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

[Tom Selleck]

before I get pelted with cans for being a storyhomo like that portapotty guy at that one music festival: is there a story in the new DLC?

 

[Durandal]

Well of course everything is better without savescuming. Please tell me you didn't play videogames like that up until this point? But the thing is, even autosaving sucks. And saving in general may in fact be the greatest degenerate mechanic ever, because it allows every casual to play and beat the game, eventually. Otherwise only true Ubermenschen like us would be able to do it.

I've long been aware of the degeneracy of Save Anywhere and its deleterious effects on player incentives. I used to play games like that but came to realize that not only was there scant challenge on offer if you savescum, but also that it completely sapped any enjoyment out of games and destroyed most of their systems. Checkpoint saving is the proper alternative, though, not permadeath (I'm talking about losing a single character file in a 30 hour game from e.g. 4 Mimick attacks or a single electrocution, not something intelligent like XCOM or this new roguelite mode). The latter encourages degeneracy in its own right, as any risky play is heavily discouraged in favor of only the most safe and boring tactics, usually exposing the game's weakest points and cheesiest options in play. Neither extreme is interesting nor conducive to the designer implementing deep, challenging gameplay.

For these slower-paced exploration-games, I've always been fond of Resident Evil's ink ribbon saving method. There's a limited amount of ink ribbons you can find in the game which you can use to save at a typewriter, and one in consumed every time you save. An essential resource which has to be used eventually but is limited in quantity will naturally be used sparingly when you don't have a clue how long the game will be and with how much savescumming you can get away with before accidentally depriving yourself of the ability to save. Even if you were to give players a limit of 500 quicksaves in a 60+ hour RPG with no way to increase that amount, they would still be conservative with their saving behavior just in case. It's that "maybe this powerful potion will be more useful later on" mentality at work.

However, your save tokens being limited and all, you're more strongly encouraged to explore and head into possibly more dangerous areas for more save tokens. Upgrades are nice, but save tokens are downright essential in everyone's eyes, especially if their scarcity is handled properly. If you savescummed too hard and ran out of save tokens, then you'll have no choice but git gud at staying alive and finding secrets until you find another token to fuel your addiction. Only being able to save at designated save points allows the designers to get more creative with level pacing and exploration, while it also pushes players to keep on living. If you've made a lot of progress and killed a lot of dudes and found a lot of loot, you want to get back to home base safely instead of redoing everything again, even if that means incurring some mistakes in the process. You have to plan ahead and know the layout in and out to find the most efficient route to the nearest save point, or you can keep pushing onwards in hopes of finding a new save point. Anyone who's ever played Resi 1 will develop a mental map of the entire mansion.

Also fun is that the amount of save tokens you got in Resi scaled with difficulty. If only someone would mod Prey so difficulties scale the yields you get from resource drops rather than HP values.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

before I get pelted with cans for being a storyhomo like that portapotty guy at that one music festival: is there a story in the new DLC?

Yes, but it is much more in the background than the OC. Into the Breach is the best reference point I can think of for how it tells its story.

 

[RoSoDude]

Well of course everything is better without savescuming. Please tell me you didn't play videogames like that up until this point? But the thing is, even autosaving sucks. And saving in general may in fact be the greatest degenerate mechanic ever, because it allows every casual to play and beat the game, eventually. Otherwise only true Ubermenschen like us would be able to do it.

I've long been aware of the degeneracy of Save Anywhere and its deleterious effects on player incentives. I used to play games like that but came to realize that not only was there scant challenge on offer if you savescum, but also that it completely sapped any enjoyment out of games and destroyed most of their systems. Checkpoint saving is the proper alternative, though, not permadeath (I'm talking about losing a single character file in a 30 hour game from e.g. 4 Mimick attacks or a single electrocution, not something intelligent like XCOM or this new roguelite mode). The latter encourages degeneracy in its own right, as any risky play is heavily discouraged in favor of only the most safe and boring tactics, usually exposing the game's weakest points and cheesiest options in play. Neither extreme is interesting nor conducive to the designer implementing deep, challenging gameplay.

