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

samuraigaiden

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I haven't finished it yet, but it's definitely a game worthy of it's Looking Glass legacy. Have you tried System Shock 2? Pray is almost a remake of SS2. So if you like Prey and haven't finished SS2, you absolutely owe it to yourself to do so.

A lot of people have been recomending it to me recently. I'll definitely play it soon.
 

Shaewaroz

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I haven't finished it yet, but it's definitely a game worthy of it's Looking Glass legacy. Have you tried System Shock 2? Pray is almost a remake of SS2. So if you like Prey and haven't finished SS2, you absolutely owe it to yourself to do so.

A lot of people have been recomending it to me recently. I'll definitely play it soon.

SS2 is the best psychological horror fps rpg I've played and much of the horror comes from resource scarcity. You never have enough resources to feel adequately equipped to survive, so you feel helpless and tense all the time. You have to use your ammo and other resources sparingly or risk completely screwing yourself. SS2 also has the most interesting enemies you'll ever meet in any game.
 
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SS2 is the best psychological horror fps rpg I've played and much of the horror comes from resource scarcity. You never have enough resources to feel adequately equipped to survive, so you feel helpless and tense all the time. You have to use your ammo and other resources sparingly or risk completely screwing yourself. SS2 also has the most interesting enemies you'll ever meet in any game.

Yep. Its a good mix of

- Everything in the game chipping away at your resources
- Everything in the game just sort of slowly, randomly, erratically respawning over time.
- Everything in the game being best defended against by carefully looking around and listening so that you know they are there before they know you are there.
 

RoSoDude

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I've come around on Prey (though the complete stagnation in weapon/enemy variety and level design after the Arboretum still irks me to no end), but SS2 is still the deeper, more intricate game:
  • The various threats of the Von Braun more meaningfully impinge on your resources than the worst Talos 1 has to offer. Hoard all you want, but you will at some point find yourself low on medkits, bullets, or psi hypos and have to adapt
  • Managing your character build is essential in SS2 where in Prey you can pretty much pick whatever you want (or nothing at all, per the requirement that "No Needles" be accessible to achievement hunters). Character upgrades are as vital and rare as your other resources
  • SS2's combat is more straightforward but also more thoughtful, with fewer optimal solutions that declaw enemies completely. It pays to choose the right ammo type and come prepared with good gear, but you'll still have to move and shoot decisively to avoid getting killed
  • SS2's mix of hand-crafted encounters and random spawns are designed to catch you off guard in tense moments. Prey has an interesting ecological development as you progress through the campaign and return to previous areas, but all spawns are scripted and enemies typically patrol a single hub
  • SS2's audio design is rivaled only by Thief and Arx Fatalis. The moans, clanks, and clatters of enemies are both spine-chilling and crucial to gameplay as sounds propagate realistically and reveal dangers around the corner (also you're dead to me if you turn off SS2's glorious soundtrack). Prey unfortunately inherits the awful mixing and nonexistent directional sound of most contemporaries
  • Since the player wakes up on the Von Braun a month after everything goes FUBAR, audio logs are able to chronicle the catastrophe and build intrigue, where the logs on Talos 1 can only establish last week's office conflicts. Plus the story twists and turns are flat out more engaging in SS2
Do also play the original System Shock, preferably before the sequel. I'm not among the sizeable legion here that prefers it, but it is absolutely worth your time and attention. Don't wait for the remake.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I can only repeat that Prey just plain sucks as a horror game, it's pretty much the same one jumpscare through the entire thing and that's it. SS2, on the other hand, is by far the scariest game I've ever played.
 

Naraya

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Prey 2017 is one of the very few games that I played more than once from start to finish but I'd never say that Prey 2006 is a 'shitty shooter'. It's a fun FPS with interesting mechanics and your opinion is invalid.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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I can only repeat that Prey just plain sucks as a horror game, it's pretty much the same one jumpscare through the entire thing and that's it.
It also sucks as an immersive sim. You seldom get more than one path to your destination, so the "choice" is just stealth vs combat.
I mean, it's OK for this day and age. They just really dropped the ball when it comes to horror, it just doesn't compare to SS2.
 

Bad Sector

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I've come around on Prey (though the complete stagnation in weapon/enemy variety and level design after the Arboretum still irks me to no end), but SS2 is still the deeper, more intricate game

It has been a while since i played System Shock 2 (which was when i played the Prey demo back when it was released but couldn't buy the game, so i played through SS2 to cope), however personally i find Prey to be the better immersive sim overall (and in fact i consider it my favorite immersive sim so far). The main reason is that Prey has overall more mechanics to play around with and the levels are designed to let you take advantage of all mechanics to allow you play with in variety of different ways (these three are for me the most important aspects in an immersive sim). I never got that feeling from SS2.

