[Sanek]

It's a sad thing to see that in a world where Bethesda buys all possible IP's and have a world-wide acclaim, guys at Raven and Human Head Studios don't have any commercial or critical success. I haven't head about them in a while.

[MusicallyInspired]

It's my understanding that Raven's latest games haven't been very good. I think they made decent expansions and adaptions of IPs (Jedi Outcast/Academy, Elite Force) but that was ages ago and I just haven't heard anything great about them otherwise.

[Captain Kupo]

MusicallyInspired, on 12 April 2017 - 02:28 PM, said:

It's my understanding that Raven's latest games haven't been very good. I think they made decent expansions and adaptions of IPs (Jedi Outcast/Academy, Elite Force) but that was ages ago and I just haven't heard anything great about them otherwise.

Their last two games were pretty good

Wolfenstein 09 had issues but it was a good shooter overall, hurt badly by the fact that we were just coming off of a fuckton of ww2 games

Singularity was a good game too from what i remember. It had alot of really cool concepts and ideas but they never really seemed to go all thd way with them. People probably brushed it off as a bioshock clone

Id recommend both personally

Since then all activision has had them do is assist on call of duty because thats obviously the best use of their talent

I think they worked on the entirety of mw remastered but i could be wrong

[MusicallyInspired]

CoD? That'd be why I hadn't heard anything since.

[HulkNukem]

Prey will be getting a playable demo on April 27th, but only for Xbox One and PS4

Hopefully a PC version is released before/soon after the full game releases

[Mr. Tibbs]

Duke4 Aussies, JB Hi-Fi are offering a deal on upcoming bomba Prey where you can pick the game up for $59 at launch. Possibly the cheapest AAA release in recent years. Target are coming in at $64 and Big W $62, if JB's not an option.

https://www.jbhifi.c...ne/prey/444560/
https://www.jbhifi.c...me/prey/444558/
https://www.jbhifi.c...-4/prey/444559/

[Sledgehammer]

HulkNukem, on 13 April 2017 - 07:46 AM, said:

Prey will be getting a playable demo on April 27th, but only for Xbox One and PS4

Wouldn't be surprised if their PC port is another piece of shit. Why do they do this?

[HulkNukem]

Been playing for an hour on PS4 and there's still lots of areas I haven't explored. Overall, I am really liking this game.
My issues are that it runs at 30fps and the controls feel sluggish, however so did Dishonored 2 on PS4 while when I tried it on PC it ran buttery smooth and tight, so this is a non-issue. With how much precision you need with the crosshair when picking up objects, clicking on things on computers or panels, and fighting the basic mimics that can outrun the default sensitivity of the joystick, this is also one that will run 10x better on a keyboard + mouse setup. The only thing I see being harder with KB+M is the hacking minigame.
The other issue is it does feel a bit overwhelming; there's a couple times you walk through a corridor that ends up opening up into a massive area with tons of optional areas to explore. It's like if Bioshock levels were three times bigger, with different ways of accessing areas.
I'm enjoying the hell out of it though and I can't want to get the full game to fight different enemies. There's a lot of systems in place, like turrets you can pick up, move, and activate that only target aliens, but if you were to start giving yourself the alien powers, the turrets will think you are a threat, and so you either destroy them, get out of their sight, or hack them, but you also have to have hack upgrades in order to do that. It makes the game feel like there's tons and tons of options at your disposal for your playstyle, and subsequent playthroughs should be varied.

Also, there's no penalty for just killing all the enemies like there was in Dishonored, so the game doesn't have to slow down to accomodate stealth

[PsychoGoatee]

Sounds pretty promising from your review there, I'll definitely give this game a try sometime. Plus it's one of the few interesting looking FPS for a while that I can think of, especially for single-player.

[PikaCommando]

So... how's System Shock 3, folks?

[Mr. Tibbs]

Scott Miller and Chris Rhinehart talk about the Prey series troubled history with GamesRadar.

Quote

And after a pitch from Human Head, Bethesda picked up the rights for the series in 2009. This sequel was a radically different game: the portals, wall-walking boots, and Native Americans were gone. Instead you played as a human bounty hunter, deep in space, looking to solve mysteries by cover-shooting and chasing down alien scum using a slick free-running system reminiscent of Mirror’s Edge. Think Deus Ex meets Mass Effect meets Prince of Persia, and you’re getting close to what it might have been like. During closed demos of the game, the creators teased links to Tommy, the hero from the original Prey, but he was no longer the protagonist.

