got a hankering for a game what makes you feel like you’re inside the game so i googled “immersive first person games” and loaded up a longplay of Prey (2017). i’ll be damned if they didn’t just slap a fresh coat of paint on bioshock and call it a day. derogatory.
i definitely don’t agree with that, i found prey to be vastly more interesting than bioshock in basically every single way
anyway i played space invaders 64, which sucks. for one it’s ugly as hell and looks like a flash game, and your hitbox is massive. they add bosses which are awful at telegraphing attacks (which led to some initially amusing sudden deaths) and there is a powerup system where if you attack enemies of the same colour four times in a row you get a certain powerup, so there seems to be ideal ways to play each level making it a bit of a puzzle shooter except it’s not nearly as interesting as that sounds, and the concept is also pretty poorly executed because not enough thought was put into the mechanics and how the game plays to make it actually work well together
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Now now, Prey had much worse combat than Bioshock >_>
(I only ever played the demo for Prey, those little “popcorn” enemies may have been among the most annoying enemies I’ve come across in a FPS and turned me off the whole thing).
In other news I finally beat Ys IX Monstrum Nox and its back half was much stronger than the baffling first one. That said the amount of story saved for the last chapter and a half as opposed to the prior… six or so required it to go full story dump several times. On the other hand how much it referenced/built off of all the stuff that happened in the prior games while keeping it mostly “if you know you know, if not that’s okay” was kinda charming. Ultimately I think it ended up as alright overall, but definitely more for the Ys diehards than anyone else and the first several hours are a legit problem.
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Yeah Prey is vastly more exciting and interesting than Bioshock. You should just play it for like three hours. Get the glue gun. Call it quits if you want to after that. But exploring the space is a key part of its charm and whatever genius it may claim.
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My experience exactly. I was (and I guess sort of still am) curious about Prey with all the praise it gets, but fighting those small enemies was nothing but frustration and made me not care anymore about whatever else the game might have to offer.
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Prey certainly has awful enemies. No one is wrong about that.
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The worst part of Prey is definitely the first couple hours where you mostly dealing with the little small enemies and don’t have a good way to fight back, yeah. I’ve had to tell people to stick with it if they like the other things about the game enough to keep going.
Personally I think it’s definitely worth powering through the rough start because it ended up being one of my favourite games. I still need to play mooncrash though.
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for whatever reason, those small mimics were hell to deal with in the demo but I found them relatively straightforward when I played the full game a year or so later can’t tell if the demo is particularly poor or if they’re only annoying on controller but fine on kbm
The only comparison to be made with Bioshock is that they’re both primarily influenced by the original System Shock, but Prey does it well by being an exploration-focused dungeon crawler. In contrast, Bioshock is trash for particularly stupid babies.
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I thought the baddies were annoying but in a good way
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yall not seeing the bioshock/prey comparisons is making me crazy. amnesiac main character walks around ruined environment picking up random garbage and jabbing stuff into their veins/eyeballs for powerups. transhumanist gloss on anarchocapitalist world. mysterious voice on the radio directing your objectives. obnoxious audio log exposition. the interior design in the offices is even art deco typography ffs. like i’m sure it will distinguish itself in various ways but “nothing like” is such a stretch
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also sort of unrelated but im kind of salty that “immersive video game” apparently has a technical definition instead of an artistic judgement
like this is such a misnomer, player choice is certainly one thing that causes a feeling of immersiveness but not the only thing… art design, setting, even the user interface matter
Immersive sims by definition allow for multiple approaches, and typically incorporate elements of multiple genres, including role-playing games, stealth, first-person shooters, platform games and survival horror.[2]
…
The term “immersive sim” may also be used to describe the game design philosophy behind the immersive sim genre, which uses interacting, reactive and consistent game systems to create emergent gameplay and a sense of player agency.[5][6]
like yeah the height of immersion for me is when i can shoot stuff, roleplay, and jump on boxes
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considering how little jumping i do outside of videogames jumping is not as immersive as either climbing or scampering
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i did appreciate that prey has a stamina meter, albeit i think they should replace the bar with just audio cues and if you sprint too much you double over and pant for like 2 minutes. also if you crouch walk too much it should give you a “Knees Hurt” debuff
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Immersive Sim is a semi/codified genre. The idea of an immersive sim in theory is that you don’t have a linear level with one way of engaging with it. Instead, a level is designed more like a structure or situation, and you have a moveset that is usually customizable through gear, powers, or RPG mechanics that let you engage with the level in the way you want to.
Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock, and Dishonored are prey are ‘immersive sims’.
I’m not sure the definition of it as a clear genre always makes sense, but these are all games inspired by and in dialogue with each other and they definitely predate bioshock.
I think the specific plot similarities in Prey are conscientious of this and are trying to mess with your assumptions from bioshock, by immediately making it clear weird shit is happening and trying to make you guess exactly what the weird shit really is.
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Worse in my mind is that if you say “shooter” the first thing people think of these days is some 3D first-person thing (as illustrated by that quote) instead of the one true genre.
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from what i played of them bioshock and bioshock infinite felt more like they were maybe “inspired” by deus ex / system shock 2 vibes but were going for more of a pure shoot 'em up xbox 360 experience and prey 2017 felt more like it was embracing the larger more open-ended maps and level designs of that style of game
cruelty squad feels a little “immersive sim” too…
it’s my opinion that prey 2017 is certainly better than any of the bioshock games but they’re certainly cousins i think!
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“immersive sim” is, in the narrowest possible definition, a game developed by Looking Glass Studios - Wikipedia, and Arkane has been essentially making direct successors to each of them (Ultima Underworld → Dark Messiah, Thief → Dishonored, System Shock → Prey) for as long as they’ve been around. they do have analogues to other genres and there’s not a strict rule about which games are or aren’t immersive sims, it mostly has to do with how much emergent behavior the game incorporates (from back when that was a very novel thing to do at all).
Ken Levine worked at Looking Glass toward the end of its heyday and was, afaict, essentially its dumbest employee, which he leveraged to get to make System Shock 2 and Bioshock
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immersive sim usually denotes a specific kind of hybrid FPS but idk i think of like Larian games, the “open world” Zeldas, and the Hitman reboot trilogy as different genre games that have imsim DNA. if it’s got discrete interactions between mechanics & world objects that can be used to complete game goals in emergent ways thats imsim, baby
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Incorrect, arx fatalis is the ultima underworld like
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