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

[rusty_shackleford]

immersive sim is a meme

 

[Trithne]

The "Immersive Sim" genre needs to get over SS2 and try new things. Again, mooncrash was a great start, and that sort of limited rng affecting map design is the kind of thing that needs to be learned into more.

Also randomised keycodes.

But seriously, leave System Shock alone. It did its thing, make something new.

I'm actually more interested in Void Bastards over this SS3 that I honestly hope never comes out, for this reason.

 

[Lutte]

The "Immersive Sim" genre needs to get over SS2 and try new things.

""needs"" to try new things like we're under a cornucopia of games of the same vein? Really? How many actual SS2 clones are there out there? You don't mean Bioshock do you?

If you really have a crusade to wage on cloning mediocre styles of games I can point you to the door of the Obsidian's forums and their resurrection of shitty RTWP rpgs. Your energy would be welcome and purposeful there.

 

[HansDampf]

RoSoDude, dumb question. How can I quickly confirm, at the beginning of the game, that your Core Balance mod and hardcore modules are correctly installed? I'm still getting 1 health from food, like green tea. Is this correct?

 

[RoSoDude]

RoSoDude, dumb question. How can I quickly confirm, at the beginning of the game, that your Core Balance mod and hardcore modules are correctly installed? I'm still getting 1 health from food, like green tea. Is this correct?

1 health is correct, there should just be no healing over time.

Main mod: jump from a small height and activate the radial menu. If you continue to fall to the ground at half speed rather than freezing in place, the mod is installed.
HALFMAT module: Pick up some food in your apartment (e.g. Glucassist!) and check its material yield in the inventory against the values listed here, which are hopefully up to date. Don't check with other junk items in your apartment -- I changed some of those
NOFREELUNCH module: Eat a piece of food and check the status tab in your Transcribe. The WellFed bonus should list Trauma acquisition rate instead of health regeneration.
LESSAMMO module: Find a way to break out of your apartment early and locate your first GLOO gun in the foyer. The ammo pickups on the ground should be between 6-12 GLOO each instead of 12-18 (rough luck if you glitch your way there and both are exactly 12).

 

[HansDampf]

Finished Survival Mode on Nightmare + Core Balance mod + "hardcore" modules. I was also relying on autosaves, like your mod recommends. The first time I played this game was in 2017, so I don't remember every detail and what the mod has changed. But I know that I enjoyed it more this time, mainly for 3 reasons:
1) No hacking. That mini-game is atrocious.
2) In my first playthrough I didn't get any Typhon skills. This time I did (24 human skills and 23 Typhon skills, according to the stats screen).
3) More challenging resource management with half material yield, less ammo, and no operator healing. One thing I do remember from vanilla, is the abundance of ammo. I'd found so much that I had to recycle it frequently to free up inventory space. This time, however, I had to fabricate ammo all the time throughout the game (also medkits and psi hypos). Every missed shot hurts. Every wound eats more medkits and therefore more resources. Still, it could be done with even less material yield. I got a lot of extra Neuromods out of it. With the Necropsy skill, synthetics and minerals will eventually become the bottleneck. Hard to say if it's a skill worth getting. I've also used quite a few Recycler charges on piled up junk, turrets, and operators.

