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

[Zakhad]

Stole this game

anyone in this thread who uses the term "immersive sim" - please fucking neck yourself.

Pirating games? Sounds like you're... immersed in sin.

 

[Wunderbar]

Oh I forgot to mention, anyone in this thread who uses the term "immersive sim" - please fucking neck yourself.

immersive sim

 

[Infinitron]

Prey's Director On The Polarizing Final Act: 'There Was Definitely Too Much'

The problem with developing a video game is: Sometimes you need to stop. Even when you’re not totally happy with your final act. This week on Kotaku Splitscreen, we discuss all that and more.

First, Kirk and I talk about the appeal of Dead Cells, the problems with video game grind, and Diablo III coming to the Switch. Then, Arkane co-founder Raphael Colantonio joins me for a fascinating chat about the video game industry, crunch, Prey’s strengths and flaws, and much more.

Colantonio, you may remember, wrote the now-infamous e-mail calling me and other reporters “press sneak fucks” back in 2013. With him departing Arkane last year—and therefore, being free of Bethesda’s PR, who have blacklisted Kotaku for nearly five years—he and I were able to get on the phone and mend fences earlier this year. So I’m thrilled to have him on our podcast this week.

Listen here:

Get the MP3 here, or read an excerpt:

Jason: I absolutely loved Prey. Well, I should correct that—I absolutely loved Prey for three-quarters of the game, then the final act came and the security bots started attacking me and I was like, ‘this isn’t the game I signed up for.’ I’m curious to hear your perspective... What made you guys decide to approach it that way?

Colantonio: It comes back to the thing we were talking about a little bit earlier: crunch versus triple-A or reacting to changes toward the end of the production. Budget, shipping on time, etc. I think we did our best as far as planning — we thought on paper it’d be a nice change of pace toward the end, so it feels more intense and more like an acceleration as opposed to ‘Here is more story.’ So on paper it seemed right. The problem is when you implement those things, even the designers can only see so much of it, because they don’t see the rest of the game, they only see their part. And it’s only, believe it or not, it’s only around alpha, like three months before the game ships basically that you can see the entirety of the game in a state where you can fully comprehend it. It doesn’t crash too often, there’s not too many showstoppers.

Jason: All the assets are in instead of grey boxes.

Colantonio: Exactly, everything is in, and it’s in a good state enough that you can truly appreciate the level of what you’re trying to achieve. In this case, yeah there was definitely too much at the end, it was too intense, not only the security bots but there was some other stuff. In general, I think it was too intense, we were trying to ask the players to backtrack, and do some stuff. It was just too much. We should have cut it short. But we could not know. Sometimes you hope, you shoot in a direction and hope you hit the target, then in the last months you try to adjust, correct, etc. We probably were running out of time, and people did work, they did their jobs, and... We could have done with another few months of polishing for sure.

Jason: I think every developer says that.

Colantonio: There are some economic realities behind it. We had been developing the game for a while. There’s a moment where you book the shelves, because that’s also part of the ecosystem of our activity is that you have to book shelves at the retail stores. So once it’s there, you cannot tell them at the last minute, ‘Oh by the way we’re going to delay the game.’ There’s an entire chain, an entire organization. So it’s not just money, it’s a full thing, at some point when you’re committed, you’re committed... We have so much momentum, so much inertia when we do things, that there’s a moment at the end when you just have to wrap it up.

Jason: Did you try to delay Prey?

Colantonio: We did delay Prey a little bit compared to the very initial date we agreed on. There’s a moment when you can, because there are staged gates when you develop a game... There’s the prototype, vertical slice, alpha, beta, etc. Mid-game, there’s still time to delay the game if you have to, and Zenimax was really good with that. They were good with evaluating the game together with the developer and making the decision that makes sense for the game.

Jason: So when you guys got to those last three months, was that something you specifically brought up, that final act being too much action, too intense? Was it something you discussed but realized you couldn’t change?

Colantonio: Yeah absolutely, it was a recurring theme, the feedback was very clear. We have to accelerate the end just because it’s too intense, not that fun. If you had played the version we had a month before that, you would have thought it was even worse.

Jason: Maybe you should’ve put that out, then released the new one, so people could be like, ‘Wow by comparison this is amazing.’

Colantonio: Yeah, again, I think creators are never fully happy with what we do, and there’s tons of things that we wish we had done a little differently, but it worked out. Given how hard it is to make games. Preywas a very rich game, there was tons of things in there, tons of things that layer on top of each other, so I think it worked out in the end.

