Arkane PREY - Arkane's immersive coffee cup transformation sim - now with Mooncrash roguelike mode DLC

[Tweed]

This is all sounding really good, pity about the operator.

 

[Icewater]

There was another mod that tried to balance it by making the Medical Operator hurt your suit and the Engineering Operator hurt your heath but I don't care for that sort of thing.

Why? A tradeoff like that is better than nothing.

 

[ciox]

More useful would be if the Medical Operator could hurt himself when healing you, that would approximate 'limited uses'.

 

[razvedchiki]

any balance mod worth mentioning?i want autistic level difficulty.

 

[Tweed]

Why? A tradeoff like that is better than nothing.

Because it's really stupid. I was interested in that rebalancer till I saw how they were dealing with balance.

 

[Icewater]

"It's really stupid" isn't a reason.

 

[Tweed]

"It's really stupid" isn't a reason.

From an in-universe perspective it makes zero sense for an operator to damage some other part of your stats to balance things out. A medical operator that can only heal traumas still performs a medical operation that's valuable and easily explained versus a medical operator that damages your suit for no logical reason. Even less logical is a supposedly functional engineering operator that actually harms you while it repairs your suit. From a gameplay perspective all they've done is "rob Paul to pay Peter" with a sloppy solution to try and punish the player for abusing operators, it's very tacky. If that doesn't bother you then by all means use it.

 

[Icewater]

Maybe the operators are buggy. Maybe it has to cut through your suit to heal you. Maybe the engineering operators weren't designed to repair suits and accidentally harm you while doing so. Have some imagination.

 

[RoSoDude]

There was another mod that tried to balance it by making the Medical Operator hurt your suit and the Engineering Operator hurt your heath but I don't care for that sort of thing.

Why? A tradeoff like that is better than nothing.

Maybe the operators are buggy. Maybe it has to cut through your suit to heal you. Maybe the engineering operators weren't designed to repair suits and accidentally harm you while doing so. Have some imagination.

While I certainly can imagine how to justify such tradeoffs (the same explanations spring to mind), it still strikes me as out of place, from both a gameplay and a fictional perspective. For one, the operators scan you over and bleep bloop you to full health/suit repair/psi in a manner that suggests sophisticated, precise, and robust technology. They give no indication (other than the mod changelist or just trying it out) that seeking out their services can actually be harmful -- instead, their demeanor and sound design communicate a friendly helpfulness. From a mechanical perspective, they indeed impose an immediate cost, though it still generally amounts to a much larger long-term payout. So you spend a suit repair kit now to save on three medkits, and then spend a medkit later to save on three suit repair kits or psi hypos... you're still getting limitless regeneration, it's just a bit less convenient, and requires that you have at least one of the "cost" items on hand. This may limit how you use them when the types are far apart, of course, but I'm not convinced it's much different than the incentives now.

So to me, it's counter-intuitive on several different levels, and doesn't do much to meaningfully combat the issue at hand. But maybe you feel differently and the tradeoff (heh) is worth it. If you'd like, I can create an alternate module for your personal use with these tradeoffs built in. I'd rather not release this feature along with my mod proper as it doesn't suit my vision (lol calm down RSD we're talking about number tweaks), and I don't want to be seen as just lifting stuff from other mods for the hell of it.

 

[FreshCorpse]

I finished this last night and reading through this thread it seems like I have the same rough opinion as everyone else - I liked it a lot but it did have some problems, notably in being too long for the mechanics it had. Took me 21 hours, doing many of the side quests and I have to say that given the small number of combat and environment mechanics it probably should have been shorter. Probably the creative decision to make would be either to cut some of the less important areas or to introduce a number of new enemy types, maybe both.

I see Prey has the fairly common problem that NPCs talk over each other. I don't know why they decided to place multiple significant NPCs in the same room without solving it. Dr Igwe is particularly annoying in this respect as not only did he delight in talking over other NPCs but he also called me at highly inappropriate times with long, boring diatribes about whatever classic music he's into at the moment. What I've seen in a couple of games (GTA 5 at least?) is characters who recognise that something else is happening and who shut up for a bit and then resume when things are quiet. Prey really needed that feature.

