Hello, I'm Tim Hall, Producer from Sierra, and this is about the completion of F.E.A.R. Extraction Point, the expansion pack for last year's award-winning F.E.A.R., which will be out in stores on Oct 24th.

I'll start out by saying that this has been the most organized project I've ever worked on with everyone sticking to their schedules and deliverables so there really wasn't any great drama or any big disasters or any sitting watching the files download and thinking "I wonder if this will even be close to where we need to be..." So with that aspect Timegate took all of the drama out of the finalizing of the game. We sort of "causally jogged across the finish line" as Francis Choi, the Associate Producer, said.

While this might be disappointing for you readers out there who were hoping to hear tales of horror and despair, I could write a book about some of the things I've seen on other games over the past 10 years, but it was a great ending for us that showed that the constant hard work by everyone had paid off at the end. Of course that's not to say that there weren't any last minute changes or little fires that had to be taken care of but they were really all worked out with a final three-day trip to Timegate studios in Sugarland, Texas.

I spent three days with Adel and Robert at Timegate and during that time we went through the entire game from beginning to end with the team members who worked on those sections for a final polish pass. We had done this several times before during the project but this pass focused mainly on the smaller polish items we felt should be addressed for release.

We had a pretty easy time of it and there were no huge points of contention, which was great - then again maybe I'm just remembering what I want. Once that's done everyone went back with their notes and started making adjustments based on the conversations. We then reviewed the changes for final approval or for another pass if there were technical issues that cause changes to occur.

One such change that we had technical issues with was the use of the fire volumes in a certain scene. This event came back every day, and we had been discussing it for a few weeks prior to the visit, with the problem of getting enough fire on screen to push the player where we wanted them to go without causing the frame rate to suffer since there were multiple other effects going on at the same time. I won't give away the trick that was used to do it in the end but lots of discussion later it was working on the final day. It's always great to see something happening on screen that may be different than what everyone had started thinking of but has turned out much better than everyone had initially wanted.

We also had gone through a series of different endings during the project, trying to get that F.E.A.R vibe down just right, so the final trip was a great chance to go through the final ending with everyone, gather some feedback and make some minor adjustments.

I returned to the office late Friday and we got the GM build shortly after at which point it went over to QA for testing. Our last week was spent making only bug fixes and all creative content was locked down. After QA was done the build went over to the burn lab for mastering and we then turned our attention to getting the localized builds wrapped up and out for the world release.

There you have it - no big fires, no staying up for three days straight, no waiting for builds that should been delivered two days prior, no fist fights in the parking lot - well not yet anyhow but I'm holding out that we can control ourselves for the next few days until we hit store shelves ;)

Thanks and I hope you enjoy F.E.A.R. Extraction Point as much as we do and it will be available Oct 24th for the PC,

Tim Hall