Some comments on

and stuff:
- I don't know exactly what you've changed about the chipsets, but I did get suit and scope upgrades to install more of them, so it can't be that bad.
- Psychoshock is way overpowered, even with those hardcore modules. Psi hypos are very cheap to fabricate, and there are even chipsets that boost Psychoshock damage by 20%, and lower psi cost of telepathic abilities. Fighting the big Typhon enemies is thus very easy, unless they are surrounded by smaller enemies, like a Technopath with turrets. Psychoshock then tends to not hit the big fat Technopath I'm actually pointing at, but the turret that's floating next to it. Annoying.
- Psyonic Aptitude (increasing your psi pool) is kind of pointless, when your only* source for psi points is psi hypos, which can be quickly consumed mid battle.
- I was surprised to learn that the Nightmare can be mind-controlled. This doesn't seem right. It's also weird that it can't follow you to other maps. Kind of defeats its purpose.
- NOFREELUNCH turns food into junk. Consuming food items for 1 HP each (or 2 psi) is just a waste. To fabricate one medkit you need 2x organic material, which is mostly found in food.
- Also, if the purpose of the NOFREELUNCH module is to force the player to use limited resources to heal, I wonder if it shouldn't also nerf or remove chipsets and skills that regenerate health and psi "for free". One chipset, that is found early, regenerates 10 HP for a successful stealth attack. Not a stealth kill, just an attack! Later you can find one that regenerates psi while you are in contact with Coral. I was hoarding psi hypos from then on. Similarly, there is also a health regen skill that regenerates 25 HP after you take damage. Get hit for less than 25 HP damage and you have a net gain. Those were the moments when the hardcore modules seemed to loosen the grip.
- Traumas could have been interesting, if I hadn't always had a cure ready in my inventory (found, not fabricated). There has been only one situation in which I had bleeding status and didn't have a cure. But the damage I was taking from sprinting and jumping was directly compensated by the regeneration skill.
- When you are setting traps with Superthermal, you can hold the button to stop time. I was a bit confused. Maybe you should add this to the description, and also change it to 0.5x normal speed, like the radial menu.
- I bet most players will get the suit upgrades not to carry more and bigger weapons, but just to avoid the frequent backtracking to recycle stations. The unfortunate side effect of HALFMAT is that recycling is now even less rewarding. Maybe a better, but unreasonably more time-consuming way to reduce material yield, would be to remove half or more of the junk/food/typhon loot found in the levels.
- Is this a bug? It happened with two fabricators fairly late in the game, and it was permanent.

 

[ciox]

Psychoshock should probably be split in two, a psi power that just damages stuff and has a less intense cooldown, so you can still use it to instakill random dumbass Mimics like a boss. It's nice to have a power that just kills shit, you know, and without some giant cooldown attached or the risk of blowing yourself up.
Meanwhile the Silence power does no damage and scales with enemy power somehow, so the strongest psionic enemies aren't affected as much. I'm sure it's impossible to implement but that's how I felt about it.
You can get full psi refills from those Psychic Operators, they just have a condition where they won't refill you unless you're at less than 40% or something.
I do agree that all of the HP/psi regenerating stuff should probably be kicked out.
Food being recycle fodder....well, at least it's usefu to eat it if you can't make it to a recycler right that very moment, if you're always just a few feet away from a recycler to sell junk atm then that's more of a level design problem.

 

[RoSoDude]

Woo 100 downloads, now I can pretend it was all worth it.

Appreciate the detailed feedback. Some of the best I've gotten. I'll go through it point by point.

Finished Survival Mode on Nightmare + Core Balance mod + "hardcore" modules. I was also relying on autosaves, like your mod recommends. The first time I played this game was in 2017, so I don't remember every detail and what the mod has changed. But I know that I enjoyed it more this time, mainly for 3 reasons:
1) No hacking. That mini-game is atrocious.
2) In my first playthrough I didn't get any Typhon skills. This time I did (24 human skills and 23 Typhon skills, according to the stats screen).
3) More challenging resource management with half material yield, less ammo, and no operator healing. One thing I do remember from vanilla, is the abundance of ammo. I'd found so much that I had to recycle it frequently to free up inventory space. This time, however, I had to fabricate ammo all the time throughout the game (also medkits and psi hypos). Every missed shot hurts. Every wound eats more medkits and therefore more resources. Still, it could be done with even less material yield. I got a lot of extra Neuromods out of it. With the Necropsy skill, synthetics and minerals will eventually become the bottleneck. Hard to say if it's a skill worth getting. I've also used quite a few Recycler charges on piled up junk, turrets, and operators.

1) Agreed. I rebalanced the hacking timers anyway, but I wouldn't begrudge anyone using the new One-Button Hacking mod, which is compatible with CORE BALANCE (I'll make a note of this in the description the next time I update it).
2) Looks like about half of the skills by the end? That was my target with HALFMAT, glad to see it worked out that way.
3) Glad to hear it. I think I like Necropsy being of mixed usefulness? Before it felt like something that you ought to get ASAP, because you were needlessly gimping yourself otherwise. Now it's something that you pick up if you're confident in your non-exotic material harvesting and want to go all in on Neuromod crafting -- probably best for alien runs, and I don't care that this conflicts with Split Affinity achievement. Cheevos are dumb. If it were possible, I'd have the Materials Expert skill only affect synthetic/mineral so you could choose what you want to optimize. But that's out of the question.