I had below minimum spec hardware when I started the game without realising it (CPU bottleneck: my CPU had 2 real threads of execution instead of 4). I'd been holding off on upgrades until they were really necessary for something so not a problem but I was surprised when a GPU upgrade alone didn't help - turned out that Prey really needs at least 4 physical cores. I remember some complaints about performance (but much less than Dishonored 2) on release and wonder whether this was down to more people having 2 physical cores at the time. Who knows.

My observation for people looking at rebalancing it is not only to reduce drops but also to reduce spawns: as it is Prey has a lot of trash mobs. Just reducing the number of enemies by ~35% and increasing enemies difficulty by ~35% would make for a more fun game. The problem is particularly acute with military operators towards the end of the game.

I committed to engineer skills early and had a pretty good time of it except that I felt slightly underpowered in combat and mobs seemed a bit spongey. Turrets are excellent against Typhon early on but struggle later (even when fortified) and the fact that turret bullets break GLOO makes it difficult to help them by doing crowd control during larger fights. They also get flipped easily by some of the phantoms. It would have been really cool if they had introduced alternate weapons for turrets - flame turrets or GLOO turrets.

 

[Arnust]

Mooncrash seems to handle most of your problems. Also literally has laser and GOO turrets.

 

[Trithne]

Mooncrash indeed has a lot of things that would've made the base game a lot more interesting, from good stuff like the turrent variants and the Typhon detectors, to simple but still interesting stuff like distinct crate types, mostly because they re-enabled trauma for it.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Mooncrash seems to handle most of your problems. Also literally has laser and GOO turrets.

Thanks for the tip - I'll have a look at some point. Right now Mooncrash costs not much less than what I paid for the main game, plus I'm done with Prey for a bit.

 

[Jenkem]

play hardcore mode

 

[RoSoDude]

Just about done with my balance mod. Will be coming out alongside a Prey Modding Guide as well as my "Prey RSDK", which will include the tools you need to convert, decrypt, and pack up the game files.

But first, I thought I'd put out a "Detailed Tooltips" mod for the vanilla game, just so people can have a clue what their chipsets are doing. An updated version will be coming out with my actual mod.

https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/39/

Detailed Tooltips
by RoSoDude

#### What is this? ####
This mod adds detail where it was missing from the in-game tooltips, based on data taken straight from the game files:
-Hard numbers for all chipset effects (e.g. Reduces X damage by Y%)
-Psi costs for Neuromod abilities
-Missing info in Neuromod/chipset descriptions (e.g. moving during Mimic Matter attracts attention, ARTAX Gen 1 boosts glide duration)
-Resistances in enemy research data (e.g. Thermal/Etheric/Voltaic Phantoms, Telepaths, Weavers, and Nightmare are resistant to Mindjack)
The mod is only available in English. Please let me know if you would like to produce translated versions of the mod.

#### Installation ####
Copy the English_xml_patch.pak file over Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Prey\Localization\English_xml_patch.pak.
Back up the original first if you like. To uninstall, simple revert to the original.

#### Wait, what the- ####
Yes, you read those descriptions right. The Kinetic/Superthermal/Electrostatic/Psychoshock Amp chipsets only boost damage by 10%, while Aggressor Amp boosts damage by 20%! Impact Amp increases knockdown by 4x, the ARTAX Gen 1 Propulsion chipset also increases glide duration by 267% even though it only mentions speed, the Fear Reactor chipset has only a meager 10% chance to activate, and... well, the list goes on. As such, I've created the CORE BALANCE modification for Prey [TBA] which addresses these issues and many more. Enjoy these detailed tooltips for the vanilla game, and perhaps come try CORE BALANCE after you've seen the truth laid bare.

 

[MuscleSpark]

Enjoy these detailed tooltips for the vanilla game, and perhaps come try CORE BALANCE after you've seen the truth laid bare.

