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

[RoSoDude]

As the prophecy foretold: "Man must first break the game before he can fix it."



Don't get me wrong. I ultimately agree that speedrunning is the most degenerate act man has ever come up with. But the thought of waiting for (fake) elevators and sitting through another (fake) helicopter ride just to go through the lengthy tutorial segment and endure yet another loading screen before I could test 95% of any mod changes made my skin crawl worse than any oil monster in this game ever could. So I spent half an hour learning this basic speedrunning strat so I never have to do the intro sequence again. What you're not seeing are all the attempts where I couldn't throw the stool in just the right spot, messed up the angle of the jump and ended up on the wrong side of the inside-out wall, or hopped desperately at the lip of the barrier before I figured out the spacing you need to mantle up over it.

Oh, the things I do for you guys...

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the cool part of this is it means you can play around in the Neuromod Division in Morgan's jammies! Sadly, it reverts to the spacesuit on level transition, so you can't go out into space and freeze your ass off.

 

[Doktor Best]

Down to 16 players and mostly negative reviews a day after launch!

https://steamdb.info/app/741820/

About on par with Deus Ex: Breach then (what a hit!)
I thought the "let's tack on a multiplayer mode" fad was over by now.

I dont get it, why didnt the, just implement VR mode for the main campaign and mooncrash? Would have been golden. The first fully fledged immersive vr sim. It would have generated a lot of positive attention for the game...

But no, lets shit out a halfbaked hide and seek mode with tons of technical problems instead. Who the fuck makes those decisions and who puts them in charge?!?

 

[Hines]

I dont get it, why didnt the, just implement VR mode for the main campaign and mooncrash?

They did it to win the respect of Gamespot. Simply put, Typhon Hunter is Prey at its very best.

Since the cool reception when Prey was released last spring, Arkane has continued to revise and expand the game. Most notably, it released a premium expansion in June called Mooncrash, a rogue-lite adventure set on a satellite that retained the mechanics and milieu of Prey but applied them to an entirely different genre. Another six months later, we now have Typhon Hunter, an expansion that once again takes Arkane's promising source material and attempts to reimagine the kind of game it can be. A hide-and-seek version of Prey is more compelling than Prey in its original form, it turns out. Like the rogue-lite twist of Mooncrash, the sneaky, delightful Typhon Hunter multiplayer is simply a more rewarding application of Prey's basic elements; it ports over the environments from the campaign and repurposes the unique enemy design for the core of the new experience.

It's strange to say of a free add-on to an underwhelming game, but TranStar is actually on the upper end of experiences on the PSVR, succinctly showing off the immersive features of the technology. Considering it isn't even the main attraction of the DLC and is more like a bonus, it's clear that Typhon Hunter is another worthy, generous expansion from Arkane, who have by this point more than made up for Prey's shortcomings.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/preys-free-typhon-hunter-dlc-finds-childlike-fun-i/1100-6464006/

 

[Zakhad]

Arkane, who have by this point more than made up for Prey's shortcomings.

This is such a wrong-headed idea I don't even know where to begin. Anyone who thinks what Prey was lacking was, uh, multiplayer and VR...

 

[Wunderbar]

https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/38
Seems like an interesting mod. Makes game harder, nerfs crafting, adds attributes and rebalances every neuromod ability.

 

[Tweed]

Sounds interesting, I've tried some of the re-balancers in the past and they all left a bitter taste.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

 

[Average Manatee]

https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/38
Seems like an interesting mod. Makes game harder, nerfs crafting, adds attributes and rebalances every neuromod ability.

Everything sounds interesting, but

You start off the game much weaker than in vanilla Prey.

Uhh, I thought the starting power level in vanilla was almost 100% well-balanced and fine-tuned. The issue was that the difficulty never really increased. This makes it sound like something really masochistic.

 

[aweigh]

game is 2spooky4me.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

game is 2spooky4me.

same, I can't play horror games at all

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Uh, this game really isn't scary and compared to SS2 it looks and feels like a joke.

 

[aweigh]

2spook

 

[Tweed]

Why is everyone in this game so fucking ugly?

 

[Morgoth]

Why is everyone in this game so fucking ugly?

Ugly is the new anti-racism.

 

[aweigh]

Why is everyone in this game so fucking ugly?

Not joking when I answer: SJWs.

 

[Turjan]

There's always artificial insemination to keep the species going.
Or alcohol. Lots of alcohol.

 

[Rahdulan]

Why is everyone in this game so fucking ugly?

It's just the inbred Dishonored factor. Arkane went for that bumpy, rough look.

DAS RITE

 

[Nano]

I wouldn't say no to that guy on the left.

 

[AW8]

game is 2spooky4me.

Prey definitely has spooky parts, but I loved it because it's tied to gameplay.

In Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, I investigated a haunted mansion while following a ghost and being peltered with objects. It was really spooky. However I soon realized that the flying objects never hit me hard enough to kill me, and all the spooky sounds and visuals were just that: Sounds and visuals. I ran through the rest of the walking simulator hoping to be ambushed by something I could fight, but I was left disappointed.

In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I investigated a haunted tower. At every floor there was an apparition of a tortured ghost that extinguished all torches and eerily told me the story of what had transpired there. However I barely listened to it because I was busy looting every container like a vacuum cleaner. Again, just sounds and visuals (and lots and lots of crafting materials).