Human Head worked on the game with Bethesda until late 2011. At that point, it was possible to play through all of the game's major levels, many of the weapons were in, as were the enemies. "We were really proud and happy with everything that we had created at that point," Rhinehart says. And while the first pitch for Prey 2 did include Tommy, Human Head instead decided to take the sequel in a different direction, while still working inside the universe of the first Prey game.

Some other interesting details:

Quote

One of Prey’s concepts even came from past projects that Human Head had worked on. The idea of wall-walk boots originally came up during initial work the studio did for Daikatana 2. That game never happened, and after that, Human Head started talking to Epic about handling Unreal 2. One of its ideas for that project: yup, those wall-walk boots. Human Head didn't end up doing Unreal 2 either, which was Prey’s gain. "Fast forward to Prey, we were like 'Alright, we would love to be able to do wall-walk boots,'" Rhinehart says. "So I'm glad that we finally managed to get that particular tech in the game."

Quote

Development for Prey wasn't all portals and roses, even at Human Head. Problems arose between 3D Realms and Take-Two. At one point during development, according to Miller, Take-Two actually stopped funding Prey over design disagreements, which including the publisher wanting to make it more like Nintendo’s Metroid. 3D Realms picked up the monetary slack as Human Head continued development. Bridges were rebuilt, and Take-Two ultimately started the cash flow again. It didn't, however, give Human Head as much time as Miller thought it needed.

"I felt like the game needed another four to six months," Miller says. "Because there was some key things that weren't in the game that I really felt were important. And one of those key things was putting back in that portal gun." That was a tough break for the development team. Prey had been in development for more than ten years at this point, and some features had to be compromised on. "It was just... a crying shame that we didn't have that portal gun in there, because, you know, a year or two later the game Portal comes out, and... steals our thunder in that area," Miller added.

On the 1997/1998 iteration:

Quote

Timing and industry changes turned to trouble for Prey. It was mostly developed on the 3DFX card and the Glide API ("It was the hot shit API of the day," Schuytema says) but internal troubles at 3DFX hit just as the Prey team was ready to go all-in with Glide. Meanwhile, Microsoft was getting its Direct X API off the ground. The team moved away from Glide, and ended up going with Direct X instead.

"It was the right call, but boy did it cost us," Schuytema says. "That was when William Scarboro (Head Engineer) had to essentially rebuild the engine, so it was non or semi-functional for a long time. There was just too much work to do and at that time, it was essentially only William working on the engine code". Schuytema very much credits the death of the first version of Prey to the stalled progress of the Direct X switch. And in 1998, George and Scott "pulled the plug," according to Schuytema. "It was a painful decision, but they had to make it". Schuytema left in 1998 too, and Prey sat unfinished and unreleased. "When I left, the game looked sort of like a Lamborghini that was getting its engine rebuilt - it was gorgeous and amazing, but it had parts all over the place!," Schuytema says.

[HulkNukem]

Waiting for my package to show up any minute now. I built a new rig with a 1070 so I'm excited to try some new games on it (This and Quake Champions are the newest games I've used it for).
I'll have impressions and screenshots either tonight or tomorrow.

And oh shit, yeah, original Prey having a portal gun would have some serious affects on what has happened since then; possibly even change the gaming landscape. Also I remember one of the things they didn't have time for was making Jen's character model better looking.

[PikaCommando]

Damn, that portal gun would've snuffed Portal out. Nice job fucking it up, Take Two.

Also, Daikatana 2? Interesing. I thought work on the sequel never came to be after the first game was out.

[HulkNukem]

It was very very early development and Romero was helping Humanhead out since he knew some of the guys working there; he gave them an Unreal engine license to make Daikatana 2, and when it was cancelled, he let them keep the license and they wound up making Rune.

[Micky C]

PikaCommando, on 05 May 2017 - 06:50 AM, said:

So... how's System Shock 3, folks?

[Daedolon]

Still looks nothing like a SShock title, I don't know where you guys get the connection.

[PikaCommando]

Daedolon, on 06 May 2017 - 11:54 PM, said:

Still looks nothing like a SShock title, I don't know where you guys get the connection.

Plays like a poor attempt at being one, I suppose.