The Truth Laid Bare is a great DLC/expandalone title.

 

[RoSoDude]

And we are LIVE!

https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/40

PREY CORE BALANCE MOD - Version 1.0
by RoSoDude
https://rosodudemods.wordpress.com

#### What is CORE BALANCE? ####
CORE BALANCE is a modification that seeks to improve Prey's game balance without substantially altering its core design.
Neuromod skills, chipsets, status effects, etc. are essentially the same, but numbers are tweaked to even out the viability of strategies, while also reducing the abusability of certain systems.
The player's strength will start out on par with the base game, but they will have a longer route to unstoppable godhood, with fewer no-brainer skills and more playstyle flexibility.
The total number of Neuromods needed to obtain every skill remains the same, but overabundant resources are reduced and character progression is slightly decelerated.
Survival Mode options are now finely tuned to provide the intended depth and challenge, where in the base game they were easily trivialized by resource balance and other numerical oversights.
Far from simply nerfing everything, this mod aims to enable greater creativity and player expression by bringing underpowered options up to par, so every Neuromod and chipset is an interesting choice.
Enemy designs and hazards are also rebalanced, with some previously undodgeable attacks and instant death events mitigated, and enemy resistances made more intuitive and explicit for the player.
This mod is NOT designed purely for hardcore players, though there are optional modules to suit them as well as more casual players and everyone in between, making for a highly tweakable experience.
CORE BALANCE is Prey as it should have been; retaining all of the nuanced gameplay that Arkane is known for, but with none of their famous balance mishaps!

#### Overview of Changes ####
Food heals over time and more slowly (but for a longer duration).
Oxygen is limited in space in Survival Mode even when at full suit condition.
Weapons degrade at vanilla rates (so trading for new copies remains viable) in Survival Mode, but have a chance to jam below 5% condition. Spare parts are much less effective at repairing weapons. The Huntress Boltcaster can now degrade and break too, just like a real nerf gun!
Loot tables contain far fewer Suit Repair Kits, and psi hypos, spare parts, medkits, and food are somewhat rarer. Trauma-clearing items are slightly more common in Survival Mode.
Difficulty settings expanded with greater impact on the effect of healing items and trauma acquisition, while damage intake scaling on Hard and Nightmare is removed.
The radial selection menu only slows time down by 50% rather than stopping it entirely, the effect of Combat Focus is downtuned at every rank, and it no longer provides any bonus damage.
Directly damaging alien abilities require more investment to ramp up to full potency, and higher ranks are more expensive.
Less direct alien abilities such as Remote Manipulation and Lift Field are slightly cheaper, and Mindjack/Machine Mind last longer at the higher ranks.
Mimic Matter now provides increasing benefits to stealth camouflage, and base visibility while rolling around as a coffee cup is as low as while sneaking (rather than as high as running)
Human skills offer increasing benefits as you upgrade them, rather than often suffering from diminishing returns except in the case of already overpowered skills.
Hacking puzzle times are rescaled, so tier II hacks are not more difficult than tier III and IV hacks.
Anomalies in chipset balance are resolved, and niche chipsets buffed to encourage unique playstyles. Thorough numerical detail is added to chipset descriptions to better inform player choices.
Enemy research data are expanded to include resistances, where it was previously poorly communicated that some enemies were resistant but not immune to Mindjack, Fear, etc.
Overly damaging enemy attacks and hazards are downtuned to lead to fewer cheap deaths and more recoverable situations in gameplay.
In addition, there are 5 optional modules which can provide further gameplay changes (these go in the same folder as the main patch file):
-patch_COREBALANCE_1-0_HALFMAT.pak halves recycling yield. Recommended for hardcore players (requires new game, not compatible with MOREMAT module)
-patch_COREBALANCE_1-0_MOREMAT.pak increases recycling yield by 1.5x. Recommended for casual players (requires new game, not compatible with HALFMAT module)
-patch_COREBALANCE_1-0_NOFREELUNCH.pak removes fountain healing and all restoration from Operators except Survival Mode traumas. Recommended for hardcore players
-patch_COREBALANCE_1-0_LESSAMMO.pak reduces the counts of ammo found in containers and in the world (requires new game). Recommended for hardcore players
-patch_COREBALANCE_1-0_WEAPMODCRIT.pak replaces the Pistol range mods and Shotgun recoil mods with critical chance mods (may or may not require new game)
The full changelist is provided in "CORE BALANCE changelist.txt".
Mooncrash is not currently supported. Stay tuned for similar balance updates for the DLC in the future.

