Vasari

Click on this thread about Prey, it's definitely not a mimic

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There are probably already threads about previous incarnations of Prey, but there doesn't seem to be one about the Prey that's actually being released next week.

 

This isn't Space Cherokee or Space Bounty Hunters, this one seems like a spiritual successor to System Shock 2. There's a demo on PS4 and Xbox One (But not PC unfortunately) that lets you play the opening section.

 

Some thoughts after playing it:

 

That might be my favourite game opening in recent memory. Seeing exactly how the simulation of the opening sequence worked was some fantastic level design.



 

I know it's more based on System Shock, but there's a grandiose sense to the architecture of the station that feels very much like Bioshock.

 

I don't know if the mimic trick will get old eventually, but it'll probably give me a heart attack before it does. I hope there's a way to identify a mimic from a distance. I do like how much they've emphasised stealth and finding alternate solutions to straight combat.

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I was really looking forward to this, given that it is a new ‘Shock-em-up/immersive sim from Arkane. But I had a go on the demo last night and was a bit disappointed. I’d still recommend giving it a shot if you have an interest in that sort of game because there’s some cool things about it but I don’t think this is a Day One Perch for me. 

 

The opening is quite impressive. I don’t mean this in a bad way, but for some reason it felt like a thing that could have been in a reasonably ambitious FPS from ten years ago. Oddly enough I was reminded of the original Half Life above everything else. I like to see a scientist get wrecked behind a door which is slightly too slow in opening for me to help him. I like to break a pane of glass with my melee weapon. 

The mimics are a great idea. But I just couldn’t find any way to engage with them which felt at all fun or satisfying, or even interesting. You have a room which you want to explore, and you’re almost certain there’s at least one mimic hiding in it: what do you do? As far as I could tell they don’t have any visual ‘tells’ when undisturbed — though at one point I knocked a cup off a table and it started glitching wildly before it transformed — so your only option is to turn into a total maniac and smash everything up. Sneaking might be a possibility, but then you’re just doing the same thing much more slowly. And that’s not really how I want to play these games; not for one hour, and certainly not for twenty or thirty hours. 

It is not an especially scary game. It seems to mistake jump scares for horror. The BIG SOUND EFFECT that plays when a mimic goes for you is going to get really old really fast. Plus the game then rattles off what seems like several minutes of pounding, aggressive music, even after the creature is dead and nothing is happening — why do that? It’s not good! 

The possibility of using your environment against the enemies is intriguing. But it becomes a headache when it butts up against the fact that a. the creatures are very fast, difficult to pin down and want to get in your face all the time, and b. your resources are so limited that quick-loading your way out of a bad confrontation is basically essential.  

If they had given you something more to work with from the beginning — if, for example, the goo gun came with a small pool of infinite recharging ammo — I think that would have encouraged more experimentation. Playing Zelda lately has really demonstrated the value of having a small collection of tools which are very flexible, if not especially powerful in themselves. Compared to that, sighing over another door which I can’t open without L3 hacking feels rather old fashioned.

I do like a briefcase inventory system, though.

 

I really hope they push the psychological aspect of the horror further than they did in the demo. If they do, it might be enough to pull me back in. As it stands, I think I’ll wait for the reviews; if they're good, I might pick it up when it's a little cheaper. For now I have the new Deus Ex and a second playthrough of Dishonored 2 to scratch the same itch...

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I'm a little bit concerned about this version of Prey. I have really liked Arkane's games since Dark Messiah. The Prey demo seems to have a couple of issues that I hope they solve.

 

Like @marginalgloss mentioned, some of the audio is messed up, in that it jumps in when there's one enemy around, hangs around for way too long after you've killed the mimic, and then ends really abruptly leaving an awkward silence. The music has been of a good quality, but it isn't being used very well. Also, I'm not sure for long the mimics will be an interesting enemy. I played through the demo slowly, and kind of figured out how to spot them before they jump (I won't write it for fear of spoilers and I'm not 100% sure on it either). The controls feel a bit clumsy too.

 

I think it'll get more tactically interesting when you get powers (which aren't in the demo), but I'll be curious as to how they control and interact with everything else going on.

