The Game Reviews recently had the opportunity to chat with Eric Studer, Associate Producer for F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Eric was kind enough to answer a few questions for TGR readers about the upcoming horror FPS, scheduled to be released early next year.

The Game Reviews: One of the features that stood out the most for us in the original F.E.A.R. was of course the fear factor. What have you done to ensure that this next iteration continues to keep games on the edge of their seats?

Eric Studer: Alma is a scary figure, whose origins lie in the very best of Japanese horror.  However, we knew that if we simply presented her again as a scary little girl, it wouldn’t resonate with our players the way it did in 2005.  Audiences are a lot more aware of those kinds of scares, and so we needed to find a way to expand on Alma’s character the same way we have expanded the game.  For FEAR 2, Alma’s presentation takes more influences from things like Eastern European and American horror.  She is a lot more directly confrontational than she was in the first game and will interact with you a lot more directly.  That’s not to say we’ve abandoned what made Alma scary, we have just built on the formula and given her more depth.

TGR: Alma often had a great effect on the events within the previous F.E.A.R. titles. In what new ways will she manifest herself now?

ES: Now that she’s released, there are very few things that Alma can’t do.  She will change several times over the course of the game.  The forms she takes make her character and her motivations far more unsettling than FEAR.  How she appears to the player ties very closely into the story, so I don’t want to say too much.

TGR: During our hands-on time at E3, we noticed the environments seemed much more interactive than those in the previous title, to what extent will this interactivity play a role in the title?

ES: One of the things that made combat in FEAR so satisfying was seeing things go flying as your bullets tore through helpless objects caught between you and your foes.  That kind of interactivity is something you’ll see a lot more of that this time out.  The EPA is a great example of the interactive nature of the environment.  Its chain guns and rocket launchers will pulverize anything it hits.  When the wall enemies were using as cover gets destroyed, they have to find a new way to survive and their strategies change.  There is also the addition of interactive cover objects which are everyday objects in the combat space which you can flip or slide and turn into cover.  Enemies use them, and we encourage the player to use them as well.  You’re going to find yourself surrounded without a place to hide, and flipping a table or a bench to create cover where there was none before gets the player to think strategically about the battle field and look for ways to get the advantage.

TGR: While we were playing at E3, we also noticed it seems as if you have switched to a regenerative health system. What was the main reasoning behind that? We also read somewhere that you decided to switch back. Can you clarify that situation for our readers?

ES: We did originally have a regenerative based system, but changed to the traditional Medkit implementation because we found that players tended to use the same strategy when they regenerated health.  They would take damage to a point and hide, waiting to get back to full health before attacking again.  With Medkits players can control when they resupply their health, encouraging them to experiment with more combat strategies.  It’s easier for them to adopt a more aggressive strategy when they control when they heal.