 

[Multidirectional]

Eager to read impressions, I've been on a lookout for something like this for that inevitable replay.

 

[LESS T_T]

GDC talk about the design of Mooncrash: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...an_immersive_sim_with_Preys_Mooncrash_DLC.php

How Arkane built a roguelike atop an immersive sim with Prey's Mooncrash DLC

Last summer the team at Arkane Studios released Mooncrash, a DLC pack for their critically-acclaimed 2017 immersive sim Prey that wrapped its systems into a roguelike game of five survivors escaping from a secret moon base.

It was a fresh and innovative spin on the immersive sim, a genre of game Arkane has helped advance and define (through both Prey and the Dishonored series) -- and today at GDC, lead level designer Richard Wilson took the stage to explain how (and why) it was built.

According to him, Mooncrash has a common origin story: a number of Prey developers were set up to work on some DLC while others moved on to other projects, and they decided to try something outside their comfort zone as a way of stretching their legs, creatively.

“When you go from project to project in triple-A, a lot of the time you’re solving the exact same problems every time,” said Wilson. “This doesn’t offer much in the way of creative growth...sometimes this can even cause people to jump ship between projects.”

The team decided to have an internal game jam using Prey’s system and assets, and some of the results (which include everything from a Typhon dance party to a tentacle grenade to a working basketball game) made it into what became Mooncrash.


How some scrapped Prey elements and an internal game jam led to Mooncrash

“The experience was really valuable. A lot of the team members got to play with new tools, and step outside of their box a little bit,” said Wilson. “Everyone embraced this spirit of exploration.”

It turns out a lot of the design team were already playing a lot of roguelikes in their spare time anyway, so Mooncrash was pitched from the jump as a roguelike “cross-genre exploration” built out from some features cut from the original game.

"We explored some ideas for random level elements in Prey that ended up getting cut for scope, so we took that and leaned more heavily into that," said WIlson. "[Mooncrash] seemed like a natural extension of those ideas."

Since the team was short on roguelike design experience, they began studying landmark games in the genre to understand how to think about design problems like progression and world persistence between player deaths.

“Games like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy and Risk of Rain, they were basically masterclasses in these other spheres of thought that we hadn’t explored yet,” Wilson admitted.

Arkane also worked to deconstruct the “immersive sim” genre to try and figure out what the component parts are (vents, snippy emails to read, etc.) and whether they could work well in a roguelike framework.

“Character skill trees, for example; this was something we had on the block when we were looking at it, and we decided to keep it,” said Wilson. "A linear, beat-by-beat narrative? That was something we examined and decided it didn't belong in the DLC."

While sorting out what to include in Mooncrash Wilson says the studio also tried to preserve as much of what made Prey successful as possible, like Arkane’s penchant for effective environmental storytelling.

“The bulk of our storytelling happens in the environment,” said Wilson. “This worked really well in Mooncrash because it takes place in a defined location, and the main character’s job is to find out what happened there.”


"We wanted the fresh start of a roguelike, where you can try new things without the fear of mistakes"

Player agency was also a key concern for the Arkane team, and Wilson admits that while the “high-level” agency available in Mooncrash is less than what’s possible in Prey (given the size and space restrictions), a lot of work went into ensuring the “low-level” agency players have (to say, choose how to move through an area or bypass an enemy) is about the same.

