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

[LarryTyphoid]

Turning off the quest markers in Prey just seems like pointless busywork to me.

Yeah but I played the game 50 times so now I can turn them off and pretend like the game is like System Shock and not popamole

 

[SharkClub]

Prey still has some of the best level design I've experienced in an immersive sim despite the quest markers. There is always handful of different ways to get to any given area on the map and it's very fun to climb all over the place, the amount of verticality and freedom of movement is pretty much unmatched within the genre, even the Dishonored games with the blink ability feels more strictly confined (eventually you find yourself sliding off of roofs or fighting being pushed back in bounds). For me the biggest issue with Prey is not the quest markers it's that it could have used a couple more weapons to add variety and soak up weapon mods, neuromods should have been a bit more expensive to craft (or Typhons dropped less Exotic material) and the enemy designs are just overall kind of weak (there's like 5 actual enemy types and then a few different flavors of each).

System Shock 2 does not have any of these issues, there is an abundance of weapons, a lot of unique enemies and you won't be able to upgrade everything you want in one run. Though that last one is done rather sloppily by tying cybernetic module requirements to the difficulty, which is changeable on the fly, it also makes Psi builds lame because the inflated module prices on Impossible means that it's a pain to get even a handful of abilities and any respectable stats before the very end, it's much more manageable with a more cookie cutter weapons build. I never liked how module requirements changed with a modifiable difficulty mode in SS2. There are much more elegant ways they could have gone about this. What SS2 does not have is the extreme freedom of movement and vertical level design, which is where Prey obviously excels and carves out it's own niche in the genre.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

the enemy designs are just overall kind of weak (there's like 5 actual enemy types and then a few different flavors of each).

That's being super nice. The enemy cast is incredibly lame, especially so for a game that really wants to be SS3.

 

[Tacgnol]

the enemy designs are just overall kind of weak (there's like 5 actual enemy types and then a few different flavors of each).

That's being super nice. The enemy cast is incredibly lame, especially so for a game that really wants to be SS3.

Indeed, the enemy design is by far the weakest part of Prey. It's a real shame considering the superb enemy design of the games it is inspired by.

Typhons were the perfect opportunity with all their psychic abilities, we could have had way more humanoid enemies in various states of control or mutation rather than the phantoms.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Don't forget the robots. SS2 has protocol droids, the bulky and intimidating security/military bots, cyborg assassins and, last but definitely not least, midwives.

Prey has a toaster that slowly floats towards you making beep-boop sounds.

 

[Tacgnol]

Don't forget the robots. SS2 has protocol droids, the bulky and intimidating security/military bots, cyborg assassins and, last but definitely not least, midwives.

Prey has a toaster that slowly floats towards you making beep-boop sounds.

Sound design in SS2 was king, it made the enemies 10x more intimidating than they would have been on visuals alone.

Robots reporting to Xerxes what they were going to do to you, Hybrids and Midwives with their creepy utterances. Even the enraged shrieks of the monkeys.

Prey did try to copy that with the Phantoms and their disjointed dialogue, but it somehow falls flat.

 

[ciox]

Bringing some of the Mooncrash additions to arsenal/beastiary into the main campaign could have made a difference, simply because you started with something quite bare, unfortunately it was already ordained that nothing else would be done with Prey besides use it as a testbed for Deathpoop ideas.

 

[ciox]

Don't forget the robots. SS2 has protocol droids, the bulky and intimidating security/military bots, cyborg assassins and, last but definitely not least, midwives.

Prey has a toaster that slowly floats towards you making beep-boop sounds.

Sound design in SS2 was king, it made the enemies 10x more intimidating than they would have been on visuals alone.

Robots reporting to Xerxes what they were going to do to you, Hybrids and Midwives with their creepy utterances. Even the enraged shrieks of the monkeys.

Prey did try to copy that with the Phantoms and their disjointed dialogue, but it somehow falls flat.

