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

[Israfael]

something I'd like to be doing in a computer game, but there you go.

You can be sure that point one will be connected to a crafting mechanic that, while robust, is ultimately pointless, since you don't really need it and it's not fun.

At certain point of the game you need specific type of ammo to deal with a new type of enemies (ahem, *huge plot twist* Arkane style), so 3D printing comes in handy. Also, I'm not using any Typhon powers, so I recycle all the psi hypos and convert them into shotgun ammo and other things I need. It allows you to play without metagaming knowledge (although if you are enough an autist, then it'd be a downer for ya, I guess)

higher difficulty levels result in some enemies dishing out ridiculous damage

Even nightmare dies in less than one clip of a shotty, and phantoms can literally be wrenched to death with proper skills and mods with 0 risk. Dumb play is not rewarded in this game, it's the same as in SS2 - you can try to shoot midwives with anti-personnel ammo you can use on something else, at a huge cost to your strategic reserves.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Miniscule? They doubled my weapon damage!

I guess with full upgrades and perks it migh be possible with some wepons. But for example pistol has "upgrades" that literally add 1 dmg. And my whole point was that instead of adding less, but much more significant upgrades with upgrade kits being rare, they go for this proverbial +5% crap.

And you can craft weapons for the sake of flexibility - you can decide that you don't want a particular weapon to take up inventory space (Q-Beam in the early game, for instance), so you recycle it, and then you have the option of crafting it again later on if you want to. Don't see why this is so difficult to understand.

It's difficult to understand, because that's a very outlandish argument that's not particularly convincing. Especially confronted with actual realities of the game, like multiple copies of most weapons being available, readily available storage space, multiple upgrades for each weapon and so on.

Meanwhile, the difficulty in SS2 came from all the interesting combat mechanics and enemy behaviour?

Come join the club of people that support instabanning people using the "it was the same/worse in a game released 20 years ago!" "argument", it's fun. Unless of course it's used to brutally scathe the newer game, when it actually works. And yeah, the combat, enemies and different mechanics connected to it were very interesting for a game released in 1999 and the difficulty did not come from enemies being hp sponges, do you somehow disagree with that?

Besides, you're either exaggerating or don't understand the damage mechanics.

Oh, the "game's 2deep4u" maneuver. Yes, I was (and still am) early in the game and when I met my first technopath in the Fabrication and did not have upgraded shotgun nor modules for dmg perks, which totally mean I should play F4 instead. A game where difficulty seems to be working in pretty much the same way.

It allows you to play without metagaming knowledge (although if you are enough an autist, then it'd be a downer for ya, I guess)

I really appreciate how you claim that people who don't like "gameplay" of collecting paper and lemon peels are autists

Even nightmare dies in less than one clip of a shotty, and phantoms can literally be wrenched to death with proper skills and mods with 0 risk. Dumb play is not rewarded in this game, it's the same as in SS2 - you can try to shoot midwives with anti-personnel ammo you can use on something else at a huge cost to your strategic reserves.

Fucking parallels, how do they work.

 

[RoSoDude]

What are other games which have 3D metroidvania megadungeon design? I only know of Arx Fatalis.

System Shock 1? Probably the best example of a 3D metroidvania dungeon crawler there is, since it's not really an RPG and has the same linear upgrade principle.

Both SS1 and Arx emerged out of Ultima Underworld, which I have yet to play but I hear is pretty similar in regards to the dungeon layout.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Yes, I was (and still am) early in the game and when I met my first technopath in the Fabrication and did not have upgraded shotgun nor modules for dmg perks

Mein neger, there's like 5 explocanisters in that area and a lot of room to run around and evade the technopath (I used the elevators for instance) while you toss them in its face. You are really hurting your argument here.



Also, some of those fucking jump scares in this game I swear

Spoiler

"Follow the green dot" looking glass

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I don't think I am, the technopath did not kill me, it just took a lot of punishment to take down, which is all I'm saying.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

It's difficult to understand, because that's a very outlandish argument that's not particularly convincing. Especially confronted with actual realities of the game, like multiple copies of most weapons being available, readily available storage space, multiple upgrades for each weapon and so on.