WIlson also noted that since systemic game design is one of the core pillars of Arkane's design philosophy, the team tried to fill Mooncrash with new design elements (like the hackable, progress-blocking “Typhon Gates” sprinkled throughout the base) for players to mess with in interesting ways.

This is something Wilson says Arkane's audience expects, but this approach to design also has the side benefit of keeping the game feeling fresher for longer as players progress through multiple playthroughs.

Wilson provided this visualization of how a player might progress through a big game like Prey, seeing a significant chunk (but far from all) of the expensive assets (shown here as dollars) on each playthrough


“It may look like there are a thousand ways to get around these things, but in truth the player only has one or two ways in the beginning,” added Wilson. “Then they gain more tools as they progress through the game. So it sort of means that as a player gets tired of dealing with Typhon Gates, they gain more tools for dealing with the Gates, and that creates a sense of progression.”

Here Wilson tries to sum up the design of Mooncrash in a similar slide, as the restrictions on what a player can accomplish in a given run ensure they'll see more of the game in shorter playthroughs

Spoiler

Arkane’s process of fitting the framework of immersive sim design around a cast of five playable characters (players start with access to just one and unlock the rest during play) was also tricky, as one of the core selling points of a game like Prey is a player’s ability to customize their abilities to suit their playstyle.

In Mooncrash each character has a much narrower set of unlockable skills, a design decision Wilson says was made in order to help players quickly grasp what a character does and how.

“Each character was focused so the player could make informed decisions,” said WIlson. “All the smaller trees, they have enough wiggle room for the player to express themselves, but they were also heavily themed so the player could make informed decisions.”

The studio also hoped that providing multiple playable characters with narrow proficiencies would encourage players to try out different playstyles. Wilson gave a quick shoutout to Suspicious Developments’ Heat Signature as a great example of a game that does this well.

“We wanted the fresh start of a roguelike, where you can try new things without the fear of mistakes,” said Wilson. “So we introduced this concept of resetting the simulation.”

But there’s still a level of persistence between simulation resets, in the form of “simulation score” points the player earns while playing which can then be spent to modify the simulation in future runs. Wilson says Arkane fell in love with this aspect of roguelike design, in part because of the sense of “playing a co-op game with yourself” that it can foster in Mooncrash.

As you might expect, he also notes that Mooncrash wound up being much easier than Prey for players to jump into and out of or play through multiple times.

“When you look at a game that’s 15 hours long, and there are choices to be made in the middle...it’s possible the player can come back to that game without remembering what those choices were,” said Wilson. “If you’ve got a shorter game, players are more likely to remember those choices in the time it takes to get back to that choice, and they’re more likely to play your game more times to see those different outcomes.”

However he cautions that if the choices are too subtle and organic (something Wilson says Arkane struggled with on the Dishonored games), players can often barge through them without realizing they’ve made a significant choice at all.


Keeping the game feeling fresh run after run after run after...

“To address these issues in Mooncrash we adopted a more roguelike approach, and so we wanted to shorten the replay loops,” said Wilson. “One problem this model can cause, however, is boredom from repetition.”

To deal with that, Arkane built multiple starting locations into the game, “so when a new character started, they’d start in a different location than a previous character, but in the same level.”

This helped keep level load times low during runs, but also wound up helping players feel more familiar and comfortable with the game during character shifts.

To keep players from getting bored of seeing the same areas and enemies time after time, Wilson says "we dipped our toes into random content generation...but rather than focusing on the amount of variability we could offer, we tried to focus on meaningful variability.”

“In Mooncrash, one of the ways we tackled this is through what we called hazard channels,” he explained. The team created five different “hazard channel” states (irradiated, on fire, etc.) which could be assigned (in mix-n-match chunks) to random parts of the level, and even layered atop each other, when the simulation resets.

“The spaces can be recontextualized meaningfully for the player,” Wilson explained. “Now you have to decide if you want to find another way around, or use your tools.”

These hazard channels also had the welcome side effect of injecting variety into the game’s look and design, helping the moon base feel less stale as players progress through the game.