 

[Ash]

The final quarter of the game was "too intense"? I wish. Try the opposite. It nearly put me to sleep. Bland, boring, rushed, uninspired, unchallenging, unengaging, not a lot going on.

"Jason: So when you guys got to those last three months, was that something you specifically brought up, that final act being too much action, too intense?"

God damn game journos. The final act is supposed to be action packed you total dunce. A problem I found with Prey is that it wasn't even close to as action-packed as it should have been, using Shock 1 & 2 or pretty much any game of this type as a point of reference. As a result it's a garbage-looting sim with little payoff for all the micro-management; you spend 90% of the game exploring and looting, but not actually using those resources. A few pathetic robots that pose no challenge to the player's god-like power is the complete opposite of "intense".

 

[A horse of course]

The final quarter of the game was "too intense"? I wish. Try the opposite. It nearly put me to sleep. Bland, boring, rushed, uninspired, unchallenging, unengaging, not a lot going on.

"Jason: So when you guys got to those last three months, was that something you specifically brought up, that final act being too much action, too intense?"

God damn game journos. The final act is supposed to be action packed you total dunce. A problem I found with Prey is that it wasn't even close to as action-packed as it should have been, using Shock 1 & 2 or pretty much any game of this type as a point of reference. As a result it's a garbage-looting sim with little payoff for all the micro-management; you spend 90% of the game exploring and looting, but not actually using those resources. A few pathetic robots that pose no challenge to the player's god-like power is the complete opposite of "intense".

I think it's fair to call it "intense" in the sense that

Spoiler

The military robots patrol have very wide patrol routes, will often attack you almost immediately upon entering an area, and are spammed almost non-stop from the reployers...deployers...whatever. They're also relatively robust and are a net drain on your ammo and psi. Combine with the sudden timed mission and it feels like that whole section is a non-stop running battle from one end of the station to the other. After fighting them for about ten minutes I realized it was more convenient to literally run past everything, grab the objective, and run to the next area. The player is also unaware that meeting with Alex will trigger the Apex Typhon and shut down all non-essential areas of the game - they may well have been intending to go back to sidequests upon getting the final arming key and typhon mcguffin.

So in effect it feels like from the moment the military robots appear, the game suddenly transitions into a rather lengthy railroaded climax sequence rushing past lots of fighting and explosions and stuffies. That's what they're referring to as "intense". There may as well have been a "self-destruct" countdown on the player's balls for the last part of the game and most people probably would've played those sections in exactly the same way.

 

[Ash]

Wasn't my experience from what I recall. I was a walking god and they were flies to be swatted. Only two bots were deployed at a time with a long cooldown period. Areas were already cleared out + walking god so there was no reason to hang around other than to get to the next objective marker. So basically I fought 2-4 piss easy bots per sector of the station, only noticed they respawned because I stumbled into one of their deployment stations, and it was about as far from intense as it could be, much like the rest of the action in the game.

 

[A horse of course]

Wasn't my experience from what I recall. I was a walking god and they were flies to be swatted. Only two bots were deployed at a time with a long cooldown period. Areas were already cleared out + walking god so there was no reason to hang around other than to get to the next objective marker. So basically I fought 2-4 piss easy bots per room, only noticed they respawned because I stumbled into one of their deployment stations, and it was about as far from intense as it could be, much like the rest of the action in the game.

I was literally maxed neuromods and weapon upgrades on everything but no Typhon powers and they took a fair bit of ammo with various weapons considering their frequency. I was usually fighting 4 or 5 at a time but whatever. I ran past them because the "loot" was shit and there was nothing to do except do the objectives. Reminded me of Halo, of all things, except not fun.

 

[Ash]

I had over 2000 Q-Beam ammo and each bot drops more. Those things get vaporised in seconds.

Was thinking of replaying Prey, then I remembered the game has like four weapons and four enemy types.

 

[RoSoDude]

I was very well equipped for the military operators in my first run (human build, fully modded Disruptor Stun Gun and Q-Beam, tons of ammo hoarded for both, many EMP grenades on hand, equipped chipset that reduces laser damage), but I still found myself in tedious fights with 4-5 military operators at a time thanks to constant respawing, high health values, and my original assumption that there would be some cooldown on the respawning to make fighting them worth it. It wasn't an actual challenge or anything, because you're only really fighting mechanical enemies (operators + turrets) who are all susceptible to the same tools and thus require no situational variance in tactics. EMP grenades or Electrostatic Burst will waste an entire group. On my second run (nearly maxed scientist + alien skills) it was even easier, since I could spam Electrostatic Burst and Machine Mind to disable them and then hack them all friendly so no more spawned. The Shuttle Bay then ironically became the most relaxed low-key level of the entire game.