Game is non-linear, you'll find things in a different order depending on where you go first, and for some weapons you can also find the blueprint before the weapon itself. It's probably there as a holdover from before they axed weapon degradation, but it's still useful as a way of preventing players from screwing themselves over. Especially given that most weapons are still useful when completely unupgraded, stun gun and boltcaster being the most obvious.

Come join the club of people that support instabanning people using the "it was the same/worse in a game released 20 years ago!" "argument", it's fun. Unless of course it's used to brutally scathe the newer game, when it actually works. And yeah, the combat, enemies and different mechanics connected to it were very interesting for a game released in 1999 and the difficulty did not come from enemies being hp sponges, do you somehow disagree with that?

... Bro, you started your post with "This is more of a Bethesda game than a SS2 successor", and you're mad that I'm comparing Prey to it? And yes, with how easy it generally is to avoid taking damage from most enemy types in SS2 (sometimes level design prevents circlestrafing around them, but when it doesn't, they're completely helpless), they mainly become an obstacle for how much ammo/psi you need to pump into them to kill them. They're obviously not as spongy as the ones in Prey, but there's a lot more of them, and I think it about evens out in the long run. Of course, in SS2 you can kill a lot of stuff with the wrench while taking no damage, while in Prey you get murdered trying the same thing on Hard and above.

Oh, the "game's 2deep4u" maneuver. Yes, I was (and still am) early in the game and when I met my first technopath in the Fabrication and did not have upgraded shotgun nor modules for dmg perks, which totally mean I should play F4 instead. A game where difficulty seems to be working in pretty much the same way.

So... you went off the beaten path, met a powerful enemy, shot at it with a weapon you invested nothing into, and are complaining it took too much ammo to kill? That's pretty fucking rich after your "it's like a Bethesda game" critique, as you're basically complaining that there's no level scaling. What next, go into the wilderness in Gothic 2 at level 1, complain the troll is a HP sponge?

 

[Darth Roxor]

I don't think I am, the technopath did not kill me, it just took a lot of punishment to take down, which is all I'm saying.

The difficulty not coming from any interesting mechanics, but the fact that higher difficulty levels result in some enemies dishing out ridiculous damage, while at the same time taking even more ridiculous amounts of ammo to kill. (...) The first time I've met Technopath I've used all my shotgun ammo to kill it, while shooting at point blank range.

Explosive. Canisters. All over. That. Place.

I'm fairly sure I encountered that technopath the same time you did, and yet I didn't use a single 'bullet' to kill it, just had to finish it off with some tazer shots after throwing a few explobarrels against it.

Also strongly disagree (in this particular case) on difficulty not coming from mechanics - before that, I was clearing every room with a portable comrade turret (enter room -> set up turret -> run around like a retard to trigger all mimics) and thought myself invincible. Suddenly technopath turns comrade turret against me, and I'm left having to improvise, run away or spend all my ammo against it. I chose to improvise and took it down without too much resource loss. So far it was one of the cooler points of the game to me.

 

[ciox]

I don't think I am, the technopath did not kill me, it just took a lot of punishment to take down, which is all I'm saying.

The difficulty not coming from any interesting mechanics, but the fact that higher difficulty levels result in some enemies dishing out ridiculous damage, while at the same time taking even more ridiculous amounts of ammo to kill. (...) The first time I've met Technopath I've used all my shotgun ammo to kill it, while shooting at point blank range.

Explosive. Canisters. All over. That. Place.

I'm fairly sure I encountered that technopath the same time you did, and yet I didn't use a single 'bullet' to kill it, just had to finish it off with some tazer shots after throwing a few explobarrels against it.

Throwing canisters around might only require Leverage 1 but it still does require a certain upgrade build, I didn't pick Leverage for example because I specifically didn't want to play this game like it was HL2 or Bioshock.

At any rate I don't think the big blob enemies are that hard, just shotgun damage upgrades and standard skill will make short work of them all, if you don't have that yet you can just run or sneak past them, they're not that great at spotting you since they seem to love staring at a wall for upwards of a full minute.

