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Isn't Prey 2 in development? Could have sworn there was something about that a while ago. Though that could have been for the Mooncrash DLC.
I'm currently replaying Prey for the 1st time (after 1st playing through it on the games release), and completely loving it. It's the most SS2-like game out there. As for Mooncrash, gave that a play this week. It's good, but there's time limits attached when I wasn't a fan of. Beyond, it's quite good as it's a rogue-lite. Played it for a day, then wanted something more substantial so decided to replay the main game.
Prey, while I did really enjoy it overall, had a lot of its own problems. Most importantly to me, the enemies are nowhere near as compelling as those of SS1 or especially 2 - The mimics had great mechanics but they weren't leveraged enough. Like most other enemies they only seem to spawn based on trigger with no randomisation. So if you already know the areas of the game you're going to encounter them (or where it's foreshadowed) you're free to let your guard down once you've cleared them all out.
Beyond their prophunt gimmick though, the other Typhon forms are quite boring - as someone else said earlier, humanising a game's enemies tends to make them a lot more horrifying in this sort of context. SS2 did that perfectly while in SS1 there's plenty of evidence indicating that most of them were human at one point. Prey however failed to do so - even though you can hear the "thoughts" from some of them, they're practically formless and not sympathetic in any real way.
Mechanically it falls short of both SS for lenient resource management. Because there's no weapon degradation you're only limited by ammo, and the resources to craft it are abundant. I've heard even with DLC (or update? Idk), the re-added weapon degradation is trivial to deal with because the guns don't jam until they're at the lowest condition and it takes a lot of use for them to degrade.
System Shock 3, from the teaser, seems to be going a similar route regarding enemy design unfortunately.
One question for you and anyone else who's played through Prey; What did you use the shape-shifting ability for?
I chose not to use the alien powers.
Graphics and gameplay are not mutually exclusive. We develop both aspects but neither is being sacrificed for the sake of the other.
Agreed but it doesn't always come down to man-hours or resourcing. It could be that precedent, investor expectations or industry standards (among others) unconsciously and automatically drive a certain level of care and detail (care and detail are of course good things) in a given area. However if that means adding the same detailed skeleton to all AIs so that they shatter properly or adding the same number of layers to textures so they react appropriately to lighting or whatever it is, you have pot-committed to something across the board in the interest of consistency, which consumes time, money, talent and while not mutually exclusive, all these things don't come from an infinite reservoir. They do eventually tax the efficiency of something else. So then it's a matter of what ratio or balance the team is settled on and what the relative importance of different activities are. I was simply saying that there are some aspects of a game that could benefit from huge improvements due to leaps and bounds in the technology but which don't necessarily yield a better player experience by themselves. I'm not a gamer who's "in the know" because I don't watch the news or the podcasts or whatever is out there but when I see these tech shows, they have a certain body language which says to me, "we're using this piece of proprietary tech so now we have to give them a plug and show you how their latest features are being put to good use in our game". And my knee-jerk reaction (however irrational) is that that stuff belongs in tech demos and not in a game preview, unless it just happened to be needed to achieve a certain design objective. But it seems more likely, based on the impression I get, that there is a conscious effort to use tech for the sake of... being competitive with other games, promoting the makers of the tech, appeasing investors, impressing the more impressionable segment of the target audience, etc. For example, could you imagine making the entire game without volumetric lighting? I mean you could make a better game without that, than some bad games that do have it, so volumetric lighting alone won't save a game - I think we can all agree on that. But it's kind of expected now so fuck it - let's make sure everything has it, and bloom and a dozen texture passes and ragdoll physics and destructible environments, and this and that... Is it all necessary, all the time to make the game better than its predecessor? How was Bioshock better than SS2, what with its fancy water physics? The game was visually stunning but failed to impress as advertised so... This perspective may not be worth much however because I don't get particularly involved or become particularly informed in the details. Others might have a different point of view.
A quick note on gameplay: I think it's a bad idea to use many of the hotkeys they've made available to you, such as reload/healing patch/grenade/quick pickup hotkeys. SS1's combat is already rather straightforward with the mouselook mod, and much of the tension and challenge that was still there came from managing so many things manually in the interface in the midst of danger. Since reloading is instant save for the time it takes to mouse over from your target to the reload button, a reload hotkey renders magazine capacities as essentially pointless. Also notable is that there used to be a functional difference between dry reloads and tactical reloads, since you had to click once to unload a partially unspent magazine and again to load the desired ammunition type -- a reload hotkey merges these functions and removes another element that you had to keep track of. Other hotkeys streamline gameplay in a similar manner, to the detriment of tense moments where you're cornered and have to improvise a way to get out of a sticky situation. I appreciate that you can rebind hotkeys for your implants and whatnot, but I think it might have been best if they had left out many of the new ones.To clarify, I don't think streamlining the interface from e.g. SS1 to SS2 was a bad thing -- I'd argue that Deus Ex/Thief/SS2/Arx Fatalis perfected the interaction paradigm in this sort of game with minimal loss of depth. Nor am I one of those people who insists you must play Doom with arrowlook, alt-strafe and CTRL to fire; or even SS1 without the mouselook mod for that matter. But the difference is that those convenience/quality of life features don't delegitimize entire chunks of gameplay. Doom still has tough encounter design that requires careful movement, weapon selection, and target prioritization with mouselook, and SS2 importantly compensated for its greater fluidity in gameplay and refined interface with aggressive enemies which did more than slowly shamble at you like turrets with legs. With the need to juggle the interface removed alongside the more straightforward movement and aiming from the mouselook mod, the flaws of SS1's combat design are stretched to a breaking point. It's like replacing Resident Evil 1's tank controls with Hotline Miami's topdown setup and expecting any of the horror or dread to remain in the absence of any other changes to AI, weapon design, and so on.
I [...] gave weapons a high chance to jam below 5% condition (where before they always jam at 0% condition) to make it more impactful for the player.