounds like a bug to me dude, no one else seems to be having problems with items disappearing when dropped. I've forwarded your comment to the devs, hopefully they'll have an answer...

They don't disappear instantly (though I've encountered a couple places where they partially clip through the ground), but I've run into two moments where they're despawned based on game events- once when the "Carcass" boss spawns, and again when I take the fuse at the school. At these two times any items dropped on the ground by me will disappear forever.

In general though, I guess I'm just morally opposed to the inventory system as a whole. Managing that stuff takes away from the horror, something Afraid of Monsters never did. I know they're trying to be more Survival Horror instead of just Horror, but this wasn't a problem in either Resident Evil or Silent Hill game. RE gave you the item box, and Silent Hill's always had unlimited inventory space except SH4, which also gave you an item box at your apartment. I just don't want to manage my inventory. I don't want to manage ANYTHING. I want to progress through scary places fighting scary things, like AoM. These new elements that Cry of Fear adds may be neat from a technical standpoint (I'm impressed with the dual wielding system, for example), but they dilute the horror to an unfortunate extent.

Saw your post "conveying" mine on Cry of Fear's forums. Thanks for insulting me, D3ads, really. You're just the nicest bro.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

Saw your post "conveying" mine on Cry of Fear's forums. Thanks for insulting me, D3ads, really. You're just the nicest bro.

Quote from Buddy

lol

Well it turns out other people have been annoyed by the same thing so I guess you're not shit at it after all Jetset.

No, no, clearly anyone who disagrees with design decisions is shit. I'm just glad to find I'm not alone in being shit. Perhaps those of us who are shit at Cry of Fear should go play something lower, closer to our clearly shitty skill levels, like Afraid of Monsters.

So you were judging me based on a misunderstanding of a post about something you haven't personally played? lol.

I beat it today. The end credits screen is brilliant, just brilliant. Best end credits ever. Doctor Mode can blow me, though.

haha amusing to see that in 2012 the mod community still loves some drama

Some things never change.

Probably should put off trying for high rank runs until there's a patch or two. The memory leak crashes are sudden, unexpected, and make trying to keep a low save count incredibly dangerous, and your save count effects your ending rank. I was replaying with the camera + dev commentary on (the camera freezes enemies when you take their picture, it makes playing through for the dev commentary low stress), and just had the game crash like a good quarter of the entire length of the mod since the last time I bothered to use a save recorder.

Speaking of ending rank, your kill count also counts into it maybe. On the final screen it lists your kills via melee and firearm, above your rank along with the more obvious skills like time, accuracy, saves, damage taken, etc. But I'm not sure which way it would go, if it matters at all- whether they'd reward you for killing lots (which would serve perhaps as a counter-balance to the time stat), or avoiding enemies (which would play into the time stat). My gut says a low kill count would be more pro, at least, since the enemies are fast and dangerous and frequently you've got very, very little room to dodge (one of the mod's biggest downfalls, imo).

edit: Also walking about with the camera makes the game buggy. It has a working viewport on it that seems to re-draw the screen specifically for it- on a space about 1/20th your screen, it'll show about 1/10th of your screen, taken from the bottom left corner. Going into maps with it out will sometimes fuck up textures or shaders (the latter I'm now taking as a warning sign of incoming memory crash).