Imagine being a company that tells Shinji Mikami to create a horror-themed third person shooter with a weird JP>ENG title translation, lets Arkane create a space station game where you mess up monsters with your wrench until next batch of audio logs falls out, and then valiantly defends its intellectual property by suing anyone who wants to include nouns like “Fallout”, “Prey” or even “Scrolls” in their game’s name
No, never.
8 Likes
it’s one of the few fantasies where I don’t dread the future
anyway, the first ~real~ level, the hardware room, has some fantastic design – interesting shortcuts and secrets, clever verticality, branching paths with various tricks for various character builds, decent environmental storytelling, everything I want from immersive sim. whenever I walk into the next room, I feel dread, whenever I walk out of it, I feel like I’ve, hm, mastered it? the combat did start feeling too easy by the end of the level, and that’s exactly where improved enemy types with new jumpscare abilities are introduced
I dig some cute, unexpected humor scattered among the logs. I don’t think the art deco inspired interiors fit the hopeful 80s sci-fi vibe as well as they should. Still, I was kind of interested in the story in the beginning because it builds a sense of mystery, but after 3-4 hours, now that I’ve found the second part of Looking Glass video where Morgan is told she needs to get the two detonation keys, blow up the station and kill herself, there is… absolutely nothing that propels me forward? no clear stakes, no interesting character arcs, not even a happy ending to look forward to? I fully expect some twist later, but for now it’s just ehhh, I’ll force myself to keep playing because I really like the level design and the fully interconnected structure speaks to me more than what I saw in Dishonored and Deus Ex
That sounds like the plot problems Dishonored has had. I’m looking forward to these even though I found Dishonored enervating because I don’t have so many self-imposed restrictions in a non-stealth game.
Well, she told you you wouldn’t like it lol.
Actually I just got to that part myself. Whatever the next big plot twist ends up being will probably determine whether I think the story is actually good or just a well-executed excuse for a bunch of neat videogame levels.
Fingers are crossed!
edit-There’s another twist like right after this one! This story’s just carving its way down the rabbit hole! I have no idea how it’s going to end.
I can’t tell if the lack of functioning mirrors in this game is a PS4 technical problem or a really transparent attempt to hide an obligatory Shocking Identity Reveal. I just got to the first time the obligatory Second Contradictory AI Voice calls you for the first time and I need to take a break. The writing in this is bad, and combat is incredibly awkward on a controller (with the caveat that I’m bad at gamepad FPS). Successful combat seems to involve quicksaving before the encounter, then replaying it until you get your lures into exploding barrels just right to take minimal damage. (So it’s a real Immersive Sim.)
I like parts of this game but it just feels “competent.” The Mimics are the only bit of personality that exists in this game at all, and jump-scare headcrabs alone aren’t going to maintain this for long. I’m not sure I’ll keep the Redbox rental more than another day so I hope this game is secretly really short.
it’s funny how some of these things that I thought we’d easily have nowadays are as rare as they were twenty years ago because the rendering expense scales exactly with the general graphics. At least we have screenspace reflections now and I can get all the shiny floors I want
I’m about five minutes away from being able to fabricate a whole shitload of nueromods. I’ve got the materials I just need to get into a certain office and access a computer. At first I was like damn it I don’t want to go looking for the guy’s passkey or whatever but then I saw a crack in the window and realized I can use the toy crossbow I found early on and promptly tucked away in my safe because I wasn’t using it to hit the lock button on the other side and open the door that way.
2 Likes
I appreciate that most of them time, if you see glass, you can smash the hell out of it and go through it.
RPS reviewed this today and claimed to adore it while noting that the early game, the ending, and the map UI are all apparently terrible
yeah, I really wish arkane weren’t totally incompetent at narrative, they love their little vignettes and environmental storytelling but everything else feels like a misremembered comic book
They’re French.
4 Likes
The shame is Harvey Smith cares about story and builds meaningful plot architecture but doesn’t seem to know how to pace twists and turns; the players understanding of the story from go is the same perfect view as the creator’s, a world made to say one thing.
I really, really like this game! Though the story is predictable as all hell. At this point I’ll be more surprised if Morgan doesn’t turn out to have been an alien all along. I’m still trying to retrieve the arming keys, and I’m getting close, but I’ve been wandering off doing side quests and appreciating how fleshed out the world of the game is through all the incidental details and stuff. I have no idea how far along I am, if I’m nearing the end or still somewhere in the middle.
I haven’t been looking stuff up any so the possibility space of what’s possible is still very large for me. I wonder if it’s possible to not only save all the survivors but also eradicate the aliens and not have to blow up the station (though I’m going to do that anyway if I can). I know from one of the achievements it’s possible to escape early in an escape pod without blowing the place up or rescuing anyone, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else is possible.
I’ve made a lot of neuromods and upgraded my weapons a lot. I’ve stuck to just human abilities and I love zipping around and high-jumping all over the place, swinging my super powered wrench at stuff and then fixing things that are broken or hacking hostile robots. I wish I hadn’t dumped six or seven weapon upgrades into my pistol because I did a side quest last night where I found a way better pistol that takes upgrades. I haven’t messed with upgrading the non-standard weapons yet.