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i'm very angry that this game made me afraid of a room with five chairs in it

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I really liked the demo. I wasn't following this game at all but I ate the demo up and am excited for more. 

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Listening to the cast today definitely sealed the deal on me buying the game. Now the waiting begins...

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Some thoughts on the game after 20ish hours (avoiding spoilers):

  • I really recommend playing on Hard or higher. The increased HP of enemies really made me consider whether or not I wanted to invest bullets into killing them, especially at places where resources are scarce. Makes for a much more tense experience.
  • For some reason I can't quite figure out, the choices that the game asks you to make feel surprisingly meaningful. They're of a binary and abstract kind I'm not super fond of some times, but even then I feel compelled to stop and think about them. It might be that the really excellent voice acting humanizes the other characters more than I'm used to.
  • There's really excellent voice acting.
  • I think the biggest flaw of the game so far for me is that it does not always do the best job communicating whether or not something should be immediately possible or if something will happen later that makes it possible (plot-wise. It does a pretty good job of telling you when upgrades will let you do stuff.)

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I've been largely avoiding information about this game since it seems like I'll want to play it at some point and also not be spoiled but from what little I've heard, people whose opinions I trust are really enjoying this, which makes me excited. Arkane has never made a game I dislike and it sounds like Prey isn't going to break the streak.

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Steve Gaynor's been livestreaming this game on twitch over the last several days and every time I've been in the audience there's also been a handful of Arkane devs that worked on the game providing commentary about the decisions that went into the stuff Steve's been encountering. It's super fascinating (and super spoilery, obviously).

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Finished this a couple days ago, and man did I enjoy it. I'll probably go through it again sometime soon, just to try out different play styles and such.

 

One thing I really liked was a reveal that happens in a post-credits sequence. Not necessarily that it happens, or even what it is, but because there are clues seeded throughout the game. They're nothing too specific, but if you're paying attention, exploring, and thinking about things, you can start drawing a conclusion a few hours into the game that is then built upon later.

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I've only been able to play about ten hours, but I can already tell this game is gonna be my favorite game that comes out this year (it was one of the games I was most looking forward to). The Arkane Austin studio made so many smart, admirable design decisions about this game. My understanding is that after Irrational Studios got gutted a lot of people from that team made their way over to the Austin studio, and it makes me happy to see that talented group of people make a game that is not only way better than Bioshock Infinite, but also (in my opinion at least) surpasses the Dishonored games in the freedom it provides players. Just basic stuff like never taking the camera away, not forcing you into these play style binaries, providing you with a freedom of approach that actually is better than any other immersive sim I can think of. It's phenomenal.

 

 

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One thing I haven't heard talked about much that I really like is how everyone on Talos 1 has a name. This is exactly the sort of game that could have repeated alot of lazy environmental storytelling tropes involving corpses, but they've put so much care into presenting the game world and a big part of that is acknowledging that every dead body you find was a person involved in the story in some capacity. It tells you far more about the world to see the bodies of people who were clearly running to the shuttle bay when they died, than the old Fallout trick of putting a corpse next to a pistol and a bottle of whisky. It seems small, but in this sort of game that's absolutely a detail you need to get right, and they've clearly spent alot of time thinking about it.

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On 5/11/2017 at 6:05 PM, sclpls said:

I've only been able to play about ten hours, but I can already tell this game is gonna be my favorite game that comes out this year (it was one of the games I was most looking forward to). The Arkane Austin studio made so many smart, admirable design decisions about this game. My understanding is that after Irrational Studios got gutted a lot of people from that team made their way over to the Austin studio, and it makes me happy to see that talented group of people make a game that is not only way better than Bioshock Infinite, but also (in my opinion at least) surpasses the Dishonored games in the freedom it provides players. Just basic stuff like never taking the camera away, not forcing you into these play style binaries, providing you with a freedom of approach that actually is better than any other immersive sim I can think of. It's phenomenal.

 

 

 

That makes me really happy.  There was so much talent at Irrational that was ultimately very poorly managed, it's good to see them have a chance to shine and show just how fucking good they are. 

