Twist on 7/8/2017 at 16:21
I imagine the designers are happy to see that while one person (Gryz) hated the stun gun and almost never used it, another (Jason) leaned on it as his bread and butter weapon. Prey really is a game about playing the way you want. Luring enemies around the corner while you charged the gun... simple, yet unique enough I never thought of doing that. I have to admit I leaned more towards Gryz with the stun gun.
Quote Posted by icemann
I liked to create zones of death. As in, spots where I'd place all the turrets on the map I could find to create a "safe" zone.
That's great. :D Did you ever try to keep them repaired or did you not have enough resources to do that?
How far along are you? What kind of build are you using? If you liked using turrets to do your dirty work, you might like using a few of the typhon abilities to build a diverse little army of different things to do your fighting for you. For people who've played maybe passed the halfway point or so:
Combining machine mind (for turrets and operators), mindjack (for humans), and phantom genesis (for creating friendly phantoms from corpses) lets you build an army of turrets, operators, a human and a phantom to do all the fighting for you. I've always enjoyed when single player games allow you to pit enemies against each other, and Prey does this as well and as any game I've ever played (... I think).
Speaking of builds... what builds did you guys use? My first time through, I played through simultaneously with two builds, one who strictly used human abilities, and one who strictly used typhon abilities. It was fun, and I enjoyed employing different solutions in each of the playthroughs, but I still wonder if I should have done that for later playthroughs. There were multiple occasions I wished I could have combined human and typhon abilites.
While I enjoyed being forced to creatively use the typhon abilities, the typhon build was a quite a bit tougher to use through most of the game. No hacking, repairing or lifting skills made exploration more difficult. No inventory enhancements became tedious as I could barely carry anything late in the game. And until the late game, combat was quite a bit tougher as I couldn't increase health, psi or stamina and I couldn't upgraded weapons beyond the first basic upgrade.
It did, however, encourage me to try different combinations of abilities I don't think I would have tried had my basic human combat abilities been so limited. In the late game, using typhon abilities to create different traps and build small armies of friendly AIs was pretty fun. Even basic combinations were surprising fun, like casting mimic on a small item, then casting Kinetic Blast or Lift Field on my mimicked self to launch myself up, over and passed a room full of AI. Sometimes I found myself giggling at my ridiculous solutions and the fact that the game actually let me pull off what seemed like a silly idea.
t850terminator on 9/8/2017 at 05:28
God, its so fucking good. Probably my goty 2017 so far.
Runs butter smooth (screw idtech 5!) and has a very decent filesize-to-content ratio (only about 18GB on the drive). The technical opposite of Dishonored 2 (
It feels like it was a designed as a PC game through and through.
I've been bruteforcing it with a shotgun and throwing every random item (why can't more games follow the HL2 style of being able to pick up all the props)
tbh, it feels more like the original Deus Ex wearing the skin of System Shock 2 than System Shock 2, as in the game actually gives you true freedom of approach and encourages you to exploit instead of telling you to fuck off if you invested your shit wrong...
imo, the biggest flaw is the lack of total mod support (wish Arkane's games had mods ).
samIamsad on 12/8/2017 at 11:40
Does anybody have experience what limited video ram manifests itself in on this? This is the first ever time I bought a game whilst my PC didn't fully meet the system requirements: My video card has only 1 GB of VRAM. Whilst the frame rates are smooth on 720pish on low, even medium texture detail, there seems to be a more or less permanent hard disk access going on when walking/running around, curiously though without any much frame drops or anything. I was always under the impression prior that a lack of VRAM would manifest itself in crashes or textures loading up late or not at all in general. Upon searching, some argue this was down to a degree to the nature of the CryEngine, as textures etc. would be constantly streamed even with more memory available. Is this inherently to Prey/the engine or should I better finally upgrade the card so that I can finally play Dishonored 2 et all too and have less on a burden on the HDD?
Game looks promising so far, though feeling eerily familiar if you've played all the Shock games prior down to almost every single starting trope. :D
Judith on 12/8/2017 at 12:00
AFAIK, constant HDD access is more a sign of not enough system RAM, not VRAM. Due to huge difference between RAM and VRAM clock speed, you'd experience substantial game slowdown if you'd run out of GPU RAM. That said, 1 GB is pretty low these days. Getting a 4 or 6 GB card (e.g. if you plan to move to 1440p later) is a good idea.
Neb on 12/8/2017 at 13:43
The calibration button. It got me.
demagogue on 12/8/2017 at 14:13
I so want to play this, and after 4 weeks Asus still won't give me my stupid number to send it for repairs.