If you’re interested in building levels like this, Wilson cautions that Arkane found that “chunkiness” in Mooncrash’s randomization systems would lead to boring, “same-y” level layouts.

Another slide from Wilson illustrating how randomizing systems that output levels and other assets in small, homogenous "chunks" can give you a lot of levels that feel same-y, even though they're totally unique


“Another way to add variety to the game was the corruption meter,” said Wilson. “This kept the player from hanging around in the game, and pushes them to accomplish their goals.”

It was inspired partly by the way Risk of Rain's difficulty steadily increases over time, as well as the ghost that appears when players spend too long on a stage of Spelunky.

“We like how….it pushes the player forward to reach their goals,” said WIlson. “This was one of the more contentious decisions we made, actually; a lot of people felt it went against the explorability of our games.”

Arkane tried to temper the pressure of the corruption meter by adding in a consumable item players can use to reset the meter, but Wilson said it was still a contentious system to implement.


Why DLC is a great opportunity for your team to experiment and expand on ideas

“One of the first drafts of Mooncrash was basically just opening up the Talos space station map form the first game and adding escape routes,” said Wilson. “Mooncrash ended up being much more lightweight, but the base concept of an escape game appealed to us.”

There are a number of different escape routes in the game, some of which require multiple characters to “work together” between playthroughs to unlock them.

“The differences add very deliberate choices for the player,” said Wilson. “There are lots of choices the player has to deal with, and not only do you have to decide which escape route is most opportune for the character you’re currently playing, you have to think of the characters down the line.”

Once Arkane had this in place Wilson says the studio decided to add in a reward for players who get all five characters off the base without resetting, in order to further tie together the various roguelike elements into a larger puzzle.

“We wanted to incorporate this because it turns the game into this puzzle box, where you have to consider the strength of the characters, the complexity of the escapes, and the order you want to perform them in...as well as the difficulty ratcheting up as the player spends more time in the simulation.”

“Our big takeaway from this project is that you should be willing to break from tradition, if you're given the opportunity. DLC is a fertile ground for that, and even if you’re not successful, if your studio is still oen, you can bring some of the lessons learned back to your next core project.”

“I don’t think, at the end of the day, that Mooncrash is the future of immersive sims,’ Wilson concluded. “But I do think it’s a future for immersive sims.”


BONUS Q&A

Asked after the panel about any regrets he had about Mooncrash, Wilson added that "If we had had the budget, I think it would have been cool to redo the moon base for every different character's vignette; that would've been cool. If we had the budget."

When another GDC attendee asked about how Arkane decides what systems, mechanics, and items to build into its games, Wilson said "in general, the mechanics, the game objects, we look to see how many systems they can interact with themselves...and then a lot of the time stuff bubbles up through iteration."

"There are some rare cases where like okay, these two things interact in a way we can't support because there are then expectations that cascade out of this, so we have to cut it off," he added. "But in general, the more the merrier. QA loves that."

 

[Ivan]

Just finished my first playthrough of Mooncrash and I loved it! Funny thing though: I couldn't actually "finish" it since I forgot to get the helmet and ran out of Oxygen. What a fitting end.

 

[Lutte]

The problem is particularly acute with military operators towards the end of the game.

I've seen that criticism a few times about Prey but I don't get it. Like at all. By the time this specific event happens and spawns countless milops, you've already explored the majority of the station. You don't need to linger anywhere.
Are you the sort of guy who kills all enemies you see on the road when going back to a boss you died to in a souls games?

Just because enemies exist on the map doesn't mean you have to kill them. Just run past. Blink. Whatever.

 

[Average Manatee]

Eager to read impressions, I've been on a lookout for something like this for that inevitable replay.

It's pretty good. I think the default mod settings by itself is a bit too generous, but if you add the optional modules its very well balanced. It's entirely NOT a directly difficult mod, but instead a resource conservation/management mod. Unlike in vanilla, there's a very good reason to split more between psi and shooty shooty since being overreliant on one causes much more resource issues.