Some comments on

and stuff:
- I don't know exactly what you've changed about the chipsets, but I did get suit and scope upgrades to install more of them, so it can't be that bad.
- Psychoshock is way overpowered, even with those hardcore modules. Psi hypos are very cheap to fabricate, and there are even chipsets that boost Psychoshock damage by 20%, and lower psi cost of telepathic abilities. Fighting the big Typhon enemies is thus very easy, unless they are surrounded by smaller enemies, like a Technopath with turrets. Psychoshock then tends to not hit the big fat Technopath I'm actually pointing at, but the turret that's floating next to it. Annoying.
- Psyonic Aptitude (increasing your psi pool) is kind of pointless, when your only* source for psi points is psi hypos, which can be quickly consumed mid battle.
- I was surprised to learn that the Nightmare can be mind-controlled. This doesn't seem right. It's also weird that it can't follow you to other maps. Kind of defeats its purpose.
- NOFREELUNCH turns food into junk. Consuming food items for 1 HP each (or 2 psi) is just a waste. To fabricate one medkit you need 2x organic material, which is mostly found in food.
- Also, if the purpose of the NOFREELUNCH module is to force the player to use limited resources to heal, I wonder if it shouldn't also nerf or remove chipsets and skills that regenerate health and psi "for free". One chipset, that is found early, regenerates 10 HP for a successful stealth attack. Not a stealth kill, just an attack! Later you can find one that regenerates psi while you are in contact with Coral. I was hoarding psi hypos from then on. Similarly, there is also a health regen skill that regenerates 25 HP after you take damage. Get hit for less than 25 HP damage and you have a net gain. Those were the moments when the hardcore modules seemed to loosen the grip.
- Traumas could have been interesting, if I hadn't always had a cure ready in my inventory (found, not fabricated). There has been only one situation in which I had bleeding status and didn't have a cure. But the damage I was taking from sprinting and jumping was directly compensated by the regeneration skill.
- When you are setting traps with Superthermal, you can hold the button to stop time. I was a bit confused. Maybe you should add this to the description, and also change it to 0.5x normal speed, like the radial menu.
- I bet most players will get the suit upgrades not to carry more and bigger weapons, but just to avoid the frequent backtracking to recycle stations. The unfortunate side effect of HALFMAT is that recycling is now even less rewarding. Maybe a better, but unreasonably more time-consuming way to reduce material yield, would be to remove half or more of the junk/food/typhon loot found in the levels.
- Is this a bug? It happened with two fabricators fairly late in the game, and it was permanent.

- I tweaked 19 chipsets, added numerical detail for all chipset effects, and rebalanced the suit/scope slots you get from Suit Modification I/II/III and Psychotronics I/II/III respectively from 2/2/2 (diminishing returns) to 1/2/3 (increasing returns, also with rebalanced Neuromod costs). I'm happy to hear chipsets felt more attractive to use; I think a lot of people agreed they felt pretty unimpactful in the base game because of how poorly the effects were communicated and how unsatisfying it was to spec into them.
- Would you believe that I nerfed the hell out of Psychoshock? Neuromod cost for I/II/II from 3/5/5 to 3/5/7, damage from 45/65/90 to 20/40/60, nullwave duration from 20/20/20s to 5/10/20s, and the Nightmare was given 50% resistance to nullwave. I'll look into the psi cost.
- Agreed. Not sure what to do about it, since I wanted psi hypo effectiveness to scale with difficulty. This means Psionic Aptitude is good on lower difficulties, but pretty crap on higher difficulty modes. I guess there's the psi regen chipsets and water fountains... Perhaps I'll just lower the Neuromod cost from 2/3/5 to 1/2/3, though I'd be sad about losing the 1 Neuromod = 10 psi points conversion I had going on, heh.
- Nightmare has 50% resistance to mind control, along with Telepaths and Weavers. Perhaps it should be made immune, since you can already game its attention with turrets, other mind-controlled AI, and Phantom Shift. I'll think about it. Doubt I can do much about the overall timer/map mechanic, which is too bad because it frankly sucks.
- I still scarfed down food all the time to avoid using medkits, but it's true that the NOFREELUNCH WellFed bonus is pretty lame. Still has improved stamina regen, and I traded health regen for trauma resistance. Kind of a "who cares", I'll admit. At least medkits also require some synthetic/mineral to craft.
- The regen stuff is a big issue, but I can't do much about it without screwing up CORE BALANCE's modularity. The sneak attack chipset and the Regeneration skill bonuses are both defined in the same files that HALFMAT and MOREMAT overwrite, so there's no way to edit them while still allowing the user to plug in whatever selection of modules they like. I was pretty baffled when I realized that this didn't just include up close and personal sneak attacks with a wrench, and you could just restore free HP/psi by shooting an enemy across the room with a pistol. I'm almost positive my hands are tied there. I'm also shocked to hear that Regeneration is not restoring *up to* 10/25 HP like it should. Can you verify this is absolutely the case?
- Trauma items are RNG loot, so your experience can vary quite a bit. During my test run I had a really bad series of events after I got shot into space from Deep Storage and allowed a Technopath to give me a bleeding trauma. I had to clear out the Phantoms in the Cargo Bay without jumping or sprinting, and because the sequence bugged out and the survivors wouldn't open the door up for me, I also had to find a way to clamber up to the upper catwalk without killing myself. My ideal is for the player to have 1-2 drastic experiences like that where everything goes wrong and they have to improvise. However, traumas should also come into play from time to time in a less critical manner, so I might drop the loot chances a bit and possibly nerf the bleed damage a bit so it's more livable.
- This is true of psi targeting generally -- it turns on SuperHot mode and you only move time forward when you move your character or your aim. I elected not to change this because it's a pretty distinctive feature and some of the psi attacks can be finicky to line up (as you were saying with Psychoshock). While 50% is probably a reasonable compromise, it also makes it less obvious how the mechanic works, since it requires the player to notice the difference in rate rather than a binary distinction between time moving/not moving.
- Yeah, not going to manually remove items from the levels. It may actually be possible, but I wouldn't feel confident that I had evenly addressed organic/synthetic/material (moreover, this would make Necropsy even more questionable as I wouldn't be lowering enemy counts). I spent enough time fine-tuning all of the junk in loot tables. HALFMAT is a tradeoff, as it sacrifices the reward of recycling for more exciting loot and better resource economy/character progression. As for the overall issues with suit upgrades, I agree but think it's a lost cause. Two more weapons (Psychostatic Cutter and disk gun!) would solve this by making weapon selection a genuine incentive for inventory expansion, but that's a pipe dream now.
- Looks like a bug to me. Never seen it before. Hope it's not my fault!

