Prey

[deanb]

 

My interest piqued when he turned into a cup of coffee.

[TheMightyEthan]

 

Well shit, this game's looking pretty cool.  Very much Bioshock in space.

[Mr. GOH!]

Looks more System Shock than BioShock, but I get ya.

 

It does not look like the original Prey at all.

[deanb]

Yeah looks pretty neat. 

 

Anyone remember the original XCOM trailer (for the game that became Declassified).

[TheMightyEthan]

I hadn't thought of it, but now that you mention it I can definitely see the similarity.

[deanb]

 

RPS first hour of Prey. They do alert there's spoilers in it, but I can't imagine much in the first hour.

[Mr. GOH!]

Looks 100% like a successor to System Shock, not Prey. This is a good thing.

 

EDit: Oh, I already said this last year. I adore Arkane, so I'll likely pick this up  when it's released.

Edited February 16, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I've got my eye on this, though I'm not quite sold yet.

[Mr. GOH!]

That hour-long gameplay video and some of the reports I've read have sold me, at least to the extent that I plan to get it unless the reviews are terrible.

[deanb]

 

A lot of the powers are certainly similar to Dishonored, not that I mind much. I quite like the idea that a side effect of taking on more alien powers is you get seen as an alien by the stations defence systems.

 

And a video showing the mixing up of some powers and weapons. Watching this it'd seem that some of the alien abilities are replicated in weapon form so I guess you can either have it as a power or taking up a weapon slot.

[deanb]

Hour long demo due on the 27th, so I guess you can play that instead of watching GotG that week.No idea if it'll carry on into the full game mind.

[Mr. GOH!]

GotG doesn't release until the 5th in real countries. 

An hour is it? I think i watched a preview longer than the demo would be. 

[deanb]

I know, that's why I said "you can play it instead of watching GotG".

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's a "timed demo" or like up to a certain part of the game that'll take around an hour if played normally but two hours if you try and look at everything and play with whatever starter weapons and powers you get.

[Mr. GOH!]

Apologies for not getting your joke! I'm just salty we have to wait a week for GotG.

 

From what I've seen of the beginning of the game, I bet it's timed and gated, but that it will be difficult to reach the gate in an hour. IIRC, there seems to be a good half hour to forty-five minutes of scripted content at the beginning of the game.

[TheMightyEthan]

It would have to be gated in addition to being timed, otherwise speedrunners would figure out how to beat the whole game within the time limit.  

[deanb]

Having taken it for a leisurely stroll this afternoon I think it's just gated.

Anyone else given it a spin, tbh nothing huge or new to be seen though you get a bit more time to read books and emails and be like "why are all the other corpses named but this one has a number".

I'm not very good at smooshing mimics, I played on Normal and my health got eaten into a fair bit. Got killed my a Phantom that decided to pop up n I called it quits on that. I'm not sure I'll get it tbh, it doesn't really have any moments of calm, due to the mimics being...well mimics, every item could be a new confrontation. Bit too stressful for me tbh. Compared to say Bioshock where you can have those little moments to recollect, before shitting yourself in the morgue.

The chance of kinda just going anywhere is kinda cool (though tbh I can see how they can easily gate you anyway given a chunk of places are behind doors that need keycards or combinations).

[deanb]

A brief look into the design and thinking behind the structure of Talos 1

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/297288/Designing_Preys_scifi_space_station_to_be_like_a_megadungeon.php

Sounds it'll be a bit like Portal 2 where you end up in the old disused testing facility and work your way up through the decades (just in reverse I guess with this)

[Mr. GOH!]

I'm not even to the point of having crazy mimicry abilities, and this game is quite good. It is 100% a spiritual successor to system shock and is a better modern take on the concept than BioShock. I'll have more thoughts later, but I am really liking it so far.

Edit: Played a bunch more, and it is really neat. Feels like SystemShock or the original Deus Ex. 

Edited May 7, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[TheMightyEthan]

On 4/13/2017 at 10:23 AM, TheMightyEthan said:

It would have to be gated in addition to being timed, otherwise speedrunners would figure out how to beat the whole game within the time limit.  

Heh, looks like I wasn't too far off:  a speedrunner has beat the game in 44 minutes.

[Mister Jack]

Reviews are starting to trickle out and they seem to be on the average side.  Might wait for a price drop on this one.

[Mr. GOH!]

Some of the early average reviews were clearly written by folks who raced through the game. I read them and think "this was not my experience at all." 

But it's a System Shock style game; it's not a fast-paced shooter or a Dishonored-style stealth game. 

[TheMightyEthan]

According to RPS the game is completely fantastic, except for the ending, which is utterly terrible.  But that the game is so fantastic that the horrible ending doesn't meaningfully detract from the experience.

I must keep telling myself that I am not allowed to buy any more games until I finish at least two more of my current backlog (after Persona, which I hope to finish today).

[Mr. GOH!]

I am nowhere near beating the game and, apparently, not halfway through it, by RPS's account, but the RPS review seems much more in line with my experience so far than a lot of the other early reviews.

It's a game about exploration and environmental storytelling that also has very good logs and emails that make more narrative sense than most. It's not like everybody decided to record their last moments on, erm, the space station via audio log; a lot of the final recordings are surprisingly banal, even if they point towards new areas or missions. The attention to detail is pretty wonderful; one of the achievements is to find every person -or, in most cases, their corpse - on the station. Every corpse you find contributes to that achievement since there are no random dead people; they're all named and there's information to find about most of them, although not necessarily where their corpses ended up. The game really rewards taking it slowly and paying attention to everything, from the environment, to the data logs, to stuff written on white boards. 

Yes, the mimics are annoying, but no more than headcrabs were in HL and HL2. Prey gives you very good tools to deal with every enemy, but RPS, and other reviewers, seem to revert to smacking the mimics with the wrench when you're clearly supposed to freeze them with a different weapon and then finish them off with the wrench. Once you get the rhythm down, its' easy. They're tougher to deal with when coupled with much stronger baddies, but nothing any seasoned video game player can't deal with. 

Combat is mostly about picking the right tools or laying the right traps, at least early on. I've encountered a couple of heavy-hitting enemies I just had to overpower with weapons when I've gone off to explore areas off the main path, but I think I was essentially underleveled for those encounters and that they would have been much less resource-intensive if I had waited and explored those areas later on.

  The level design and art direction are also fantastic. The whole station and every environment feels like a real place that had dozens of people working in it until recently. I haven't encountered an area or space that felt like an arbitrary video game space, if that makes sense. 

Very minor non-story spoiler about a neat moment during exploration below.

Spoiler

One of the coolest early moments is when you leave the station for a spacewalk and discover you can just zoom off into space and turn around and see the entire massive, art deco-y thing hanging there in the void. You can also explore the entire exterior, although there are enemies that are pretty tough prowling around. It's a pretty neat early moment that you can miss if you don't take a second to recognize that you're free to explore and check out stuff beyond the nearby nav points.

Edit: Oh, and the music by Mick Gordon is really great sci-fi ambient electronica. The sound design overall is pretty good, too.

Edited May 9, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[MetalCaveman]

 

It had some really ool ideas, shame about how things went down.

[deanb]

 

Daang.