For these slower-paced exploration-games, I've always been fond of Resident Evil's ink ribbon saving method. There's a limited amount of ink ribbons you can find in the game which you can use to save at a typewriter, and one in consumed every time you save. An essential resource which has to be used eventually but is limited in quantity will naturally be used sparingly when you don't have a clue how long the game will be and with how much savescumming you can get away with before accidentally depriving yourself of the ability to save. Even if you were to give players a limit of 500 quicksaves in a 60+ hour RPG with no way to increase that amount, they would still be conservative with their saving behavior just in case. It's that "maybe this powerful potion will be more useful later on" mentality at work.

However, your save tokens being limited and all, you're more strongly encouraged to explore and head into possibly more dangerous areas for more save tokens. Upgrades are nice, but save tokens are downright essential in everyone's eyes, especially if their scarcity is handled properly. If you savescummed too hard and ran out of save tokens, then you'll have no choice but git gud at staying alive and finding secrets until you find another token to fuel your addiction. Only being able to save at designated save points allows the designers to get more creative with level pacing and exploration, while it also pushes players to keep on living. If you've made a lot of progress and killed a lot of dudes and found a lot of loot, you want to get back to home base safely instead of redoing everything again, even if that means incurring some mistakes in the process. You have to plan ahead and know the layout in and out to find the most efficient route to the nearest save point, or you can keep pushing onwards in hopes of finding a new save point. Anyone who's ever played Resi 1 will develop a mental map of the entire mansion.

Also fun is that the amount of save tokens you got in Resi scaled with difficulty. If only someone would mod Prey so difficulties scale the yields you get from resource drops rather than HP values.

Yeah, something limitation like ink ribbons would work too, since you at least wouldn't save before every encounter. I must admit, though, I still prefer distinct locational checkpoints, and feel a SS2-style respawner would have been great to assure that you're not redoing any tedious looting and recycling -- to keep things tense and challenging, every death could require a respawn token (could be some Mimic-based technology due to how they swap dimensions with tether consciousness, blah blah blah) and cue minor enemy repopulation. Hell, you could allow players to spend their Exotic materials on crafting these respan tokens as well, giving them a choice between power and safety.

Player/enemy health values are unaltered by difficulty setting, it's just a lazy damage taken/received modifier slapped onto everything. Lower yield on items would have honestly been a great way to do the difficulty scaling, as it'd enforce all manner of resource scarcity, add value to exploration, and more naturally limit the player's power as a result of being able to craft fewer Neuromods. If such a mod were to exist (shouldn't be too hard, I'd think?), it should also just replace the difficulty modifiers wholesale, as they barely accomplish anything other than encouraging you to savescum like a degenerate. More info/reasoning on the subject here.

Also, I'd love it if someone could do the following with mods:

• Give weapons a chance to jam periodically below 25% condition, increasing as durability goes down
• Make weapons degrade faster (I'd even go as far as twice as fast)
• Make oxygen drain even at 100% suit integrity, with the rate linearly increasing with decreasing suit integrity
• If possible, limit the amount of restores an Operator can perform...

 

[Trithne]

For these slower-paced exploration-games, I've always been fond of Resident Evil's ink ribbon saving method. There's a limited amount of ink ribbons you can find in the game which you can use to save at a typewriter, and one in consumed every time you save. An essential resource which has to be used eventually but is limited in quantity will naturally be used sparingly when you don't have a clue how long the game will be and with how much savescumming you can get away with before accidentally depriving yourself of the ability to save. Even if you were to give players a limit of 500 quicksaves in a 60+ hour RPG with no way to increase that amount, they would still be conservative with their saving behavior just in case. It's that "maybe this powerful potion will be more useful later on" mentality at work.

However, your save tokens being limited and all, you're more strongly encouraged to explore and head into possibly more dangerous areas for more save tokens. Upgrades are nice, but save tokens are downright essential in everyone's eyes, especially if their scarcity is handled properly. If you savescummed too hard and ran out of save tokens, then you'll have no choice but git gud at staying alive and finding secrets until you find another token to fuel your addiction. Only being able to save at designated save points allows the designers to get more creative with level pacing and exploration, while it also pushes players to keep on living. If you've made a lot of progress and killed a lot of dudes and found a lot of loot, you want to get back to home base safely instead of redoing everything again, even if that means incurring some mistakes in the process. You have to plan ahead and know the layout in and out to find the most efficient route to the nearest save point, or you can keep pushing onwards in hopes of finding a new save point. Anyone who's ever played Resi 1 will develop a mental map of the entire mansion.