System Shock Remake also fails at this, there's some attempts here and there to make enemies seem alive, but it's not even close to the Thief and SS2 style where almost everything is outfitted with a full sound set that has numerous reactive sound samples for every situation. Whatever was going on with the old sound design seems quite hard to replicate nowadays.

 

[kangaxx]

Don't forget the robots. SS2 has protocol droids, the bulky and intimidating security/military bots, cyborg assassins and, last but definitely not least, midwives.

Prey has a toaster that slowly floats towards you making beep-boop sounds.

I think the toasters are the worst part about the game actually. Especially when they spawn relentlessly around endgame time. At least you can block the spawn points with boxes and put an end to it.

 

[Average Manatee]

Certainly. Ending the game with an onslaught of enemies that have the least personality/scare factor and the least interesting tactics to defeat (they just hover around and ignore terrain so all you can really do is spam bullets at them) was an awful idea.

 

[Latelistener]

By the way, I recently posted my mod on Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/109

Initially it removed both sounds and animations from containers. I had some help and now it just removes sounds.

I thought maybe they brought this bug with Mooncrash, but no, I found footages on youtube from a console version of the game back from 2017 and it was already there.

How this got past QA / QC, went into the release version of the game and haven't been fixed with post-release patches is a mystery to me.

 

[Tacgnol]

By the way, I recently posted my mod on Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/109

Initially it removed both sounds and animations from containers. I had some help and now it just removes sounds.

I thought maybe they brought this bug with Mooncrash, but no, I found footages on youtube from a console version of the game back from 2017 and it was already there.

How this got past QA / QC, went into the release version of the game and haven't been fixed with post-release patches is a mystery to me.

Neat mod. Is it compatible with RoSoDude's core balance mod?

 

[Latelistener]

By the way, I recently posted my mod on Nexus: https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/109

Initially it removed both sounds and animations from containers. I had some help and now it just removes sounds.

I thought maybe they brought this bug with Mooncrash, but no, I found footages on youtube from a console version of the game back from 2017 and it was already there.

How this got past QA / QC, went into the release version of the game and haven't been fixed with post-release patches is a mystery to me.

Neat mod. Is it compatible with RoSoDude's core balance mod?

Should be. The mod modifies animation events located in the "Objects" folder. RoSoDude mod uses "Ark" and "Libs" folders.

 

[RoSoDude]

Certainly. Ending the game with an onslaught of enemies that have the least personality/scare factor and the least interesting tactics to defeat (they just hover around and ignore terrain so all you can really do is spam bullets at them) was an awful idea.

The most interesting tactic to "defeat" the laser toasters is to pile boxes in front of the operator dispensers so they can't spawn any more. But yeah, actually fighting them is a bore.

Prey's cast of robotic enemies is pathetic, honestly I wouldn't complain so much about the enemy roster (notwithstanding that the oil slick blobs just aren't scary in the slightest) if there were a bunch of interesting droids to fight. Just imagine any number of service robots that have been corrupted and now use whatever tools at their disposal to beat you down.

 

[Spukrian]

My personal favourite way of dealing with the military operators is to use Remote Manipulation + Hacking and let them fight eachother.

 

[SharkClub]

Prey's cast of robotic enemies is pathetic, honestly I wouldn't complain so much about the enemy roster (notwithstanding that the oil slick blobs just aren't scary in the slightest) if there were a bunch of interesting droids to fight. Just imagine any number of service robots that have been corrupted and now use whatever tools at their disposal to beat you down.

Yeah, instead of Operators in Medical/Engineering/Science/Military reskins that all turn into the same floating toaster that tries to torch/laser you when they get corrupted, having specific robotic assistants designed for each of these fields with their own unique look and attacks would have gone a long way to adding the missing enemy variety that the game sorely lacks. It just shows that the Typhon and their black goo visual design isn't even the main problem. I can tell the difference between a Phantom and a Telepath but I don't give a shit if the Fire Phantom is technically different from the Electric Phantom or the Typhon Cum Phantom. It's what I meant when I said there's like 5 enemy types with some different flavors assigned to them (though that may be a bit reductionist, there's probably more like 8).