The actual setup of the endgame (Transtar betrayal, life support failure, Typhon mass arrival) is conceptually good, but the execution is highly boring, since encounters are less diverse than ever and offer scant challenge or excitement to backtracking through previously cleared areas. It would have been a lot cooler if there were pockets of both military operators and Typhon, some skirmishing with one another (offering opportunities for the player to intervene and manipulate the AI to their advantage or slip by, think Surface Tension in Half-Life 1). I thought it was really cool at first to see military operators working on a Nightmare; I just wish the latter weren't such a pushover. More Technopaths would also create encounters against both enemy types at once. That the Shuttle Bay is an entirely new level leaves lots of potential for this kind of final challenge, but it sounds like they ran out of time to properly evaluate and rework it.

The game also loses much of its steam by the end already, which is part of the problem. Crew Quarters, Deep Storage, and the Cargo Bay are pretty darn dull. I actually like Life Support and the Power Plant section pretty well on review, but then you have to scan the coral in Zero G. Yawn. At this point it's also highly likely you'll get embroiled in completing new and old sidequests, especially if you help Igwe and Mikhaila and they end up at your office. THEN we start the endgame, which is overly drawn out and unengaging for the reasons I mentioned above. It's a recipe for player fatigue, rather than a ramp in intensity as it absolutely should have been.

Oh look, it's almost like SS2 got this right, except for Cyberspace Citadel + SHODAN which sucks.

 

[Hines]

I wonder what game Colantonio's consulting on that he seems excited about? My guess would be Darewise's online sci-fi game, which according to their site, "will be revealed in the near future." Randy Smith (LGS vet who consulted on Dark Messiah) and Viktor Antonov are there, and he previously said the best game he saw at E3 hasn't been unveiled to the public yet. Going by Smith's description, the project sounds like it's in Arkane's wheelhouse, even though it's 3rd person: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...andy-smith-and-the-state-of-the-immersive-sim

Project C is a sci-fi third-person action open-world game with "meaningful persistence". It's set on a planet designed to be a living, breathing virtual world, a place that reacts as much to itself as it does to players. Speaking of players, this is a multiplayer-focused game. In fact it sounds sort of like an MMO. Speaking to Smith, Project C sounds like Eve Online meets Mass Effect meets... Second Life?

http://www.darewise.com/

 

[A horse of course]

The actual setup of the endgame (Transtar betrayal) is conceptually good

I actually laughed out loud when Dahl appeared and started talking because he was such a trite character that for the next few hours I was convinced the game's ending would be

Spoiler

everything was a simulation taking place on Talos 1 to drill possible scenarios in the event of an outbreak, and the events were written by the nerdy D&D group because I thought there was no way the game would go from relatively grounded characters with realistic motivations to BADASS MERCENARY KILLTEAM SENT BY THE MEGACORP. How the hell are you supposed to take the audio log of William Yu and Dahl's conversation seriously?

It would have been a lot cooler if there were pockets of both military operators and Typhon, some skirmishing with one another (offering opportunities for the player to intervene and manipulate the AI to their advantage or slip by, think Surface Tension in Half-Life 1).

I ran into pretty frequent fights between Operators and Typhon in that sequence, the problem as you noted is that it's just window dressing for you to wait out or run past and doesn't offer any real gameplay opportunities for the player to take advantage of. My personal feeling is that the Operators should've appeared earlier in the game and should've taken key locations in each level rather than just being spread all over the map and being farted out of terminals. This would've at least given the player the chance to try and draw them away and distract them with Typhons or whatever - something that gave the player some real agency.

 

[agentorange]

As much as I detest The Body of the Many and everything after it, SS2 did the right thing in terms of pacing by introducing some new areas for the finale, which is what Prey should have done. One of the best parts of Prey is the interconnection of the various parts of Talos I, navigating and backtracking through them as you see fit, but by the time the climax comes around its almost impossible to have not seen every location the game has to offer, even if you're not obsessively exploring. The game really could have benefited from even a short excursion to a surprising new location to reinvigorate the player.