 

[Durandal]

I don't think I am, the technopath did not kill me, it just took a lot of punishment to take down, which is all I'm saying.

The fire elementals are weak against water attacks.

 

[Caconym]

Throwing canisters around might only require Leverage 1 but it still does require a certain upgrade build

Precisely no level of Leverage needed to throw canisters around.

 

[Durandal]

Precisely no level of Leverage needed to throw canisters around.

Leverage Level 1 will detonate gas canisters on impact on top of throwing them farther, normally you'd have to manually ignite it with a gun.

 

[J_C]

Wow, does old man John Carpenter really plays videogames?

 

[Infinitron]

Wow, does old man John Carpenter really plays videogames?

Apparently: https://www.polygon.com/2013/10/8/4818148/horror-director-john-carpenter-loves-video-games

 

[Zombra]

Dude.

 

[SharkClub]

This PsychoShock game is p. cool. I just played it back to back with BioShock (ew) to measure the incline and man is it up there. The dark ages of the Xbox/Xbox 360 dumbed down console ports era is finally fading out and we're on the road to recovery. It gets pretty close to the System Shock games for me at times, though it's stunted by a few things, namely the lack of variety in enemy design (black goo monsters!) as well as lacking in weapon variety (coulda used an assault rifle or a bolt-action rifle of some sort, as unimaginative as it sounds, not a fan of having no medium-long range weapon options) as well as the missing "Survival Mode" features.

Still, god bless you Arkane for not being total shit.

Now where's Arx Fatalis 2?

 

[Lyric Suite]

^ I noticed you didn't mention level design. Or does this game cover that? Somehow i doubt it. What say you?

 

[Darth Roxor]

One thing I'm finding increasingly hard to believe about this game is the degree of destruction all over the station, when you consider that the Big Crisis must have happened OVERNIGHT. What's with all the hull breaches everywhere? Everything being busted and not working? So many dead folks? Etc etc etc etc.

^ I noticed you didn't mention level design. Or does this game cover that? Somehow i doubt it. What say you?

Level design iz gud.

 

[Luckmann]

One thing I'm finding increasingly hard to believe about this game is the degree of destruction all over the station, when you consider that the Big Crisis must have happened OVERNIGHT. What's with all the hull breaches everywhere? Everything being busted and not working? So many dead folks? Etc etc etc etc.

That's actually a fairly good point, and something I hadn't considered much. I think it would be more believable if it was presented more as an ongoing event, which is a lot more reasonable, but at the same time, you can check who is dead and where from the get-go, and aside from a few story-driven events, it actually doesn't go from bad to worse. The narrative pacing and verisimilitude could've benefited from a greater overall feeling of oppressive decline.

AGAIN ACTUAL ENDGAME SPOILERS

If we stop to think about it and actively try to rationalize this - although I think this is something the developers didn't intend, so it can be considered post-hoc rationalization and looking for excuses - it's possible that this is partially a matter of the reconstruction of events within the simulation. After all, it's based on Morgan's memories, so it could be that we see a reconstruction of how it was when he got there, but since our actions within the simulation are our own, they may not conform to what Morgan did, felt, or experienced. It is possible that the decline was more gradual, and that some events happened just before Morgan got there, but within the simulation this is not apparent.

Also, at least some things have been going on for a little while, as becomes obvious in some sub-plots. Not everything happened overnight, and some people had been missing for days, and some equipment had started to break down before then. For example, I believe it was in air filtration or the reactor section, there's a story about how someone picked up some fuses and put them into the outlets/electrical equipment, only for the fuses to basically explode into a goo of seared organic matter, but they have no idea how or why that happened, and unless I'm mistaken, that was at least a few days before they truly attacked.

Maybe it would've helped if those things would've been more explicit, because that in itself implies that there's a general intelligence behind the Typhons, coordinating them, and it should've been possible to piece that together earlier than the discovery that they're making a decentralized neural net/brain.