[Micky C]

Daedolon, on 06 May 2017 - 11:54 PM, said:

Still looks nothing like a SShock title, I don't know where you guys get the connection.

Didn't the developers, marketting, or some group connected to the game claim System Shock to be a large inspiration, with this sort of being a spiritual successor?

[HulkNukem]

Daedolon, on 06 May 2017 - 11:54 PM, said:

Still looks nothing like a SShock title, I don't know where you guys get the connection.

I don't know why you wouldn't get the connection; it has a lot of inspirations and similarities to the Shock games.

[NightFright]

The real question I am interested in getting answered: Has anybody played it and can tell whether it's good?

[HulkNukem]

I've been enjoying it for the most part. There's a number of annoying issues or gameplay designs that stop it from being amazing, but it's overall a solid experience so far. I'm about 10 hours in. I plan to do a more extensive impression soon

[Daedolon]

HulkNukem, on 07 May 2017 - 08:21 AM, said:

I don't know why you wouldn't get the connection; it has a lot of inspirations and similarities to the Shock games.

Mostly looks like generic BioShock brownnosing. I haven't seen that much gameplay to claim that it looks nothing like SShock 2, but definitely not SShock.

[HulkNukem]

Daedolon, on 08 May 2017 - 12:10 PM, said:

Mostly looks like generic BioShock brownnosing. I haven't seen that much gameplay to claim that it looks nothing like SShock 2, but definitely not SShock.

The introduction to the nueromods (basically upgrade points) is very very similar to the Electroshock intro from Bioshock 1; there's the advertisements and display for it, instead of a vending machine it's a display case, instead of injecting it into your arms you inject it through your eye. There's several other things similar to Bioshock as well. They also both have the art deco architecture.
There's also a number of stuff lifted from SS; off the top of my head the crafting is closer to SS than it was in Bioshock and you can even break down any object in the game into materials that can be used for crafting. You upgrade skills like in System Shock but there's also 'chipsets" that give you different abilities similar to how tonics worked in Bioshock.
Also the basic backstory of how the disaster happened is closer to System Shock's, whereas in Bioshock it was the people's own undoing experimenting with plasmids while being taken advantage of by two big opposing forces (Fontaine and Ryan) leading to a civil war.
The game also plays similarly to Dishonored in how it feels and handles traversal so it's a mix of those three games.

[Sledgehammer]

Daedolon, on 08 May 2017 - 12:10 PM, said:

Mostly looks like generic BioShock brownnosing. I haven't seen that much gameplay to claim that it looks nothing like SShock 2, but definitely not SShock.

Considering that Bioshock is a console version of System Shock (the second game for sure), it's still technically has some System Shock inspiration. Although I'm surprised that they mentioned System Shock as their inspiration instead of Bioshock, the later is more recognizable, even reviewers on Steam mention that the game is inspired by Bioshock.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Despite only being on one sku and dropping 71% in sales from the previous week, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe managed to outsell Prey this week in the UK, and although it's
an unofficial source, Steamspy pegs Prey's PC sales at around a meager 110,000 owners.

Here's a helpful summary from Neogaf:

Quote

- Prey seems to have debuted with between 17K to maybe 25K sales in the UK.
- This is much lower than Dishonored 1, which sold about 72,000 units, Dishonored 2, 42,000, or or any other recent Bethesda game this generation. You can think of it as half of Dishonored 2 or a third of Dishonored 1 if that helps approximate.
- For reference, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided debuted with ~38K, and that got the series killed.

[HulkNukem]

Makes sense; way too many people were negative thinking this replaced the cancelled Prey 2 (it didn't, this was coming out regardless) and although I like it it's still a middling game.

[Sledgehammer]

Dishonored 2 damaged their reputation as well.

[MusicallyInspired]

I just don't like how they so callously and PURPOSEFULLY threw the Prey name on there. It was a definite message to Human Head and everyone that Prey 2 or any such iteration as it is/was would never happen. Another thing I don't like is that people who aren't familiar with the game are calling this new Prey a reboot/remake of the type of game the original Prey was and that simply is not true. Not many, but some.

I am liking what I've heard of the music so far, though. I've never seen a gameplay video yet. I just haven't been interested to see it.

[icecoldduke]

I bought the game, and unfortunately returned it. On my 1080 the game isn't at framerate on my 4k monitor(even at medium settings).

[Malgon]