Also fun is that the amount of save tokens you got in Resi scaled with difficulty. If only someone would mod Prey so difficulties scale the yields you get from resource drops rather than HP values.

Something like a cross between this and the Quantum Reconstruction Chambers of SS2.

Hell, Alien Isolation managed it better with its save phones.

 

[markec]

Finished Prey, played it on highest difficulty.

Writing is decent, it varies from good to cringeworthy but overall decent.

Maps look good but the sense of exploration is downgraded compared to Dishonored games, which is not much of surprise seeing that the game is set in space station.

Game could have used more variety with enemies but its not a major issue.

The biggest problems is that the game is way too easy and devoid of any challenge unless you refuse to use any powers.

Also resources are abundant and there is little chance of running out of anything.

Overall its a fun game but like Dishonored one that offers little challenge unless you handicap yourself as much as possible.

 

[Hines]

CohhCarnage's streams didn't stop the DLC from bombing. Mooncrash's currently sitting at 64 on the global top sellers list.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?os=win&filter=globaltopsellers&page=3

 

[Jasede]

It's a fucking DLC. What do they normally sell like?
Your absolute statement gives me no knowledge without a point of reference.

It's like saying "it sold 5 million copies" without telling me what each copy was priced and how much it cost to make.

And what does "global top seller" mean? Are those games being currently sold? Or is it an absolute number of which games sold the absolute most since the inception of Steam?

 

[Morgoth]

It means people just want to be spoonfed with safe-space games.

 

[Israfael]

Few more resets in, now I have dust storms inside the crater, very annoying (although they do look kind of nice, very 'spacey' feeling), and heroin-like tolerance to time-resets develops quite fast - I spent around 10 hourglasses in one 2.5 hr run with the engineer, if not more, basically funneling all resources I had into mass-producing the damn dose of time. Also, it seems counter-productive to keep the corruption bar at 1, since you get twice or thrice as much with corruption rating of 3 (I only got 40k points after scouring whole base sans the locked-out parts, with 19 hourglasses to spare in addition to the simpoints). It's still manageable, as you don't really need any ammo (not that many big typhons or anything except mimics and corrupted operators), but still I have my doubts I'll get enough time to escape with all 5 chars.

 

[RoSoDude]

Just did Deep Storage -> Cargo Bay -> Life Support -> Power Plant on my no-quicksave Normal difficulty Survival Mode run. I'm enjoying this playthrough way more than my first, from combat mechanics to resource management and even to level and encounter design. I've surmised that the game was meant to be played this way -- enemy attack animations are cheap and unavoidable if you let yourself get cornered, yes, but this isn't supposed to be an immediate death sentence, it's supposed to be a punishment for failing to properly lock down your enemy that costs you resources rather than prompting a reload. In my save-heavy Nightmare run I had over 50 unused medkits by the end -- right now I have only 8 because I use them fairly liberally, and I'm actually crafting them enough to run low on Organic cubes. Suit Repair kits are still obscenely overabundant, but medkits, psi hypos, and Organic material counts overall are actually balanced quite nicely... well, until I did the psi water quest, which promises to throw that all out the window. The enemy encounters ramp up more than I remember, somehow, and Life Support and the Power Plant are better levels than I remember (Deep Storage and Cargo Bay are indeed meh, though the microgravity part of the former was pretty challenging and I like the brief platforming section in the latter). I think the fact that resource gathering isn't almost entirely pointless in this run is making all the difference.

I think my appraisal of the weapon durability numbers might have lead people (including me) to the wrong conclusion. Since I don't repair my gear, I've actually had to swap my pistol/shotgun/GLOO gun at least five times each (starting at 50% durability on average). 200/500 sounds like a lot, but you'd be surprised how quickly you can run through that many shots. I still think those numbers should be tuned down a bit, but they aren't the big problem -- it's the Repair skill granting 25/35/50% durability for each Spare Part per rank. This means for the price of only 1 Neuromod, you can use 1 Spare Part to give yourself 50 shotgun shells of leeway, or 125 pistol shots. Those numbers are insane. I would propose 10/25/50% repair numbers, and slightly faster weapon degradation (say, 150/300/500 for the Pistol/Shotgun/GLOO, dunno about Disruptor or Q-beam). For comparison, you need 3 Spare Parts to Repair/Fortify turrets and 6 Spare Parts to repair control panels on e.g. Recyclers and Fabricators. 1 Spare Part for that much durability from a starting skill is an absolute joke.