As it is, despite the fact that I liked some gameplay elements of the ending (like how the means of accomplishing the two methods of eliminating the Typhon are quite different and separated by a good distance, similar to the how the endings in DX1 worked) it suffered from having too many stop-and-go objectives, making the whole climax come off as an indecisive mess: first of all you have the scanning the coral for Alex section, which feels like the very typical "go backtrack to these locations" padding that is is so common in semi-open games (I think every Metroid Prime game had a segment like this), except it's totally unnecessary because the game already encouraged exploration of all areas and this padding comes right before an ending sequence that is overlong anyways; so then you have the Dahl sequence which feels very much like a natural climax, but which itself is broken up by having to save the crew in the cargo bay, capture Dahl, take out the hacker operator, reprogram Dahl, and so on; then you go to meet up with Alex to resume what you started with scanning the coral (consequently making the whole Dahl segment feel like just a minor inconvenience), and only then do you get the real ending objectives. It's very similar to how I felt about the climax of Dishonored 2, which similarly had what felt like a natural ending with the assassination of the Duke, who was a well developed villain, but then keeps going with a backtracking mission and the real villain who never made much sense in the first place.

 

[Durandal]

I was wondering why there wasn't a Body of the Many Typhon level in Prey given how much it tried to be like SS2

 

[ciox]

It's kind of a classic face-saving maneuver... it's not that they made it too intense and high-octane for the players to handle i.e performed well but went too far, it's that there weren't enough new elements and what new elements there were - like the combat bots and sending a typhon tentacle thing after you, were too repetitive.

It's true that the right chipset/neuromod loadout can trivialize the bots totally and that's kind of OK, from what I recall you can get the laser chipset + either a chipset for wrench power++ and/or all the wrench neuromods and then you knock down all bots with just one charged wrench attack, making them totally helpless, if you've figured all that out then you kind of earned it, it won't always be available to you each run and the combat bots were pretty challenging on a psi-only run where the laser chipset did not drop for me.

I was wondering why there wasn't a Body of the Many Typhon level in Prey given how much it tried to be like SS2

Because it would just be a bunch of black goo? They did their best to make part of the station kinda seem like the Body of the Typhon but time obviously didn't let them do too much.

 

[A horse of course]

Okay, I felt a little guilty since I did moderately enjoy the game and went ahead and bought it for real with Mooncrash. Luckily it recognized all my stolen saves and everything

I'm never paying for Dishonoured though, fuck that.

 

[iZerw]

Quick question: on what difficulty should I play with survival mode?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Quick question: on what difficulty should I play with survival mode?

Nightmare.

 

[iZerw]

Quick question: on what difficulty should I play with survival mode?

Nightmare.

I believe it not one hit deaths and bullet sponge enemies right?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Quick question: on what difficulty should I play with survival mode?

Nightmare.

I believe it not one hit deaths and bullet sponge enemies right?

One shot? No. At least I don't remember being killed in one hit. Bullet sponge enemies? A little bit in the beginning until you start acquiring abilities and various items and a lot of options open up. Even nightmare difficulty will become pretty easy 60% into the game. Explore as much as possible and recycle everything and you'll have plenty of materials to craft stuff.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Disagree. If you have the self-control to never manually save, Normal is a much better experience. You will likely still die a fair amount, and a lot of the game’s problems are mitigated by ignoring quick save functionality.

 

[Child of Malkav]

A lot of games become better if you don't savescum. That's kind of a general rule. I am an advocate for limited saves. An example is the Hitman series, also a game called Dark (2013) where you had checkpoints but between them you were allowed to save 2 times and KCD where you can save only if you have enough of a certain resource.

 

[RoSoDude]

I first played the game as it originally shipped on Nightmare, as I had feared the compromised design of the game warranted the boost in challenge. However, since the difficulty settings just increase damage taken and make enemies slightly spongier, this entails occasional cheap deaths due to some less fleshed out aspects of the combat design, prompting frequent mashing of the quicksave key to avoid tedious re-looting of areas.

When the Survival patch came out, I replayed on Normal with no quicksaves, as I detailed in this post. It was a much better experience, much more legitimate tension and challenge, and the resource economy actually felt somewhat impactful since I was encouraged to continue on from mistakes and let situations play out naturally, taking precautions as needed and acting towards my survival rather than towards perfected encounters.

Restricted saving just leads to superior gameplay, I cannot be convinced otherwise. The ability to savescum engenders all manner of degenerate strategies and straight up destroys myriad systems in many games.

 

[Master]

I said something like that.

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.

If there was no saving, beating a game would be rare. Great players would be like legendary warriors, who defeated this or that game. We would roam the land and peasants would pay us money to beat games. If its a particulary difficult or complex game it would require several of us with different skills and backgrounds...