 

[Average Manatee]

The only valid response to the Prey enemy list is



Aside from the lack of enemy variety there's also a big lack of variety in their composition in levels. Almost all fights are 1v1 or 1v2 of the same things. I don't recall being surprised by a mimic during a fight or while trying to orient myself to fight a phantom despite that being the most interesting and memorable way to use them I can think of. Same goes for a lot of other enemies which seem to just exist in "their" areas. Not at all like SS2 where if you trip an alarm you'll have a monk, a hybrid and a protocol droid come after you.

 

[Ash]

Glad we're getting down to the nitty gritty of why Prey is ultimately a failure, above all the other issues small and large (and there is many), is the pathetic weapon & enemy design.
Still not a terrible game, and the most admirable effort from Arkane since Arx Fatalis, but ultimately I consider Arx the only successful/valuable game they ever made from a design standpoint.

Dark Messiah feels rushed and inconsistent. It's simple so what's there NEEDS to be close to perfection, but that is often not the case sadly.
Dishonored is dumb popamole for casuals.
Prey is a nice effort but somehow things went very wrong. What were they thinking indeed. Limp dick leadership probably. Probably too busy getting distracted & cucked by the women on the team. 90s dev teams were all male and maybe 1 cool tomboy chick here and there. Introduce a gaggle of hens and a man's attention can easily lead elsewhere other than the game. See Chris Avellone's career lol. (note: I'm talking shit/fun speculation. Could be any number of reasons).
Deathpoop & Redfall well I won't even give them a chance.

 

[agris]

going to try this vanilla, no DLC. Is nightmare difficulty good, or does it create bullet sponges?

Playing with traumas and oxygen as well.

 

[Ryzer]

going to try this vanilla, no DLC. Is nightmare difficulty good, or does it create bullet sponges?

Playing with traumas and oxygen as well.

Bullet sponges yes, at least until you have the shotgun.

Then it's a cakewalk since the game floods the player with items.

 

[Average Manatee]

Nightmare is just damage received/inflicted modifiers but they are pretty light compared to most games. If you showed me a player playing Hard and Nightmare I'd probably not be able to tell the difference.

 

[RoSoDude]

Prey's difficulty settings leave a LOT to be desired. Here's everything that changes on Story/Easy/Normal/Hard/Nightmare difficulty:

• Damage taken from most sources: 0.1/0.5/1.0/1.4/1.6x
• Damage taken from crush and laser sources: 0.4/0.7/1.0/1.2/1.4x
• Suit damage received: 0.25/0.25/1.0/1.0/1.0x
• Health/psi from consumable items: 2.0/1.2/1.0/0.8/0.8x
• Damage dealt by the player: 1.25/1.1/1.0/1.0/0.8x

What's the problem? It's all just modifiers to combat. This is not at all well-suited to a game like Prey, whose combat is all about stunlocking enemies and taking them out with your acquired tools, skills, and resources. Playing Prey as a straight shooter is not particularly effective or fun, as enemy attacks aren't telegraphed well and can in some instances be impossible to dodge. Fights are supposed to be a scrappy affair where you survive by your wits rather than running and gunning like Doom. If you're playing the game "correctly", you're declawing enemies and eliminating them before they can respond. Nightmare difficulty just makes this dynamic more binary; if you fail to properly stunlock your opponent, there's a good chance you'll get killed by them in 1-2 hits. What this ultimately encourages is just quicksaving before any encounter, because the prospect of dying to a cheap move by the enemy and having to reloot the environment for junk to recycle is highly tedious. This also has the surely unintended side effect of making you use fewer resources on Nightmare, because you will exit most fights without a single point of damage taken thanks to savescumming and will never need to heal. I had a much bigger stack of medkits on my Nightmare run than my subsequent Normal run because the former had so little room between success and failure. The only real difference in raw challenge between a savescummed Nightmare run and an autosave-only Normal run is dealing 20% less damage (not really that significant in the grand scheme), and you lose all the tension of getting ambushed, responding in real time, and recovering from your mistakes which actually made my Normal run much more hardcore and interesting.