I’ve encountered the nightmare enemy twice now. He shows up because you’ve taken neuromods but I wonder if not taking any at all will make him not show up period. Both times I’ve scanned him and he has at least five levels of scanning so I’m guessing he’ll show up a few more times before the game is over.
Just because it’s coming up in this thread and might be worth mentioning: Arkane has two studios, one in Austin, TX and another one in Lyon, France. Both studios worked together on Dishonored, and afterwards they split in two so they could work on a new project that what would became Prey (Arkane Austin) and Dishonored 2 (Arkane Lyon) simultaneously. Harvey Smith moved to Lyon for a while to personally oversee Dishonored 2, and he wasn’t around to be as hands-on with Prey. Prey is mostly the brainchild of Lead Designer Ricardo Bare and Raphael Colantalio (who is Co-Creative director along with Harvey). Ricardo, who in addition to being an all-around incredibly sharp and humble guy, also headed up some DLC for the original Dishonored and got his start in the industry working on maps for the original Deus Ex (I asked him at some point about it, but I’ve already forgotten which maps he made, sorry).
In a recent interview, Ricardo mentioned that beyond some of the obvious genre influences, the structure of Prey is definitely based on Arx Fatalis, and he and Raph used the term “space dungeon” to describe what they set out to do.
I haven’t had much time to play the game now that it’s out because I’m swamped at work, but one of the things that excited me working as a hired gun on the VO side and being able to see the entire structure of the game plotted out on paper was how many ways the plot bends subtly and overtly based on what you do (it branches in a more complex way than the the chaos system in Dishonored, but I’d rather not spoil it too much here) and for all the little variations that had to be accounted for because of how quests can be approached “out of order” in so many instances. There was a lot of play testing to get it working properly, since their aren’t discreet maps and they commited to areas being interconnected.
I just finished the Crew Quarters, which was one of my favorite areas when I was working on it, and I was really pleased by how they pulled it off. So yeah, I think what they did with the game is really cool! But I can also see why people might be dismissive of a space-station disaster thing that contains more than its fair share of miraculous plot twists and genre conventions (AI’s, science gone wrong, amnesiac protag, etc. etc.).
My main advice for anyone starting up a game is to put as many points into movement as you can from the start. Once you can dodge stuff, whatever else you decide to build your character around becomes a lot more feasible. I was definitely reloading a lot of combat encounters before I did that and now I feel like I’m only dying when I get careless.
7 Likes
I’m making things difficult for myself by intentionally not upgrading anything, for roleplaying reasons. (If I can trust anything anyone is telling me about who “I” am, and what happened to “me,” it’s pretty clear that this biomod stuff is nothing but bad news and I’m not touching it again.) it does emphasize how slow your movement options are without it – you basically CANNOT dodge enemy attacks, so I have to play like a real Immersive Sim and savescum encounters until I can dispatch enemies without taking too much damage or using up all of my hard-to-find resources like psy bombs. Finally finding a shotgun was great, because at least now i have some reliable burst damage (the pistol works but takes a LOT of shots to dispatch anything vaguely tough, and I want those rounds for mimic-checking.)
I got turned around in the zero-G maintenance shaft and ended up clearing the shuttle bay instead of going up into the Arboretum. I appreciate that there seems to be a fair amount of room to get sidetracked, even though I’m sure the plot will send me to all of these areas at a “proper” time as I go on. There are a lot of things in this game that are just okay but I dunno, a just okay immersive sim is fine when you haven’t played one in a while. And the zero-g sections are pretty cool.
This is great so far! I got to the office and then went back to comb the first area. I found a lot of useful things and one area that freaked me out a bit.
I finished it over the weekend. It was really good. I got the best possible ending according to the internet. I’m definitely going to play it again at some point, to see the other endings and get the rest of the achievements.
Besides the setting, overall atmosphere and level design my favorite part was probably all the different weapons. I opted to not use any of the alien powers my first time around so I got pretty familiar with all the different tools and gadgets.
The pistol and shotgun were the only real traditional FPS type weapons. The rest were pretty unique like the gloo gun which I used probably equally for platforming and combat, or the nerf bow which I used mainly to hit out of reach door buttons or to distract the occasional enemy. It took a few upgrades to make the q-beam worthwhile on hard difficulty and I barely used the stun gun though it came in very handy on at least one occasion.
I kept forgetting the grenades so by the late part of the game I had a lot saved up. There’s a lure grenade that draws aliens close, an emp grenade that temporarily disables robotic enemies, another that temporarily weakens aliens of their psychic powers and a recycler grenade that sucks everything within range into a black hole and spits out craftable materials.
Maybe there were others but those were the ones I had.
I saved all the humans but next time I’ll kill everyone.
There were probably five or six side quests that I never finished so I will do that as well.
All the zero g areas and exploring outside the station are awesome. There’s several maintenance hatches and little interior areas only accessible from outside.
I give it two thumbs up! Looking forward to seeing how it goes with just alien powers.
1 Like
anybody else playing this? I’m looking to be convinced, even though:
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I tend to find big, complicated, first-person action games “enervating” as astromech said and am rarely in the mood for them
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I played through both dishonoreds despite never really being sold on what they’re doing between the too-messy-yet-overly-straightforward design and the weak overarching plot and the reliance on first-person melee and the savescumminess