I like the attempt to balance out OP alien skills with turrets firing on you and the Nightmare spawning like mad, but the latter eventually just accelerates your growth towards becoming an unstoppable god who melts enemies with their mind. More tradeoffs like this would have been nice to offset the fact that the alien player can forgo reliance on resource-intensive weapons, tools, and grenades by complementing or fully replacing them with equivalent psionic abilities. My psi playthrough has been a lot of fun, as the powers add a great layer to combat and exploration, but I can tell with freely available psi that things are quickly going to go off the rails...

The trauma and oxygen systems have barely come into play, which is quite disappointing. Weapon and enemy variety is still lacking in the base game. Story and quest structure still a snoozefest as well. But I'm far, far more engaged than I was in my first run, and while weapon degradation has certainly been a big part of that, so has the change of course in my manner of play. Shotgun and medkit spam is actually the more enjoyable way to play the game, who knew.

 

[Israfael]

Finished the DLC, total 18+ hours clocked on my playthrough - while I was not very slow, like most youtube letsplays that I glanced over in the recent days, I still had some bumbling about and stupid deaths. Still, even if it's around 15 hrs with more rational playstyle, it's money well spent.

PS The volounteer's personal story is hilarious (especially if you try to play with other characters after you finish it). Corruption sets on 4 by itself and I got both moonshark, nightmare, pair of technopaths, telepath and assorted typhons in the crater... I did not buy enough q-beam ammo so I had to run like a little girl and cheat (by enabling the towers). After dodging death for good 20 minutes , I died to a stupid voltaic mimic shortly after entering one of the base sections

 

[RoSoDude]

Finished my second Preythrough. Coming away from the game with a much more positive impression this time, even despite the somewhat tedious endgame. Running around the station wasn't so bad with a full set of alien abilities and a mastery of the station's layout. I'm glad I gave it another chance, though modders really need to do some tuning of the Survival Mode options, since they aren't doing nearly enough.

The Shuttle Bay level was a bit too easy, thanks to endless psi from drinking fountains and the fact that Military Operators won't keep spawning if you hack them/mindjack them instead of destroying them. I did get 50% of my max health reduced by third degree burns from flames I couldn't see in that level (this bug happened in my first playthrough, too...) though, which was sadly the biggest influence the trauma system ever had. Got shot up a bit by turrets a bit more (which nearly guarantees a hemorrhaging trauma), but still not a big deal. One annoyance with the trauma system is that the items which fix them are supremely rare, and I never even found the fabrication plan for the Dermaweb Skin Graft item (clears burns). I picked up around 3 of each item in my entire playthrough, signaling to me that the trauma system is supposed to make you even more reliant on Medical Operators rather than preparation and resource management.

I actually don't think the resource economy is as broken as I once did -- I nearly maxed out the three alien trees and the Scientist tree by the end, which is fewer than I might have expected for having spec'd into Necropsy immediately. I became severely limited by Organic as time went on -- it's used in fewer things, to be sure, but it's also so much rarer than mechanical junk. Synthetic material was comparatively overabundant. Playing with the minimal inventory size was surprisingly a non-issue, since I wasn't carrying a Q-beam or a Disruptor Stun Gun.