RoSoDude You might want to mention in the readme that nofreelunch removes healing from food, even though its in the changelog it should probably be made more obvious.

The problem is particularly acute with military operators towards the end of the game.

I've seen that criticism a few times about Prey but I don't get it. Like at all. By the time this specific event happens and spawns countless milops, you've already explored the majority of the station. You don't need to linger anywhere.
Are you the sort of guy who kills all enemies you see on the road when going back to a boss you died to in a souls games?

Just because enemies exist on the map doesn't mean you have to kill them. Just run past. Blink. Whatever.

Military Operators are one of the only enemies that is actually still quite deadly to run past, since its ranged attack isn't dodgable. Also I'm guessing complaints are from people who didn't finish a bunch of side quests before they unlocked. It's certainly an extra kind of "screw you" if you have to wander around a bunch of areas looking for some of the obscure clue-based side quests.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interview by Tom Francis (the developer of Gunpoint, Heat Signature): https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/03/26/why-arkane-went-roguelike-with-preys-mooncrash-dlc/

Why Arkane went roguelike with Prey's Mooncrash DLC
But not why they didn't make the moon a big wheel of cheese


At GDC this week, Prey’s lead level designer Rich Wilson explained why their team decided to change the immersive sim formula for its Mooncrash DLC. Mooncrash is a fasinating artifact: it blends the immersive first-person exploration and triple-A production values of its parent game with experimental, permadeath, randomised elements pulled from roguelikes. It’s a marriage that could not be more targeted to my personal tastes, but confusingly, Rich did not cite pleasing me personally as their primary motive.

Some disclosure, though: I’ve hung out with Rich socially and he mentioned a game I designed, Heat Signature, in this talk. Mooncrash is also a vindication of something I said on a podcast 5 years ago, so I’m heavily biased towards it.

Rich says Mooncrash is the result of three factors: “Motivation to evolve, preservation of core values, and adaptation to new problems”. The motivation to evolve came partly from a desire to “grow beyond our domain”, and partly from what designers at Arkane were playing in their spare time. A lot of them were playing roguelikes.

Rich describes the first step of their process as a ‘deconstruction’ of the particular breed of immersive sim Arkane specialise in. For each component, they asked whether it was something they needed to preserve, even when venturing into new ground, or if it could be set aside. Skill trees, for example, fit well with the roguelike elements, but a “linear, beat by beat narrative” did not.

As for what they’d add, inspiration came from a game jam the company held after Prey. The team got to try building whatever they liked into Prey, including fleshing out the basketball game, adding a dance party, and several ideas that ended up working well enough that they were added to Mooncrash wholesale. The ability to have a pet mimic, and the tentacle grenades, both came from this jam.

But Mooncrash ended up being something far more complex and ambitious than a few fun tricks with no linear plot. I can’t go much further without just telling you how Mooncrash works, and there’s enough to it that even I had forgotten some of the particulars. It’s set in a simulation of a moon base, and you play a series of unique characters in turn, all of whom are trying to escape. Play as the psionic-empowered Test Subject to fight your way to an escape pod, and whether you manage that or die, now you might start as the Security Chief, with the same enemies dead and the same doors unlocked. It’s only when you lose (or escape!) all your characters that the simulation resets, and you can try all over again.

That’s the roguelike part. There’s no saving or loading, characters who die stay dead, and the game is short to complete if you manage it, but designed to be replayed many times. In particular, you’re trying to check off a long list of objectives, the most ambitious of which is to get all 5 characters to escape in one run, without resetting the simulation.

This is extremely different from the vibe of Prey, which was all one enormously long playthrough as the same character, correcting yourself along the way with saving and loading. But the shorter, looping structure actually makes a lot of sense for an immersive sim type environemnt, for reasons that Rich will now explain with pictures of dollar bills:

Broadly, making good quality ‘stuff’ the player experiences costs money – and time, and people, and work, they’re all linked. In a linear action game, the player is going to see nearly all of what you made, since all players take the same path.

