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.