Some (hopefully) actionable ideas to improve the game that shouldn't be out of reach for modders:

• Make weapons degrade just a bit faster (e.g. 150 shotgun rounds/300 pistol rounds to break from full condition)
• Have Spare Parts repair 10/25/50% weapon durability according to the Repair skill (is currently 25/35/50%)
  
• Make it so you leak a bit of oxygen even at 100% suit integrity, increasing linearly as suit damage increases (the maximum loss rate should probably be similar to the current max, the key point is to have some baseline level and increase the value of suit repair kits
• Limit the number of uses of each operator, say 3 each
• Add trauma-clearing items to enemy loot tables with a moderate % chance, matching with enemy damage types e.g. Dermaweb Skin Graft on Thermal Phantoms, Brained Pills on Telepaths, Coagulating Gel on Technopaths, Anti-Rads on Weavers, and Skeletal Repair Kits on Poltergeists. Damn I'm smart
• Remove suit repair kits from all loot tables since you probably can't remove them from the world, holy shit they're so common
• REMOVE massive psi healing from water sources when you do the quest, replaced with some temporary buff (hell, maybe could be a status effect a la Well Fed that grants very slow psi recovery over time? Is it possible to implement new status effects?) or something. If all else fails, make it heal only 1 psi at a time
• Replace the difficulty damage received/taken modifiers entirely with material yield modifiers (shouldn't be too huge a difference, think 150/100/75/50% of current yields for Easy/Normal/Hard/Nightmare)

 

[toro]

Finished the DLC, total 18+ hours clocked on my playthrough - while I was not very slow, like most youtube letsplays that I glanced over in the recent days, I still had some bumbling about and stupid deaths. Still, even if it's around 15 hrs with more rational playstyle, it's money well spent.

PS The volounteer's personal story is hilarious (especially if you try to play with other characters after you finish it). Corruption sets on 4 by itself and I got both moonshark, nightmare, pair of technopaths, telepath and assorted typhons in the crater... I did not buy enough q-beam ammo so I had to run like a little girl and cheat (by enabling the towers). After dodging death for good 20 minutes , I died to a stupid voltaic mimic shortly after entering one of the base sections

I'm watching DansGaming on twitch and it seems you have to do like 10-15 runs through the same map. It's with different characters but still.

Is the story that good?

 

[RoSoDude]

This DLC is serious incline so far. Permadeath and the dynamic spawning of tougher monsters as you progress adds so much tension that the base game was lacking. I just did the tutorial run and the engineer's shuttle escape. The latter started off rather poorly -- as soon as I got to the Crew Annex, I attracted the attention of a Voltaic Mimic who chased me all around the crew quarters and bathrooms, its electrical field disabling my GLOO gun and making it very difficult for me to fight back. As I was running away to try to take a more tactical position, a Weaver noticed and started pouring Cystoids at me. I managed to take out the Mimic (plus two more chasing me) and heal up, using the last of my medkits and scavenged food items to do so, and evade the Weaver. This was the moment where I knew the DLC was the good stuff -- my heart rate was elevated far beyond it had ever been by the base game, because I only had that one chance to survive, no loading to some previous save state. I can only imagine how it'll be with the pressure of making it out with all five characters. The rest of the attempt was mostly without major incident, though my return trip from the Pytheas Labs was beset by some tough Corruption Level 3 Mimics and Phantoms with some nasty flame modifiers -- given that I lost a good half of my base health to a burn trauma, I had to make quick use of a Typhon Lure, allowing me to slip past and board the shuttle.

I haven't really had any opportunity to install many Neuromods yet, but I imagine as it goes on and I have to expand my run to include the other characters there'll be more of that, among many other things. The new content in the DLC is also awesome so far -- the Psychostatic Cutter is a great alternative to the wrench, losing the latter's powerful windup smash in favor of a ranged attack that costs psi points, and I love the new boost ability on the jetpack. I also really enjoy the character presets, it's a nice way to add variety to a shorter expansion. Figured I'd post screengrabs of the character select screen for those still on the fence:

Spoiler

Overall the DLC seems a lot more confident in actually being a hardcore game. Plus, it's some of the first real innovation on the Immersive Sim formula in over a decade, accomplished through heavy genre mashing like in the old days. I really like the direction Arkane is going with this one, finally we have something relatively uncompromising from them that showcases some real intelligence and creativity. I only wish the base game had been more like this in spirit (more than just my mod tweak suggestions above -- permanent consequences for your actions through contiguous Shock respawning would have made a big difference, I feel). As much as my more recent playthrough was an improvement on my previous experience, it still hasn't made me sweat like the expansion has already.

