Jeshibu on 18/8/2017 at 06:57
I played the demo for 2 hours and hit the wall in what I can do in it, I think. I really like it so far, though how tough the combat is surprised me. Now I just have to decide whether I want to get this now, or finish every other game in the genre I still want to play first (DXMD, Dishonored 1 and 2).
Also, couple of questions:
Are those broken vertical strip doors the ones you can open when you have max strength?
I haven't found a use for the nerf gun yet. Is there one in the lobby area?
There's a code on the wall in the containment area (with a brainwashed guy in it). I haven't found where to use it yet. Is that outside the lobby area?
Jason Moyer on 18/8/2017 at 07:20
Quote Posted by Jeshibu
Are those broken vertical strip doors the ones you can open when you have max strength?
Ask a coffee cup.
Quote:
I haven't found a use for the nerf gun yet. Is there one in the lobby area?
Yes, although you probably can't access anything beyond that area in the demo.
Quote:
There's a code on the wall in the containment area (with a brainwashed guy in it). I haven't found where to use it yet. Is that outside the lobby area?
Nope.
froghawk on 19/8/2017 at 02:16
Tried the demo, and quite surprisingly it didn't run as well as Dishonored 2 on my potato, partially because there were far fewer graphics options to tweak. Framerates were a bit sluggish even at low resolutions, and textures simply failed to fully load even on very high settings. O.o
Jason Moyer on 19/8/2017 at 05:13
The Stanley Parable
froghawk on 19/8/2017 at 15:02
Resident Evil 7, sort of!
dishes on 19/8/2017 at 15:05
Quote Posted by froghawk
Tried the demo, and quite surprisingly it didn't run as well as Dishonored 2 on my potato, partially because there were far fewer graphics options to tweak. Framerates were a bit sluggish even at low resolutions, and textures simply failed to fully load even on very high settings. O.o
This is basically the same experience I had - the game worked fine, but without the granular graphics settings from DH2, it wasn't as nice as it could have been.
dishes on 20/8/2017 at 03:08
Goddamn it Harvey, you've taken my money again! I just hope I'll like this more than I did SS2. The fact the air isn't rusting everything that fires bullets is a good start.
Judith on 20/8/2017 at 10:36
Finished it last night. Kind of expected the ending (I got to the Abandon ship ending somewhere in the middle of the game, and that was a bit of a hint).
Maybe it's the long break, but I'd appreciate a recap, or a bit longer summary of events. Also, the last few hours were tiresome, maybe because I chose to play on hard difficulty. I also thought I was getting a bit overpowered towadrds the end, but that one sudden takover made me use almost all my ammo and resources. Maybe I'll get back to it after a while on easy difficulty to try out typhoon powers.
froghawk on 22/8/2017 at 15:34
So, this game is pretty good. In classic Arkane fashion, it isn't particularly novel, but very well honed. The gameplay is what Bioshock advertised but failed to deliver, so the art design is fitting.
samIamsad on 31/8/2017 at 14:32
Quote Posted by Judith
Finished it last night. Kind of expected the ending (I got to the Abandon ship ending somewhere in the middle of the game, and that was a bit of a hint).
I got that too. At first I assumed I must be the only person in the world who would reach it, only to google and find that countless others have reached it early too. :cheeky: So, finished. Random musings...... sorry, long.
+ for the most part surprisingly uncompromised Shock goodness (actually, I've seen reviewers complain about supposedly unbalanced game acts; I totally dig that you can enter areas early on which then still present a
major challenge on higher difficulty anyway, rather than just being able to wipe the maps clean in typically video game fashion... Actually the early portions are my favourite, as the game forced me to think outside of the box with no much bigger weapon equipped and no tutorial giving it all away how to best beat / avoid foe X. Oldschool Looking Glass would have called this non-linear design, ponder, come back a bit later, you'll never know... modern gamers and journalists see this as "bad game design" :mad:
+ Whilst the actual narrative and writing arguably isn't onpar with Bioshock Prey is regularly compared to, without spoiling it, I think it embraces its centrally theme more consistently than Bioshock, right to the actual choices you make in the game. You (hopefully!) get a feel or foreshadowing of that early on, but this is the kind of game where when you accidentally fuck up [spoiler]Mikhaila died in my office upon I had accidentally lured a Nightmare to its doors[/SPOILER], you wouldn't want to reload and just let it play out. I was rewarded in the end by it. Needless to say in most games there is no place to fuck up either way. If you do, it's game over. I only wish the general quest design was more built around those themes specifically... but that would warrant an entirely different post of random musings.