 

[Child of Malkav]

• Damage taken from most sources: 0.1/0.5/1.0/1.4/1.6x
• Damage taken from crush and laser sources: 0.4/0.7/1.0/1.2/1.4x
• Suit damage received: 0.25/0.25/1.0/1.0/1.0x
• Health/psi from consumable items: 2.0/1.2/1.0/0.8/0.8x
• Damage dealt by the player: 1.25/1.1/1.0/1.0/0.8x

That's why I don't play games on anything higher than normal/medium. Adding zeros to numbers does not make a game more interesting, fun or stimulating in a new way or by adding a twist to the gameplay. No, just the worst kind of challenging: bullet sponge enemies whereas the player dies even faster than before.
I did like however the one hit kill feature for both enemies and player in the Ghostrunner game. By adding attachments you can change tactics and alter your playstyle.
Also the difficulty in Metro games where the higher you go in difficulty setting the higher the damage you and your enemies do.

 

[Spacer's Nugget]

I've never seen this before:

 

[Ash]

I am now happy with Prey, for the most part. Thanks to the mod "Prey for Death 2".

https://www.nexusmods.com/prey2017/mods/63

As many of you will know, I considered this game beneath me, nice attempt and a lot to love there, but ultimately a major disappointment. Much better than Bioshock, yet no true classic. Well, mods will fix it!

-Fabrication licenses! No longer can you spam infinite shotgun ammo & neuromods. You must make use of everything you can get your hands on. I don't think I used a single EMP or nullwave grenade vanilla, but here they saw a decent amount of use. No infinite neuromods nicely solves the issue where you had all relevant upgrades 60% into the game. Here by the end I did not remotely have enough neuromods. I got maybe 70% of the human upgrades but only lvl1 kinetic blast from the three alien trees. I have some criticism of the balancing of the adjusted neuromod costs & choices but it's way better than shitty vanilla so it feels kind of moot to go into detail at this time. Additionally, as you do not have all the neuromods, this forces you to get creative with solutions and weigh your options, even in the late game. It stays engaging until the final stretches now, unlike vanilla where it's a cool game until the arboretum.

-New weapons + uniques offer a little replayablity & combat diversity, as well as add depth to the weapon upgrade system. They're definitely not perfect, could use work, for example the inventory icons are borked when a weapon is broken, but again we can't be too critical when the vanilla offering was deeply unsatisfying. All the stuff from the Mooncrash DLC has been ported over, this being the psi blade + unique skin variants for all the existing weapons, only the dev smartly repurposed those unique skins versions into unique-performing variants. I found a wrench that briefly stuns, a gloo gun repurposed into a flamethrower (far too ammo hungry though), a q-beam that deals a little bit of fire damage in addition to energy and so on. All these weapons can be modified too. As for the actual new weapons not just reskins: SMG, laser SMG, Magnum, Psi Blade, Gauss Gun. And most of these have unique variants too. Oddly enough there were no fabrication licenses to be found for the SMG and Magnum ammo, resulting in minimal use for those two weapons. As a result Pistol/shotgun/qbeam remain the ranged workhorses, with laser SMG & Gauss secondary, and SMG & Magnum tertiary. Ideally all weapons would see equal potential use via ammo availability.