In Prey, I unlocked an optional room very early on in the game. I go inside and I hear someone saying "I USED TO WISH WE WEREN'T ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE". I come face to face with this fiery demon I've never seen before called "???". It instantly burns me to death.
I reload and enter the room again. I'm ready this time and get a few shots in, but I barely make a dent, so I flee. I run up a staircase and hide, but it clearly saw me since it's making its way towards me. I see its icon through the floor, the distance number slowly decreasing. When it's on the floor below me, I quickload in fear.
That was scary. Not because of the creepy sounds and visuals alone, but because the monster wasn't just talk. It actually had the stats to back it up, and thus I feared it from a gameplay perspective.

Halfway into the game my own stats had skyrocketed to ludicrous levels where I insta-killed most enemies, and had transformed from Ellen Ripley to Doomguy. Which was a shame, I would have loved to feel the fear of being underpowered and underequipped again.

 

[Jasede]

It's weird because of the crafting/skills. On the one hand, it's there, so you'd be dumb not to use them, right? On the other hand, the game really seems to be meant to be played without upgrades, but then you're kept wondering, why even include all the neat skills?

I think it's probably like... jRPG grinding. You can do it, to make the game easier, or you can ignore it, to make it significantly harder, which to some people is where the fun is.

I have no real opinion on it. I think this 'choose your own difficulty' approach isn't really my cup of tea. It's like when they give you full magical armor in a random chest in Ultima 7 just a few meters south of the starting town. Sure, you could not equip it, but then, it's there, so clearly you're meant to be rewarded for exploring... I don't know.

This is why, generally, action games are way better balanced, tighter. You never have this problem in God Hand or Bayonetta or something, simply because there's no room for that kind of thing in such games. You couldn't grind even if you wanted to!

 

[Average Manatee]

I could see overpowered skills working if the overpowered skills were all alien and therefore something the player was (morally/ethically) supposed to shy away from. Sort of like DF2:JK had the path split for light/dark, or Bioshock had the save/kill little girls, except both of these games chickened out and never gave the player a serious reason to pursue more power since the moral option was "be evil for little to no gain y/n?". Prey also fails at this with how powerful normal human abilities are. It's like they looked at Standard Weapons 6 in SS2 and thought "yeah, this is how Prey should be played once you're 3 hours in, no matter the path you take".

The distinction is that intentionally not using skills the game gives you for the point of using is RL LARPing. Not using skills because the game gives an in-game moral justification against using is in-game LARPing. It would have been pretty easy for Arkane to cap the human paths at a way weaker path and say to the player "well, I see you are having problems with x enemy, I have the exact hard-counter to that here in my alien powers section."

This is why, generally, action games are way better balanced, tighter. You never have this problem in God Hand or Bayonetta or something, simply because there's no room for that kind of thing in such games. You couldn't grind even if you wanted to!

To be fair there is a certain amount of "allowed grind" in God Hand since you can do the Arena challenges in between missions. Also technically unlimited grind available if you savescum the casino. Haven't played Bayonetta, but isn't it basically like DMC3/4 where you can replay missions to buy more skills and pump your max health up?

 

[aweigh]

spook

 

[RoSoDude]

Well, Prey also tried to have some mechanical drawbacks to installing alien skills, namely turrets recognizing you as a threat and more frequent Nightmare spawning. While both are very cool in concept, they become little more than a nuisance, as turrets rarely come pre-deployed by the level designers (other than in the Shuttle Bay), and more Nightmare spawns eventually just accelerates your overpowered character growth once you can melt it with your mind powers.

Sigh, the Nightmare. If only its true potential to dynamically stalk and threaten the player had been realized. Rather than just spawning more often, it could have been more frequently drawn to the player and harder to hide from with more alien skills, which could have been better balanced so as to not trivialize the enemy outright.

Anyway, Prey's inverse difficulty curve has a lot more to do with lackluster encounter design in the second half of the game than the skill growth, I think (though the latter is still worth addressing). There are no big endgame baddies that threaten you like SS2's Rumbler or Psi Reaver, and enemy numbers don't grow much from the initial offerings. The Talos Lobby repopulation is a nice exception, but there's little expansion besides. It might be possible to add in more enemy spawns manually in the map files by specifying coordinates, but troubleshooting and testing that sounds like an insane effort.

 

[Child of Malkav]

The Nightmare should have been a normal sized/mimic sized entity which actually hunted you across the station.

Like go wherever the player can go, through vents, jumping, mimicking etc. in order to reach the player. It would randomly spawn somewhere on the station, search, hide and wait anywhere, search again (including vents and other higher surfaces), traverse from one area to another just like the player does, once it spots the player it should sneak/stalk until opportune moment to strike, or simply attack or sneak behind for a 1 hit kill, forcing the player to watch their back when navigating, hell even use distractions to lure the player so that he/she thinks is a mimic, giving the nightmare enough time to get in closer. Or leave various resources and then hide and wait. And of course it should be very difficult to kill in combat and it shouldn't despawn until it or the player lies dead or if the player actually manages to survive against it throughout the game.

I don't know, something like that. That is a proper Hunter and still waiting for an enemy that does that but the AI programming will probably be hell so not holding my breath.

 

[Multidirectional]

Yep, my way of dealing with Nigthmare earlier was usually - hide someplace (usually under something) it has no way of reaching due to its size, go make a fresh cup of tea. Pretty intense stuff it was. Then later on Nigthmare simply becomes a pushover so I welcomed any opportunity to kill it. Didn't even do the quest to get rid of it, because why would I, it would just lower monster variety. It could've been scarier if it was smaller size and could follow you to more places.