 

[Dexter]

https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/...stuck-between-two-competing-ideologies/67581/

Culture clash: How Arkane Got Stuck Between Two Competing Ideologies
Posted on August 28, 2018, 9:00 am By Sophia

(Last Updated On: August 28, 2018)
[Note: The following article was composed with the consent of multiple sources within Arkane/Zenimax. This is based on verified testimonies collected from the sources over the course of several weeks.]

Arkane Studios is going though an identity crisis. Best known for Dishonored and Prey, the development teams are now struggling to churn out another game in the midst of a clash between two competing cultures. The omnipresent corporate culture of Zenimax, and a fringe left intersectional ideology that is taking hold under the guise of ‘social justice’.

Recently news broke that Dishonored was shelved for the foreseeable future. While this news was only just revealed to the world, Arkane in Lyon, France has known this for the past year. While my sources couldn’t say with certainty if this was what caused studio founder Raphaël Colantonio to disembark from the studio last year, it was stated that he left shortly after the pitch for both Dishonored 3 and Prey 2 had been turned down by Zenimax.

With Arkane Lyon’s flagship series put on hold, and with no other game approved to start production, the studio was broken into multiple teams. The first worked on Wolfenstein 2 DLC with Machine Games, while another team aided with the development of Wolfenstein Cyberpilot. A game as per a source that is “not great”. Meanwhile, any team members who weren’t working on Wolfenstein projects were left to prepare a project for a new and original game. A game, that as of July 2018, has yet to be officially green lit.

I was unable to gather any specifics as to what the current idea for a new game entailed, but I was informed that it’s being pitched with live service in mind. A direction that Zenimax is pushing for.

Across the pond in Texas, Arkane Austin is going through a similar conundrum.

The studio should be a year into development for Prey 2, but after weak sales of the first game — a game which was already under immense pressure to succeed after the financial disappointment that was Dishonored 2 — the pitch for a sequel was turned down.

Following the ‘disappointing’ releases of Dishonored 2 and Prey, Zenimax decided that they didn’t do well because no one buys single player games, a sentiment that one source stated was “dead ass wrong.” This mindset has led to a hard pivot by Zenimax to focus more on multiplayer and live service experiences, with only a few single player games in the pipeline.

On a positive note, it was expressed that we can expect something interesting coming out of Austin within the next 4 years. What that means was left a bit vague, as shortly after it was stressed that the studio is still struggling to figure out how to preserve immersive sim principles in a new format.

With Zenimax making life tough, the morale at both studios is low. More so when one considers how litigious Zenimax is, which has created an environment of fear where employees don’t feel safe speaking out.

The departure of key personnel hasn’t helped, either; but what is making it worse is the hiring of controversial and abrasive figures like Sophie Mallinson and Hazel Monforton. Best known for their Twitter diatribes in which they attack men , their views have been endorsed by other Arkane employees. It’s gone so far that it’s been said at work by some that “the world would be better off without white men.”

The short and narrow of it is that a culture best defined as the SJW left is grabbing a bigger foothold within Arkane. Ground that is being given to them with the help of Harvey Smith. He has tried hard to appeal to the likes of Anita Sarkeesian. One way he has achieved this is by altering the narrative storytelling within Arkane’s games. An example recounted to me was that there used to be bras and other kinds of lingerie within Dishonored 2 to tell environmental stories about the whereabouts of who they belonged to. Harvey requested they be removed near the end of the game’s development because of the ‘sexist’ message it portrayed.

Another problem people like Sophie, Harvey, and Hazel have created is a fear of expression.

Multiple employees have now told me that they don’t follow people on social media that they’d like to because of how it could be perceived. In a bid to avoid hostility and to risk the loss of their job, they refuse to follow right leaning personalities. And in the rare times that they do, they avoid controversial individuals.

For obvious reasons, this has created a work environment filled with tension. On one side you have people who just want to “make great fucking games” and on the other you have a contingent of folks whose extreme views are making life rough for everybody else.

While all my sources denied that Prey and Dishonored had been negatively affected by the far left views of those mentioned above, it was stressed by every source that they fear for the future of the studio. With more employees being hired who just add tension to an already stressful environment, I’m sad to report that the future of the once promising Arkane is not looking too bright.

 

[Arnust]

"Twitter diatribes"

"Attacks on men"


Truly doomed. Meanwhile "Harvey smith trying really hard to approack Anita" in reality means "they met on a conference and he didn't immediately slap her"