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On 5/14/2017 at 6:56 AM, Vasari said:

One thing I haven't heard talked about much that I really like is how everyone on Talos 1 has a name. This is exactly the sort of game that could have repeated alot of lazy environmental storytelling tropes involving corpses, but they've put so much care into presenting the game world and a big part of that is acknowledging that every dead body you find was a person involved in the story in some capacity. It tells you far more about the world to see the bodies of people who were clearly running to the shuttle bay when they died, than the old Fallout trick of putting a corpse next to a pistol and a bottle of whisky. It seems small, but in this sort of game that's absolutely a detail you need to get right, and they've clearly spent alot of time thinking about it.

 

Yeah definitely.

Spoiler

I also like how a lot of the phantoms have names. This means that even though I'm definitely killing them, I feel kind of sad about it as opposed to the guards in Dishonored that, despite being human enemies, don't trigger the same reaction because they are interchangable.

 

One thing I am noticing is that it is a little tricky to keep track of the main plot because nearly every character has been defined and has a story to tell. It's also nice that the game reveals its plot in a fairly subdued manner. If you want to follow the story, it really is on the player to pay attention to all the emails going back and forth, who wrote it, who it is for, etc. To that end I'm not really sure if I'm into the story or not, but I really appreciate how the story is being relayed.

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Someone needs to invent a hacking mini-game that's satisfying (and remains satisfying throughout an entire play-through), or just drop/rework the conceit all together.

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After hearing lots of good things, I picked this up last night and played a couple of hours. Some of the initial shocks were not as impactful because I kinda knew what I was getting into (even though I hadn't heard any specific spoilers) but the design of the world is really pulling me in so far. I've already found a couple of neat secrets, and I can't wait to get some more cool abilities.

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I'm really impressed with how natural the environment design feels. I've been taking my time exploring, and it feels like there are quite a few big areas you can visit before the story takes you there. There are plenty of sections that are gated off until you get the appropriate MacGuffin, but in this corporate science lab setting it feels pretty believable (as opposed to the BioShocks where the forced detours often felt scripted or arbitrary). And being able to spacewalk outside makes the whole thing feel connected in a cool way.

 

Definitely a "greater than the sum of its parts" game, for me. There are a lot of familiar components, but the whole thing is executed really dang well.

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Looking back, I think my favorite part of this game environmentally is

Spoiler

The amount of effort put into the details of the D&D campaign going on and the degree to which it's spread across the station.

 

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Well-reasoned take: this is the best Shock game, hands down. This is Arkane tributing and surpassing their heroes as they did with Dishonored. It's just so smart. I've heard some people trash-talking the story and writing, and I cannot disagree with them more. This game had writing that perfectly fit the format. The NPC interaction was limited as they usually are in these games, but it didn't feel like it would be IMPOSSIBLE to run across a friendly NPC, as it was in Bioshock 1.

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I finished the game over the weekend. Without getting into spoilers, I think the ending is really interesting, and there are a couple of details that make it difficult to tease out what's really going on.

 

This is the best discussion about the plot of Prey (and it goes without saying that it is filled with spoilers) that I've been able to track down on the internet:

 

https://www.gamecrate.com/prey-runaway-trolley-ethics-story-ending/16214

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I'm really enjoying Prey, but I think I found a voice recording that spoils the ending? I'm only as far as entering the G.U.T.S. so I guess we'll see.

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Incidentally, the bit I've heard described, right at the beginning, where

the walls all flicker off and you realise you've been a test subject monitored by scientists

sounds very similar to a cool early moment in Deus Ex Invisible War.

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3 hours ago, Dewar said:

I'm really enjoying Prey, but I think I found a voice recording that spoils the ending? I'm only as far as entering the G.U.T.S. so I guess we'll see.

 

I'm curious about which log this is.

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5 hours ago, Korax said:

 

I'm curious about which log this is.

 

The log was in Psychotronics...

 

I found a log of a scientist talking to Alex about implanting human brain cells into a Typhon, rather than the other way around. Alex rejected it saying not to waste the research, but I have a feeling that either him or I are the result of that research?

 

I dunno, I seemed so sure about it when I first heard it, but now getting less sure. I'll listen to it again when I get home.

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