 

[toro]

Spoiler

The DLC ends with a cliffhanger and implies further Moon action

I will skip it for now.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

So I finished the DLC yesterday (all Kasma objectives). Overall, really enjoyed it, but its flaws definitely became more apparent as I got closer to the end, same deal as the OC, but less drastic a dip in quality.

The good:
+ Pretty much all the new stuff is great, whether it be psychostatic cutter, new typhon variants, or the typhon gates, pretty much every new content addition is fun and unique.
+Permadeath. As RoSoDude has noted, this dramatically ups the tension in an immersive sim. Not really much to say here beyond that, but kudos to Arkane for going this route.
+Level Design. Arkane have pretty much shown that they're the only name in the game when it comes to AAA level design, and Mooncrash has some of their best yet. Pytheas base feels like a real lived-in and worked-in place, and learning its layout is perhaps the best key to survival.
+Procedural RNG. This actually works really well for the most part. At first I found it somewhat frustrating because I couldn't find a plot specific item, but I was just being dumb; once you've gotten your bearings on Pytheas and know how the security systems work you can always find plot items. Getting to them can be a bit trickier though. What's that? The Anti-rad pills you need are in a Trauma Center in the Crew Annex? Well it's too bad that the Crew Annex is now heavily irradiated and without O2. Oh also its power got knocked offline so you better get it back up if you want to have a chance of getting in the trauma center door.
+The Boost. It cannot be overstated how much fun this is. By the end of the DLC I was fwooshing across the moon like goddamn Flash Gordon. It's definitely an OP ability because Typhon just can't counter it at all, but it's so much fun that I don't really care.


The Meh:

-The Timer is great in theory, but it is WAAAAAAAAAAAY too goddamn lenient. It pretty much becomes totally irrelevent by the halfway point once you know the base layout and how the various escapes work. Especially considering that on some runs I found as many as 10 timeloop delays, the timer reaaaaaaallly needs to be tuned up to be more aggressive.

-The Corruption Meter is again, great in theory (and directly tied to the timer), but it ends up preventing you from seeing some of the DLCs most intersting content. O2 will only go out on the highest corruption level (5), for example. In the course of playing the DLC I got to corruption level 5 twice, and both times I was just dicking around farming sim-points and neuromods. If I had my druthers I would make each corruption level last twice as long as the previous, with the first level taking say, 4 minutes to advance. I'd also add low percentage chances to see the higher tiered system failures occur on the lower corruption levels.

-Moon Shark is super cool and scary at first, but ends up being just another Nightmare once you become a master of the fwoosh. He's also a total pussy once you've modded up Riley or Andreas.


The Bleh:

-Joan. Joan is fucking boring and her character adds nothing to the DLC. Her story mission is one giant fucking Fed-Ex quest, and she's also mechanically substantially the weakest of the characters. Fuck Joan.

-The reveal on who the spy is is telegraphed loudly at every turn in the beginning of the game, and makes the ultimate reveal boring and unnecessary. If you're going to lock off content to the player, don't lock it off behind a story-wall when your story is predictable and obvious.

-No Benedict Wong voicing Alex. It's understandable given the much smaller budget, but it's also... really noticeable.

-SimPoints economy is totally borked. I ended the game with 75000 sim-points, and I was in no way conservative with them. I bought tons of neuromods, and usually started each character off with at least a silenced pistol, artax system, and a chipset or three. Everything on offer should be at minimum twice as expensive as it is. Neuromods, TimeLoop Delays, and Artax System should probably cost somewhere around 10,000, 3000 for neuromods is just hilariously underbalanced.



All in all, great DLC, and happy that I D1Pd it, even with a few niggling issues.

 

[Israfael]

Is the story that good?

Story in an Arkane game? Really? I wasn't playing it for story, it's actually, as others put it, makes you think how to survive and shit, and it feels rather good (as compared to the usual "zerodeaths" popamole or save-load fests). And you simply can't learn whole sectors in one go (or several, even) if you don't have the hourglass recipe (i'd even make it limited use or remove it alltogether, it trivializes everything in the late-game)

. O2 will only go out on the highest corruption level (5), for example

Not really, if you reset the sim enough times, some zones get vented(unpowered etc) from the get-go. Some fun times dodging the shark (which can remove half your armor with one attack) or nightmare that spams the electric balls

 

[Ash]

+Level Design. Arkane have pretty much shown that they're the only name in the game when it comes to AAA level design, and Mooncrash has some of their best yet. Pytheas base feels like a real lived-in and worked-in place, and learning its layout is perhaps the best key to survival.