(though i agree fully with the enemy variety, Prey has very bland enemy designs - mimics are initially interesting but every other enemy is basically a mimic with a different behavior)

The various threats of the Von Braun more meaningfully impinge on your resources than the worst Talos 1 has to offer. Hoard all you want, but you will at some point find yourself low on medkits, bullets, or psi hypos and have to adapt

While Prey has more stuff around (and recycling makes it possible to use pretty much everything :-P though i guess you can do the same indirectly in SS2 too via the Recycler, but that happens later in the game), the only time i remember getting low on resources on SS2 was in the latter part of the game where you cannot backtrack and there are no spawns that give random items. Otherwise when playing SS2 you can pretty much wrench your way through most of the common encounters which allow you to both save ammo and pick up random stuff from the corpses (a strategy that also works in SS1 - i never ran out of medkits for example). Medkits and such are also mainly useful until you find the resurrection pad, after that it is often more convenient (and resource saving) to just die (technically there is a nanite cost but i practically forget it is there, i do not remember ever running out of nanites in the game).

Managing your character build is essential in SS2 where in Prey you can pretty much pick whatever you want (or nothing at all, per the requirement that "No Needles" be accessible to achievement hunters). Character upgrades are as vital and rare as your other resources

This isn't something that has happened on my playthroughs of SS2, but i've heard that in SS2 you can end up with "impossible" builds at the late game, which can be a big PITA.

SS2's mix of hand-crafted encounters and random spawns are designed to catch you off guard in tense moments. Prey has an interesting ecological development as you progress through the campaign and return to previous areas, but all spawns are scripted and enemies typically patrol a single hub

AFAIK Prey enemies also respawn even if you do not move on with the story, but it takes a while and they only respawn if you enter an area (ie. they wont spawn nearby). It'd be neat if they respawned like in SS2 though since i'd have more stuff to throw in the recyclers :-P.

The moans, clanks, and clatters of enemies are both spine-chilling

Yeah, SS2 excels here. Hearing the monkeys scream always make me stop (after my first encounter with them years ago where i died on the spot :-P) and all i manage to think between "That's the tri-optimum way!" and the sound of servos moving towards my direction is "fuck", often followed by an explosion :-P

Prey unfortunately inherits the awful mixing and nonexistent directional sound of most contemporaries

Yeah, it doesn't seem to have any form of proper sound propagation - the sound direction for enemies always comes directly from their real position instead of taking walls and openings into account. On the other hand there are several audio (and visual) cues about enemy state and position, so this isn't much of an issue.

(Also FWIW there are other immersive sims nowadays that use advanced sound propagation, for example Deus Ex Mankind Divided has a rather advanced sound engine)

Since the player wakes up on the Von Braun a month after everything goes FUBAR, audio logs are able to chronicle the catastrophe and build intrigue, where the logs on Talos 1 can only establish last week's office conflicts. Plus the story twists and turns are flat out more engaging in SS2

Yeah in general i'd say that i found the story and writing more interesting in System Shock 2.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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While Prey has more stuff around
This is not an honest, serious argument. "More stuff lying around" is not in any way an apt description of what happens in Prey. The source management/survival aspect of the game is completely borked and, together with crafting, can easily, and rapidly, drain all fun from the game. It's just another big disappointment, next to horror, when compared to the source material. Can you imagine any of SS2 designers thinking "wouldn't it be cool to allow the player to craft cyber modules in big quantities, early in the game"? Yeah, neither can I. Even Bioshock (definitely an inferior game to Prey overall) was smart enough to avoid such idiocies.
 

Bad Sector

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While Prey has more stuff around
This is not an honest, serious argument. "More stuff lying around" is not in any way an apt description of what happens in Prey.

"More stuff lying around" literally means that: there are more objects in the game world. It isn't an argument, it is a description of the game world - you can literally pick more stuff from the game world in Prey than in SS2.

This has implications that i also agree with: more stuff in the game world means that you have an easier time finding resources. However...

The source management/survival aspect of the game is completely borked and, together with crafting, can easily, and rapidly, drain all fun from the game.

...this is largely subjective. I didn't find my fun drained when playing Prey, if anything i have fun trying to figure out what i can make. Sure, at some point i had so many objects i couldn't know what i could do with them but that was late in the game and i had been in the same situation (having more stuff than i knew what to do with them) in both System Shock 2 and (since you mentioned it) BioShock several times. And honestly that was me taking advantage of everything to the point where i was scouting the rooms to find decorative flowers so i can throw them in the recycler (which, btw, i also found fun).

Which is basically my point in that paragraph: if you pay a bit of attention, the resource management isn't that much of an issue in System Shock 2. It is harder, especially at the start the game when you have access to basically nothing, but it isn't a difference so great where one game has to be played like a survival horror and the other like a doom clone (though i've seen people complaining that they were running out of ammo in Doom 3, so go figure... :-P).

