i know you made this post over 2 years ago but thank you for recommending this channel, i fall asleep to this guy’s videos all the time now and would definitely do the same if you ever started doing this sort of thing, it’s ideal
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same, i think they’re streaming stuff on twitch first now though
if i ever have any time + can hear in both ears… maybe i’ll do it
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life goals
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this video definitely made me appreciate the technical/artistic achievements of Prey a lot more. it maybe sounds corny but to me Prey really feels like an AAA game From The Future in a lot of ways. it seems like Mooncrash (which i still haven’t played yet) was almost a better way to use all the stuff they built tho… not that the base game isn’t good.
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arkane are notorious for this, you can tell the studio culture has a real disconnect between “what are we developing” and “what has to ship in the game” and it’s usually impressive if frustrating
def far better to have that problem than studios (i.e. EA or Ubisoft) who are taking things built many many years in the past and stretching them absolutely thin as much as possible. though it must be frustrating to keep Arkane in business…
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I’ve never really been satisfied with why I don’t like Prey more than I do, because, you’re right, the way it assembles its various component parts and its structure is really interesting, but… the enemy design is irritating, the narrative pacing is kind of irritating, the 0451 cupboards are somewhat irritating, the progression in mooncrash is irritating…
like it’s gotta be the best “classical” immersive sim after the original system shock and deus ex, it just never fully clicked with me
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i don’t know if i agree with some of those points (don’t mind the 0451 cupboards tho narrative-wise haven’t finished the game yet), but i am a little underwhelmed by the enemy design in Prey in spite of some of the cool things about them.
I know they struggled to ship anything for the longest time after arx fatalis and dark messiah, and neither of the first 2 dishonoreds were all that great imo (the first one just felt too cheap and boxy because of UE3 to be an inheritor to thief, and the second one felt like a bunch of great maps that had no idea what to do with them, very “oops! all level designers!”) but everything they’ve done since 2017 or so (including death of the outsider, prey and mooncrash, and now deathloop) has been genuinely really interesting imo, no one else is really competing in their space
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I also just remembered how much I disliked the way they just showed you the whole skill tree at the beginning of the game in dishonoured 2 and prey, really takes the wind out of your sails when you’re waiting to maybe try one powerup for like 20 hours. they finally smartened up about that in death of the outsider and mooncrash though.
arkane are weird, it’s a small miracle that they managed to ship a whole-ass system shock successor the way they did without Ken Levine’s ego coming into it, and even though their approach to quest flags is very “go here, now go here” (maybe the one crutch they haven’t gotten on top of as of deathloop) and the storytelling is alternately sparse and heavy handed, it holds up in any context! and yet I’m still kind of lukewarm on the thing
one thing I wish they’d maybe have taken away from the destined-to-be-forgotten deus ex revival is testing the player on any kind of execution other than just traversal; generally in an arkane game if you reach the objective, you did it! and that’s in turn enabled them to implement the “run past enemies because you’re bored/annoyed/fucking up” dark souls strategy in deathloop so it’s not a total loss, but something is still missing
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Really want to push against this apparently forum-popular idea that Mooncrash is a better use of Prey’s systems than the main game. Death to roguelites
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Honestly this, please game devs don’t make your FPS’ enemies be like, 85 percent Little Fast Guys even with mouse/keyboard that shit is infuriating.
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Maybe this is the locus of our disagreement, I found it very easy to smash mimics with the wrench and the way they popped out was always funny
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I hate basically all the enemies in Prey, but love that game even still. I’ve tried to prevent myself from adding an extra wrench swing to my combo of attacks whenever I want to kill a mimic, but I ALWAYS do a third attack which hits nothing because mimics only take two hits at most. I find that strangely irritating.
Mooncrash is so concise. I don’t think it’s a better use of Prey’s systems, it just surfaces them and brings them into contact with each other with greater frequency.
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The mimics are funny headcrabs, getting pranked by them is great and if they’re tricky to hit it gives them opportunity to turn into an object and joke on me again. I think the rest of the Typhon enemies need a desperate infusion of personality. It’s pretty clear they were designed for their ability use first and foremost and Arkane is so into human-equivalent enemies I don’t think they even considered actual, you know, monsters. You can’t sell an alien force solely on a vertex shader, though.
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I mean yes I frequently chuckled at the mimics being smol idiots, acting like turning a corner and turning into a mug in the middle of the floor was convincing camouflage.
It is somewhat of a bummer to get all these exotic weapons and powers and still have the best late-game strategy for dealing with the little buggers be The Starter Weapon
Maybe it’s cause of the difficulty I was playing on but later on there are beefier mimics with elemental properties. I actually like them less though because they more resemble the other elemental weakness whack-a-mole enemies
Enemy pacing is a real problem they had; you don’t see headcrabs in the back half of their games because the player has moved on to new challenges, but Prey should have been escalating its enemy compositions and trimming the fat more than it did. The focus on re-traversing old areas kind of exposed this; while they started adding new, tougher enemies of existing humanoids, they never really scaled back the mimics, did they?
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It’s not a better use, but it’s definitely a good use. One of the few games of its kind to understand the appeal of rogue-inspired games (lots of weird intersecting emergent parts), and does a great job investing you in the cycle of playing the same space over and over without getting overbearing. Clear through-line from Mooncrash to Deathloop, as other people have pointed out, but also feels like the culmination of Arkane’s take on the diorama-game. Prey (Vanilla and Mooncrash) works great where Dishonored sometimes falls flat because it uses the search action conceit to reuse space, and Dishonored is so meticulously plotted that playing through each level once or twice feels like a failure.
It’s rare to play games with such a nice payoff; they are so sure of their own emergent properties and level design that they dare to make you backtrack or replay the same thing over and over again. That to me is the heart of both diorama games and roguelikes and I think that’s why Mooncrash and Deathloop work so well for me.
Was a total failure for me. I think probably because the combat is not interesting enough to be so consequential. In the main game I could quicksave and play around with different strategies, but in Mooncrash it’s all high-wire tension which I don’t care for in general, really. I thought the most interesting part was the lived-in spacepod that was your safe hub/main menu.
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