-New level events: Minor randomized environmental hazard locations add a little diversity, and periodic solar radiation storms make the entire station go dark (all lights out) which makes things adequately spooky. Stay away from the windows or suffer heavy radiation damage/poisoning. Later in the game during these events a new phantom variation named "Solar Hunters" spawn in, and they're nasty, you absolutely want to hide. Finding where to hide in the dark with these guys on your ass may prove tricky.
In the machine shop level you also get a randomized pulse of solar activity (I forget what exactly), which powers down most electronics for just a few seconds (doors, turrets), which creates interesting situations when trying to run away from enemies for example.

-New & redesigned enemies! 6 or so new variants. Frequent enemy spawning, game is no longer just a pointless junk-recycling simulator! Cystoid phantom is a mobile cystoid spawner that can't teleport but you definitely want to keep your distance from. Chameleon phantoms are invisible and come in nasty groups of 2-3. The nightmare now lives up to his name, and has pretty much every attack in the game and then some. The typhon are almost scary now. They are out for blood!
These are all very well implemented, most notably they are all visually distinct and look the part. Occasionally you'll notice a slight imperfection in behavior but considering there is over twice as many enemies as vanilla that's to be expected. More time spent with them, more likely for things to go wrong.

-Restricted game saving! One autosave when entering a new area for the first time. Save as many times as you like at key locations (Morgan's lobby office, Alex's Arboretum office), in addition to limited use save cards you find which can be used at any security station to manually save. Makes the game a genuine challenge and all the systems and choices fall into place.

-Various Little details I should mention:

No more indicators above enemies and no sharp ear-raping sound effects alerting you when they've spotted you (special case enemies still get music, such as Poltergeists). INCLINE.
Randomized locations of some key items, though the execution leaves something to be desired.
Inventory use has a small delay, creating consequence for spamming in combat. Honestly I'd remove this. Vanilla had a delay it's just longer here.
Drinking water sources still heals you, in fact even more so (3hp as opposed to 1), but all water sources are contaminated with radiation, so you can't go overboard and need to keep anti-rad medicine handy.
The flashlight beam was changed from a moderate-sized rectangle to a small circular sphere. Arguably too small. It does make things extra spooky when all the lights go out but I'd have kept the rectangle. Still, it's fine I guess.

This mod is by no means perfect, but it has done what nobody thought possible; made Prey a genuine game. Its biggest issues were the very basics of design: absurd balance that removed all thought/C&C/strategy/challenge from the game after a certain point, lack of enemies compounding the issue even further and not providing payoff for the endless scavenging, and a lack of weapons resulting in repetition in the engagements that do exist, and that's all fixed here and with even more than that on top. There's a lot of (mostly minor) rough edges with this mod, but now I finally managed to sit through Prey a second time without quitting in disgust/boredom and I enjoyed it almost right to the end. Up until you've explored everything and Arkane have you running backwards and forwards doing menial tasks for the ending - the final 15 mins. I just quit there. One day, in a decade perhaps, I will play again with this mod. Prey now has a future.

Big thanks to the creator for making this a genuine classic. Be warned though, this is hardcore asf, more so than System Shock 2. I died approximately 80 times and had moments of frustration in the Crew's quarters (which resulted in me listening to Danielle Sho & Abigail Foy's little love story over and over and now I am traumatized). This is on easy difficulty + all hardcore options enabled (traumas, weapon degradation etc). And that is what settings I recommend you play on too.
Another word of warning is stealth playstyle is both no longer viable, and yet simultaneously mandatory, use it when you can to get the upper hand, which is not often. Perhaps play with RoSoDude 's Core Balance Mod instead if Prey is in your eyes a stealth game but you want it to be a bit less retarded, as it just doesn't fly here. You can sneak in various situations but trying to play 100% stealth is just not going to work. Otherwise this mod is a must play for any serious monocled gamer with interest in Prey. This is now my favorite Arkane game alongside Arx Fatalis. The rest are forgettable.

The next version of the mod in progress claims to be making some alt dimension mechanic, which sounds gay/mod author overstepping, but he's proven his worth so far so I'll try to keep an open mind. Hope he at least polishes up what is already existing though.