 

[SharkClub]

^ I noticed you didn't mention level design. Or does this game cover that? Somehow i doubt it. What say you?

Actually I think the level design is one of Prey's strongest points. It really does remind me of games like System Shock 2 or Arx Fatalis quite a bit. The level of exploration, secret hunting and alternate pathing to objectives (such as transforming into a coffee cup or using a toy crossbow to shoot a button through a window to open doors) is really well thought through considering it takes place on a space station.

Also instead of one big elevator connecting every level (though one does exist connecting 3 of them) like in SS2 the main mode of transportation for quickly backtracking between levels is spacewalking outside of Talos 1 (and there's shit to discover out there too) to airlocks you unlock from the inside as you find them.

I could be overrating it considering I'm just coming off of completing BioShock after finishing Prey just before it. BioShock's level design is fucking linear garbage compared to Prey and has almost no branching paths or interesting level design to speak of, if it didn't have windows everywhere telling you you're underwater it'd be boring to look at too.

Actually another unrelated note, while playing BioShock I realized that the placement of audio logs in that game make literally no fucking sense at all, why are hundreds of Andrew Ryan's inner monologues scattered all over Rapture for the player to find? In System Shock 1/2 and Prey these are almost always found on the corpses of their owners (and most of the time are just recorded phone calls between two people) or at workstations that it would make sense to find them.

 

[Jasede]

I think we already stated that the level design is on par with System Shock 2 - though I would say it's quite a bit better, in the sense that it is far less linear with more places to go and explore, more secrets to find, more interactions that were thought out, and so on. Also, the design of the station is pleasing and logically laid out for the most part. It really is Shock 3. (The actual SS3 will likely be awful.)

 

[Parabalus]

I started this on Nightmare and I'm really liking it. I'm still in the early game and spent all ~20 mods I got on economy skills so the combat is pretty deadly.

You can parkour pretty hardcore with the GLOO cannon, super fun.

One thing that I can't get out of my head, right at the start, in the room where you get the tutorial popup about "different paths to take", how do you get out without grabbing the keycard? Tried jumping on the chandeliers and lifting stuff up to find a vent but I seemed to have missed it.

What does the stun gun even do? Found one in the area where you get the first neuromod but didn't want to waste ammo to try it.

 

[Caconym]

One thing that I can't get out of my head, right at the start, in the room where you get the tutorial popup about "different paths to take", how do you get out without grabbing the keycard? Tried jumping on the chandeliers and lifting stuff up to find a vent but I seemed to have missed it.

What does the stun gun even do? Found one in the area where you get the first neuromod but didn't want to waste ammo to try it.

It literally shows/tells you right then and there:

 

[toro]

I started this on Nightmare and I'm really liking it. I'm still in the early game and spent all ~20 mods I got on economy skills so the combat is pretty deadly.

You can parkour pretty hardcore with the GLOO cannon, super fun.

One thing that I can't get out of my head, right at the start, in the room where you get the tutorial popup about "different paths to take", how do you get out without grabbing the keycard? Tried jumping on the chandeliers and lifting stuff up to find a vent but I seemed to have missed it.

What does the stun gun even do? Found one in the area where you get the first neuromod but didn't want to waste ammo to try it.

Stun gun is seriously underrated: you can silently drop humans and you can stun mimics, phantoms and bots. Also it seems Technopaths have a weakness for electricity.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Stun gun is the most powerful weapon in the game, hands down. I'd even call it ridiculously overpowered.

 

[Paul_cz]

Hilariously enough, I never used stun gun. In fact, I was wondering how the fuck do I incapacitate Dahl ? I tried going at him from behind and melee him, wrenching him, grenading him with EMPs, nothing worked. Then I remembered oh fuck, I actually have this stungun I never use...and voila he was down.
I did have fully upgraded shotgun though, which combined with the speed neuromod and timeslowing neuromods meant that by the end I was fucking Neo flying around the battlefield killing everything like in Doom 2016. And it was fun too, albeit different kind than the survival at the beginning.

For a second playthrough though I will definitely enable all the survival elements (assuming they release them) and play on nightmare so it can last longer.