Personally i like figuring out the systems in these games and trying to take advantage of them and i do not really care much if i break the game (if anything, i like breaking the games - though there should be some effort required). If the game gives out too many resources, i'll just max out everything, get the best equipment and keep it in the best shape (though TBH i do not think most players will go picking flowers in Prey so balancing the game around people like me might not be the best idea - but at the same time i do like being able to do that and wouldn't want to see stuff like that be removed for the sake of resource management balancing).

It's just another big disappointment, next to horror, when compared to the source material.

FWIW i agree that when compared to System Shock 2, Prey lacks when it comes to atmosphere.

Can you imagine any of SS2 designers thinking "wouldn't it be cool to allow the player to craft cyber modules in big quantities, early in the game"? Yeah, neither can I. Even Bioshock (definitely an inferior game to Prey overall) was smart enough to avoid such idiocies.

Yes, making neuromods - at least as early as you can in Prey - wasn't that great of an idea. It does make sense in the universe that you can create it, considering you can make pretty much anything in the replicators, but i think they should have figured out a way to require increasing amounts of resources instead of a fixed amount. Perhaps instead of creating the neuromods directly and because of (*handwavey plot excuse*) how "weird" neuromods are supposed to be you couldn't make them directly, but instead only be able to make in-between materials that then you use with a device that creates those neuromods from those materials - however each time you use the device you'll need to create more materials... because (*more handwavey stuff, i'm clearly not a writer*) some internal coil that is made from materials found outside the station or whatever gets stiffer and so it needs more power to do its work and... you get the idea.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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There's nothing subjective about it, let alone largely. If you expect this kind of game to provide tense resource management and overall economy, which is historically a big part of the genre, then Prey will get this part spoiled extremely quickly, which in turn affects many other things (like sense of dread). Afair in the beginning part of the game you get the ability to craft neuromods, shotgun ammo and medkits (plus many other things) and more crafting materials than you ever need. In fact, don't you get shotgun in the lobby area and then shells schematic in a safe right next to it? Like lol, what else is there to add. The only time I was ever short on anything was when tackling more powerful enemies early on on hard they proved to be super spongy (another example of meh design) so they could drain a lot of your ammo. But then you have a crafting station around the corner and just make more, wow, much resource management.

Even discussing the game on the historical revisionism angle, there's no denying that SS2 has real economy when it comes to modules or psy hypos for a psi build, and that's on normal difficulty. Prey has a modern crpg level economy - it stops mattering pretty much when you step out of the starting area. Yeah, it's a bit of a hyperbole, but not much.
 

JDR13

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SS2, on the other hand, is by far the scariest game I've ever played.

I'll have to assume there are a lot of games you haven't played.
I think it's really cool you've played them all. And yeah, I guess you were about -2 in '99, these things don't really work all that well retroactively.

Nah, I played SS2 for the first time back in '99 or 2000. I just haven't been locked in a closet like you apparently have.
 

samuraigaiden

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Just my two cents on the Neuromod discussion.

How many Neuromods you use ties in to what kind of run you are doing - or what kind of character you are role-playing - and giving freedom for the player to splurge and use as many as they want in the first play through isn't a bad thing.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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SS2, on the other hand, is by far the scariest game I've ever played.

I'll have to assume there are a lot of games you haven't played.
I think it's really cool you've played them all. And yeah, I guess you were about -2 in '99, these things don't really work all that well retroactively.

Nah, I played SS2 for the first time back in '99 or 2000. I just haven't been locked in a closet like you apparently have.
That's a really comprehensive list of all those games with better sound, antagonist, enemy design, va/audiologs and all other things that create the sense of horror in SS2.
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
The dumbfuck revisionists are the ones who think SS2 is remotely comparable to games like Resident Evil or Silent Hill when it's a full on action game with respawns that blares fastpaced techno music as you kill hundreds of respawning mutants.
 

Zboj Lamignat

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Bro, you have very quirky tastes and broad horizons. I like Japan and consoles too. Dem anime teyteys, rite. Who's your favourite power ranger.
 

JDR13

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SS2, on the other hand, is by far the scariest game I've ever played.

I'll have to assume there are a lot of games you haven't played.
I think it's really cool you've played them all. And yeah, I guess you were about -2 in '99, these things don't really work all that well retroactively.

Nah, I played SS2 for the first time back in '99 or 2000. I just haven't been locked in a closet like you apparently have.
That's a really comprehensive list of all those games with better sound, antagonist, enemy design, va/audiologs and all other things that create the sense of horror in SS2.

Nice projection there, but we weren't talking about individual aspects such as those, and I never implied that the games I'm referring to are "better" than SS2 overall. They're just more intense to me.

Alien Isolation, Dead Space, and Outlast would be examples of games that I found had more tension than SS2. Doom 3 and F.E.A.R. are also worth mentioning but are a notch below imo.
 

Maggot

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire
They were two contemporary examples of much better "Survival Horror" games, which SS2 randomly gets lumped in with despite being lacking in the survival department. While SH is far weaker than RE in this aspect, it came out the same year as SS2 and actually attempts at being a horror game.
 

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