Immersive Sim level design at its core is a) making a living, breathing highly believable place while also b) littering it with engaging game challenges and interesting interactive content. I find Arkane succeeded in both these points with Arx Fatalis. Only point B with Dark Messiah. And only point A with Dishonored and Prey. Though of course Dark Messiah level design does have a sense of immersion and place to an extent, and Dish and Prey do have some fun interactive content.

...still way better level design in Dish and Prey than nearly everything else AAA though.

Anyway, does this new DLC succeed at B? Prey base game did not succeed at this frequently enough for my liking, and a prime example would be the spacewalks (though the game systems or lack thereof are half to blame).

 

[Zakhad]

-Joan. Joan is fucking boring and her character adds nothing to the DLC. Her story mission is one giant fucking Fed-Ex quest, and she's also mechanically substantially the weakest of the characters. Fuck Joan.

Quest was lame, I agree, but I liked the surprise right at the start of it, and I actually find her a pretty powerful character. She's the only one who can repair weapons, for a start, making her more reliably well-armed, plus more chipset slots and more inventory room.

-The reveal on who the spy is is telegraphed loudly at every turn in the beginning of the game, and makes the ultimate reveal boring and unnecessary. If you're going to lock off content to the player, don't lock it off behind a story-wall when your story is predictable and obvious.

Hmmm, I didn't notice this immediately, but I should have in retrospect, since it was obvious even from the start. But locking off content? Not really hard to unlock that, no more locked off that any of the other quests.

-No Benedict Wong voicing Alex. It's understandable given the much smaller budget, but it's also... really noticeable.

Yep, this. I tried to make myself accept it by imagining that it was part of Kasma's imperfect simulation, since the whole thing has an "unreliable narrator" aspect.

-SimPoints economy is totally borked. I ended the game with 75000 sim-points, and I was in no way conservative with them. I bought tons of neuromods, and usually started each character off with at least a silenced pistol, artax system, and a chipset or three. Everything on offer should be at minimum twice as expensive as it is. Neuromods, TimeLoop Delays, and Artax System should probably cost somewhere around 10,000, 3000 for neuromods is just hilariously underbalanced.

Agree with this, weirdly unbalanced. I guess they were worried some casuals would fuck themselves over in the mid or late game, spending all their points and losing them and then finding it hard? But tbh you don't even need sim-points, it just makes the game shorter by making runs more efficient and eliminating some repetition. Should have blocked neuromods at least.

 

[Zakhad]

if you don't have the hourglass recipe

I still haven't found it, somehow. Wonder if that has contributed to how much I'm enjoying the game?

 

[RoSoDude]

<3sRichardSimmons Zakhad I just found that there's already a mod which aims to rebalance the corruption timer and the resource economy in the DLC. Not a lot of specific info given, but I'm curious if this would be worth a shot:

No corruption timer and Higher difficulty

This mod removes corruption timer death from the game. It also adds additional corruption levels and the enemies have more hp and damage.
Weapons cost more to buy with sim points and pistol and shotgun ammo fabrication resource requirements have been changed.
Time_loop items can no longer be fabricated.

TLDR entire game is more difficult. No timer

I'm happy to play the expansion as-is since it seems pretty awesome so far anyway, but thought I'd give a heads up and also ask for your thoughts.

 

[Zakhad]

I just found that there's already a mod which aims to rebalance the corruption timer and the resource economy in the DLC. Not a lot of specific info given, but I'm curious if this would be worth a shot:

No corruption timer and Higher difficulty

My face when all the comments on Nexusmods are people asking for an alternative mod to make the game easier

I'm still enjoying the expansion at this stage. I usually wait till I've exhausted my vanilla experience before playing with mods, but might give it a try later.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I would prefer for the expansion to be a regular one, with simply more story stuff like the base game, but I will buy it regardless since how much I enjoyed Prey.

 

[Israfael]

No corruption timer and Higher difficulty

It's like removing the whole idea of what this DLC is, I guess most people are storyfags...