Psychoshock should probably be split in two, a psi power that just damages stuff and has a less intense cooldown, so you can still use it to instakill random dumbass Mimics like a boss. It's nice to have a power that just kills shit, you know, and without some giant cooldown attached or the risk of blowing yourself up.
Meanwhile the Silence power does no damage and scales with enemy power somehow, so the strongest psionic enemies aren't affected as much. I'm sure it's impossible to implement but that's how I felt about it.
You can get full psi refills from those Psychic Operators, they just have a condition where they won't refill you unless you're at less than 40% or something.
I do agree that all of the HP/psi regenerating stuff should probably be kicked out.
Food being recycle fodder....well, at least it's usefu to eat it if you can't make it to a recycler right that very moment, if you're always just a few feet away from a recycler to sell junk atm then that's more of a level design problem.

Spliting up Psychoshock isn't impossible, just out of scope. You'd have to sacrifice some other Neuromod skills and (likely their associated) stim packages to do it because you can't create new stuff, but all of the tags and stims are driven by data in the config files.
You can still heal psi from Science Operators on NOFREELUNCH? Goddammit Arkane...

Changes I'm considering for version 1.3:

-Decrease Mimic Matter I/II/III drain from 2/2/2 psi/s to 1/1/1 psi/s
-Decrease Psionic Aptitude I/II/III Neuromod cost from 2/3/5 to 1/2/3
-Psi cost adjustments to Psychoshock, maybe others
-Make Nightmare immune to Mindjack?
-Look over trauma item loot chances and bleed trauma damage
-wat do about regen BS

 

[rusty_shackleford]

for version 1.3 you should remove all spooks

 

[HansDampf]

- Would you believe that I nerfed the hell out of Psychoshock? Neuromod cost for I/II/II from 3/5/5 to 3/5/7, damage from 45/65/90 to 20/40/60, nullwave duration from 20/20/20s to 5/10/20s, and the Nightmare was given 50% resistance to nullwave. I'll look into the psi cost.

That's insane. I was about to suggest reducing duration time... At least the cooldown is long enough (I think), so you can't keep one Typhon nullwaved indefinitely.

I'm also shocked to hear that Regeneration is not restoring *up to* 10/25 HP like it should. Can you verify this is absolutely the case?

Turns out I was wrong.