In a more open ended game like Prey, where there’s a wide spectrum of paths from the start to the end, you have to make more stuff total, and most players miss most of it. That makes these games very expensive buck-wise for the apparent bang the player gets. Rich stresses he still believes in this way of doing things, that it has a value to the player beyond this kind of maths, but it’s obviously worth exploring other structures.

If you want more of your work to be seen and enjoyed, and you don’t want to go linear, you can make a shorter game designed to be played many times. Multiple playthroughs will naturally discover a bit more of the breadth of what’s possible, but Mooncrash also does some neat things to push you not to repeat the same route each time.

For one thing, starting as a different character each time you die or win inherently changes how you’ll play: they each have different skill trees and starting kit, and their different themes and backstories prompt you to try playstyles you might not otherwise. I don’t think I ever put points into the security skill tree in Prey, which makes you better with guns and able to slow time. But when you tell me I’m playing as the Security Chief, and that’s one of only a few upgrade paths available to him, of course I try it — and have fun.

For another, your runs as each character don’t even start in the same place. When you finish as one character in Mooncrash, the next one you play begins elsewhere in the same level. That both saves a level loading time, and varies the starting location for each life without leaving the player disoriented.

Even with variable starting locations, the same chunk of environment could get repetitive over multiple lives. So each time Mooncrash resets, it also randomly adds hazards to various bits of the levels. A whole staircase might be collapsed and on fire, forcing you to either fix that with tools like the Gloo gun, or find another route. Other hazards leave an area flooded with electrified water, deprived of oxygen, cut off from the power system, or flooded with radiation. Some combinations of these can even stack.

I’m mixed on whether that system worked. I certainly wasn’t bored of over-familiar corridors, so that’s a win, but I also didn’t find myself pushed to find interesting solutions or meaningfully vary my approach. The ways I navigated these hazards were basically the same ones I’d been using in 40 hours of Prey, so they didn’t provide the same kind of variety that, for example, Spelunky‘s level generator does. where slight rearrangements of the same elements create interestingly new challenges each time. That’s a high standard to hold this system to, but I think it points to where a roguelike immersive sim could go next.

The most controversial roguelike element Mooncrash adopts is time pressure. The longer you spend in one run of the simulation, even across multiple character lives within it, the more dangerous enemies spawn. The original Rogue itself pushed you forwards with hunger: you needed food to live. Spelunky chases you with a ghost. Roguelikes want to push you to move forward instead of letting you scour the levels for everything of value. “But- !” a legion of immersive sim fans cry, gesturing frantically at 80% of their play time in Prey and Deus Ex. Yep. Rich acknowledges this system rubbed some people the wrong way, and in the time they had they didn’t manage to find a sweet spot that worked for everyone.

All the same, Rich says Mooncrash is one of the most engaging projects he’s worked on in his career. And he ended with a nice line that gets at why I’m so glad Mooncrash exists:

“Immersive sims are not dead, but the monolithic vent-crawler is no longer the only expression of that system.”

I wonder if this is the direction they're going with the next game, that supposedly has strong online/games as a service elements.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

2/10, game is too spooky, quit after 35 minutes

 

[Infinitron]

Mooncrash talk at GDC: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025732/-Mooncrash-Resetting-the-Immersive

Session Name: 'Mooncrash': Resetting the Immersive Simulation

Speaker(s): Rich Wilson

Company Name(s): Arkane Studios

Track / Format: Design

Overview: 'Mooncrash' was an unconventional project for Arkane studios. What began as a standard DLC follow-up to their 2016 title 'Prey' evolved into a creative experiment that was eye opening for both fans of the original as well as those of the design team. Not only did it add roguelike elements and multiple playable characters to the formula, but it abandoned a traditional linear narrative structure. In this talk, level design lead Rich Wilson dissects the unusual project to extract common themes, like what it takes to motivate a team to break form, what you can learn by dismantling your existing mechanics and how you can integrate other genres into your game to breathe life into it.