They're the worst. I just want to plaaay thiiis gaaame. =V
Judith on 12/8/2017 at 14:51
I just wanted to return to this after a long break, only to discover that the subsequent patches messed up x360 controller support. The control scheme is messed up, you can't pick up or interact with things, and there are names displayed instead of button icons. Awesome :/
samIamsad on 13/8/2017 at 13:12
Quote Posted by Judith
AFAIK, constant HDD access is more a sign of not enough system RAM, not VRAM. Due to huge difference between RAM and VRAM clock speed, you'd experience substantial game slowdown if you'd run out of GPU RAM. That said, 1 GB is pretty low these days. Getting a 4 or 6 GB card (e.g. if you plan to move to 1440p later) is a good idea.
Cheers, may be a good idea as now in the lobby I have found that there are some occasional stutterings caused when the HDD starts spinning during more intense battles. It's weird though. MSI Afterburner shows the RAM usage never moves beyond 3GB at the moment (the game itself mostly taking up 1.5-1.8 give or take). However, the VRAM usage rises immediately to hit the 1000MB limit. Mind I don't complain about it, given that 1 GB cards are below the specs, was happy to give it a try which I wouldn't have done with any other game. In the meantime I edited the game's game.cfg which lets you manually fiddle a bit. I went into fully-on Ultima Underworld mode and set it to 320x200 pixels -- pretty interesting seeing the 3d complexity of a 2017 game filtered through the lenses of System Shocky VGA resolutions. :) Still with everything set to low, even post processing manually turned off and Shader effects, the limits are breached readily. Whilst the frame rates are nice, in terms of video memory this looks quite a resource hog (which is relative, as 2 GB even on budget cards are the norm these days).
I have two video cards, the other is a much slower HD 6670 1GB. I used to play Alien:Isolation on this, native resolution. Different tech and all, but in comparison that's pretty steep considering how washed out and blurry the textures look on this on medium to low. Purely visually, the game has a bit of "washed out" look in general with limited contrast. Which is an artistic decision highlighting the "flatness" of optionally lower resolution textures, something that Dishonored got easier away with due to going the exact opposite route ((
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1569231/dishonored-review-boat-1920.jpg) this still is completely gorgeous). Dark areas oft aren't really much dark and colors don't much shine. This is even more pronounced if you turn off the post processing manually in the game.cfg. Maybe going to postpone this until the upgrade. Guess more VRAM would solve it pretty quickly. In the meantime, I agree, this plays like the Bioshock as it was initially announced, so everybody who didn't buy yet, don't complain when it will be the last of its kind in decades. :) Try this.
Sulphur on 13/8/2017 at 13:18
A:I used a bespoke, well-optimised engine that was extremely good at what it did, plus its relatively closed environments let it do more with less.
Prey's been developed on CryEngine, which can quite resource intensive if it needs to be (see: Ryse, Crysis 3) and has larger environments with possibly much larger textures and texture variety. It's not a 1:1 comparison.
samIamsad on 13/8/2017 at 15:46
Quote Posted by Sulphur
A:I used a bespoke, well-optimised engine that was extremely good at what it did, plus its relatively closed environments let it do more with less.
Most definitely! I'm not tech-savvy, but looking around the CryEngine also works by streaming textures from the hDD (and BluRay on PS), which means the VRAM and system RAM (only 3 gigs used in full with the system and applications running) usage may not tell the entire story. There is a command, r_TexturesStreaming, which is supposed to toggle that on and off, which would cache textures in the system RAm rather than loading them up from the HDD, but it doesn't seem to do anything in Prey. Looking for prey+stuttering brings up a few complaints by users with higher end systems too,and a few supposedly workarounds. The first time it negatively impacted me is in the Lobby's Trauma Center area, where [spoiler]you're attacked by group of two. When they start casting and the fire effects are triggered[/SPOILER], it always assesses the HDD and causes a few of that stuttering not noticed much during exploration, even though the HDD is quite regularly accessed. Maybe even upgrading the GPU wouldn't do all of that away, and rather getting an SSD/ faster HDD would be required likewise.
Additionally, when I switch to high textures, not much changes in that regard, except that those textures visibly don't fit into the GPU's RAM, and are just displayed as a blurry, indistinguishable mess, which is more in line with what I'd think low VRAM to settle to. Outside of the Crysis 1 demo, this is the first ever CryEngine game I've played AFAIK, so limited experience here though. As said, the system RAM isn't anywhere near full according to Afterburner. If the Engine inherently streams textures from the HDD, a more or less permanent access as such would be expected.