+ Generally map / system design.... so much to explore, touch, pick up, discover. On your own too. Specific description texts for every inventory item you find. Reading some of the posts here made me smile as people used tactics I never considered, such as [spoiler]luring foes into closets and then locking them in[/SPOILER]. In general, that's incredibly, incredibly rewarding all around, much more than you picking up a gun and the game immediately going like, yeah you can do this and that with it. Outside a few hints during the loading screen, Prey never does that. It places you in an environment which can be manipulated in various ways, but it doesn't spoon feed you how
+ a consistently 3d space with a real feel of the virtual "space" you get to explore. It's a small touch, but that you get to view Talos 1 in its "entirety", [spoiler]not just from the inside[/spoiler], and that the proportions all seem to stack up, right to the GUTS tunnels physically stretching all throughout the bowels of the thing... that does so much to the believability of the world.
- Mid-game can drag a bit and loses the excitement of the early stages. Whilst that can be said about any game, the maps overall aren't that huge in terms of size. Once you are done "exploring", that's one major thrill off, and towards the end the game tends to send you a bit too much back and forth in what essentially are fairly basic "fetch quests". (Would the Labyrinthean maps of Thief I be feasible in this market place, by the way, considering that players get lost in logical Space Stations such as Alien:Isolation's Sevastopol these days, even with the motion tracker giving directions straight away?) :D
- Gloo-climbing is a bit fiddly, even on keyboard+mouse. Bit of a shame, as it could have turned into everybody's favourite sports, and even spawn sub communities in particular if paired with a map editor..... [spoiler]Am I the only one who enjoyed gooeing and climbing the ceiling ventilators in the machine shop?[/SPOILER]
- Tone seems a bit inconsistent. Starts out fairly "survival horror" down to forcing you to manage ressources, and best avoiding the bigger foes. Eventually ends up more into generally SciFi territory with a few interesting twists. The nature of the "audio logs", which slightly adjusted in their "formula" here act more like voice mailings / phone recordings rather than "diaries" add to this. In particular as most of their content focus on the more "mundane", human relationship and job talk side of things, whereas for instance the classic Shock audio log let you follow key protagonists demises and journeys to the dark side one log at a time
- Nothing particularly new added to the general formulas. If you have played the forebears to this, you're in for a pretty familiar tale overall. Which is both strength and weakness naturally, and depends.
- Same as Dishonored, no walk trigger button on PC (even Deus Ex had it). "Quest markers" are triggered as soon as you get a new objective and need to be manually shut off apparently. Fairly instrusive "Objective complete" signposts... to me there's little more "immersion breaking" than a huge objective sign popping in alongside to the audio jingle used alongside it all game when you are just being [spoiler]hunted by what is supposed to be the biggest threat in the Nightmares, specifically engineered to hunt you down[/spoiler]. What should be an emergent, special moment is cheapened in feel to "completing" your random fetch quest
Has the potential to be a cult classic, this. I file it close to my cabinet where the "flawed" masterpieces sit, and gladly want moar now. Off to finally try the Dishonored 2 trial and hope my GPU won't be roasted (totally considering to also finally swap out the GPU as well, on the CPU side of things it's all decent enough looking at benches before the patches were applied). Thanks Sulphur and Judith for the RAM advice, loading times as well as disk swapping improved significantly, though there were still a few loading stutters and slow-downs, nothing too instrusive though. Given that my PC is on the lower end of things, and Prey (and my playstyle) is rather slow paced, I was fine with that. :)
tl;dr somebody please tell Raph Colantonio this was pretty much worth it for as long as he's still around!! And please stay together for some time, rest of the team. Consider to go Kickstarter or anything if this ever doesn't pan out, if you ever feel similar burnt, or doing smaller, more focused projects, where the talent and unique design is still allowed to shine. Here's opening a Duck beer, cheers to you guys!