- Trauma items are RNG loot, so your experience can vary quite a bit. During my test run I had a really bad series of events after I got shot into space from Deep Storage and allowed a Technopath to give me a bleeding trauma. I had to clear out the Phantoms in the Cargo Bay without jumping or sprinting, and because the sequence bugged out and the survivors wouldn't open the door up for me, I also had to find a way to clamber up to the upper catwalk without killing myself. My ideal is for the player to have 1-2 drastic experiences like that where everything goes wrong and they have to improvise. However, traumas should also come into play from time to time in a less critical manner, so I might drop the loot chances a bit and possibly nerf the bleed damage a bit so it's more livable.

Then maybe you don't have to change anything, and I just got lucky.

- This is true of psi targeting generally -- it turns on SuperHot mode and you only move time forward when you move your character or your aim.

I've played through this game twice and never noticed this? I thought this was a unique feature of Superthermal, because you're actually laying traps instead of attacking something directly.

 

[Morgoth]

I appreciate modder's hard work, but I personally never touch balancing mods. For better or worse, it falsifies the painter's final (flawed) stroke on the canvas.

 

[Child of Malkav]

 

[RoSoDude]

News from the Prey modding scene (kinda feels like I've had an impact with my modding guide); in particular, some mods that are compatible with my own.

One Button Hacking effectively removes the boring hacking minigame:
https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/43

Moregan replaces every human NPC with Morgan Yu, regardless of size (scariest thing yet in Prey):
https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/45

Mooncrash Weapon Cosmetics in Prey lets you swap in Mooncrash weapon skins at your leisure:
https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/50
Neat video for this one:

I also know someone was working on porting over Mooncrash assets such as the new GLOO turrets and even the Psychostatic Cutter (which they said was partially working already). Maybe somebody can eventually crack into the .lua scripts, which would really blow things up. I know the community is pretty obsessed with Cazavor, the canceled disk gun... and I just wish there were more weapons in the base game.

 

[Israfael]

An interesting talk (although the guy was clearly very nervous judging from bazillion gulps he took), but I really don't get these people who ask the "NERF GAEM" / "REMOVE TIMERRR" questions after a very elaborate explanation how and why they introduced such things

 

[Metro]

When are they removing Denuvo from this shit?

 

[The Decline]

Well I installed it and tried to play it for the first time, but the volume for voices is all messed up and blaring from my rear speakers. Lots of topics on it, but no fixes.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Israfael]

Some of them can be cleared out with recycling grenade, others can be opened with the x-bow or accessed in some other way. There's always more than one path to the room

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I think I only ever encountered one door I couldn't get through without typhoon powers.

 

[RoSoDude]

You can also fix those broken doors in Mooncrash with the Repair skill (not the base game, sorry). This was cool because you'd sometimes have broken + unpowered doors, so you'd need to Repair them first with one character and then force them open with Leverage (an underutilized mechanic in the base game) on a different character.

 

[Average Manatee]

I recall one near the generator thing when going through the GUTS. Otherwise the coffee cup transformation ability is fairly underutilized. Or you could view it as the game being too good at providing alternate options.

 

[The Decline]

Sort of fixed/minimized the audio and I've been having a good time with the game. I'm using the core balance mod and survival mode. Went in blind too.

 

[DonGabo]

Sort of fixed/minimized the audio and I've been having a good time with the game. I'm using the core balance mod and survival mode. Went in blind too.

How did you fix the audio issue? It's the only reason I haven't played this game. The audio sliders in the options do nothing to make this bearable.

 

[The Decline]

Sort of fixed/minimized the audio and I've been having a good time with the game. I'm using the core balance mod and survival mode. Went in blind too.

How did you fix the audio issue? It's the only reason I haven't played this game. The audio sliders in the options do nothing to make this bearable.

I turned my surround speaker volume down and put the voice slider almost all the way to the left. Some voices are really low now, but it's better than having your ears blown out. The audio mixing is fucked up big time.

 

[DonGabo]

Sort of fixed/minimized the audio and I've been having a good time with the game. I'm using the core balance mod and survival mode. Went in blind too.

How did you fix the audio issue? It's the only reason I haven't played this game. The audio sliders in the options do nothing to make this bearable.

I turned my surround speaker volume down and put the voice slider almost all the way to the left. Some voices are really low now, but it's better than having your ears blown out. The audio mixing is fucked up big time.

Thanks. It's a shame that this studio that tries to continue Looking Glass's legacy fucked up one of the most important aspects of the game's atmosphere. I could play some of Thief's levels with my eyes closed and maintain perfect situational awareness.