[Mr. Tibbs]

Jason Schreier, the guy who accurately reported about Prey being rebooted at Arkane Austin back in 2013, said this the other week at Kotaku.

Quote

"All I’ve heard is that they’re announcing it at E3! I’m not 100% sure, though. I do know it’s codenamed Danielle and under development at Arkane Austin. And this is a totally new Prey 2 (it might even be called something else now), not the one we saw in 2011 from Human Head."

Yesterday, Nerd Leaks tweeted this:

Quote

http://prey2.com & http://prey3.com updated by Zenimax 3 days ago. They now redirect to hidden FB page http://www.facebook.com/prey2

Quick recap on Prey 2's rocky history. Human Head stopped working on Prey 2 in November 2011 shortly before the game reached alpha after Bethesda tried to buy the studio through milestone abuse. Human Head, hoping Bethesda would honor their original arrangement, attempted to negotiate with Bethesda. Things were moving forward until March 2012, when talks stalled. Zenimax released a warning to Human Head to return to work through a Dutch news outlet that Prey 2 was going to be cancelled next week. That all stopped on April 9th, 2012 after Human Head announced plans to make Rune II.

On April 19th, Bethesda released an extremely passive-aggressive update, before giving the project to Obsidian who worked on it for a few months. Unfortunately, since they didn't have the source code, or rights to use any of the internal tech Human Head owned (mega-textures, global-based lighting, etc), it was doomed from the start. It was cancelled and quietly removed from Bethesda's upcoming titles on their site in August 2012.

In May 2013, Kotaku and a Prey fan site revealed that Arkane Austin (who were unhappy with the situation and leaked the news) had been ordered to reboot Prey 2. This was later confirmed in leaked emails shortly after the news broke. The Austin team, which was previously a satellite studio, licensed the Cryengine in mid-2013 and staffed up in early 2014. Bethesda's Pete Hines continued to lie about the project being cancelled for years before casually mentioning to someone from CNET at Aussie PAX 2014 that Human Head's game was over.

Spoiler

Prey 2 was originally going to star Tommy before Bethesda's marketing said that he was too whiney in the first game and no one would identify with his spiritual Native American goals. Human Head were tasked with creating a protagonists their girlfriends would find attractive, so Killian Samuels was born. Once the game was revealed and there was a big backlash that Tommy wasn't in the game, Bethesda asked the team to put him back in. Human Head's solution was to turn him into Killian's (who was essentially a blank slate - only VO was audiologs scattered around Exodus) mentor and guide on Exodus. After the events of Prey, Tommy spent years tracking down the Keepers and found them pulling the political and power strings on the Planet Exodus. They were constructing a new Sphere. Not a Harvester like the one in Prey, but a War Sphere to go back to Earth and destroy it. You're eventual mission was to team up with Tommy and destroy the Sphere before it left Exodus.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Whoa, looking over that it just reminds me there's so much drama there, and that's not even going in to detail about Radar Group's Prey 2 which featured portals, time manipulation and wall-walking!

Arkane's leaked pitch documents, which are real, are here if anyone's interested.
https://www.scribd.c...ey-2-Document-1
https://www.scribd.c...ey-2-Document-2

Here's a recent video of Dishonored 2's creative director, Harvey Smith, dodging the Prey 2 question.


Bethesda never once disputed claims that they tried to buy the studio. When other games in Zenimax's portfolio encounter "quality concerns," they either put the team on other projects like Battlecry Studios, or give them extra time to polish the experience like Dishonored, Evil Within, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and especially Doom. So much cool stuff people never got to see: the grappling hook, roof top races, the laser whip.

Human Head developers on the cancellation:
https://twitter.com/...424067771011073
www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/05/what-went-wrong-with-human-heads-prey-2
http://noobist.com/g...ardson-bioware/
http://www.eurogamer...ver-just-a-demo
http://rohogames.com/portfolio/prey-2/

[PikaCommando]

That's great to hear, but can we be sure this won't end up like the previous attempts?

[HulkNukem]

PikaCommando, on 25 May 2016 - 11:42 AM, said:

That's great to hear, but can we be sure this won't end up like the previous attempts?

I am pretty sure it will come out; Arkane is pretty well situated in with Zenimax/Bethesda, having released Dishonored and later the HD remaster (which wasn't actually touched up at all IIRC) and developing Dishonored 2.
Whether or not it will be as great as Prey 2 originally looked, no idea, but it wouldn't be the first time different versions of Prey were created by completely different teams.

[Mr. Tibbs]

HulkNukem, on 25 May 2016 - 12:21 PM, said:

Whether or not it will be as great as Prey 2 originally looked, no idea, but it wouldn't be the first time different versions of Prey were created by completely different teams.

Prey had the same producers throughout and, conceptually, the overall premise remained the same as the earlier iterations: Native American protagonist, portals, alien abduction. After treating the series creators so poorly, the only link Bethesda could possibly lean on is Jason Bergman, who was a producer at 2K on Prey and is now at Zenimax, and maybe hire Jeremy Soule to do the score (Prey 2's score was composed by Mark Morgan and Jason Graves).

However, Arkane's outing will the certainly the first time the team has actively been encouraged to forget the brand all together!

Quote

[H]igher-ups at the company are telling the team to forget that it's called Prey 2 and just treat it like a new System Shock.

[PikaCommando]

Mr. Tibbs, on 25 May 2016 - 12:49 PM, said:

Prey had the same producers throughout and, conceptually, the overall premise remained the same as the earlier iterations: Native American protagonist, portals, alien abduction.

But the alien ship; the main premise/world of the game; has changed drastically, from high-tech to bio-tech.

I'm just hoping that Prey 2 will have alien cities that are like the ones seen in old Prey screenshots and the Prey 2 trailer.

[Daedolon]

Huh.

[Player Lin]

It sounds like not the old Prey we know for sure...but all we can do is, just wait and see when it's out...

Or they should used other name for that.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Industry insider Shinobi602 confirmed on a podcast that Arkane Austin's Prey reboot will be at E3, and once again clarified that it's no longer called Prey 2. The reveal is less than a week away. I'm anxious to see what it is and why they consider it a Prey title.

[Micky C]

Perhaps it's a "Prey spinoff"? Although it's been so long since the original, I don't see much point in associating it with the franchise.

[OpenMaw]

Mr. Tibbs, on 06 June 2016 - 02:57 PM, said:

I'm anxious to see what it is and why they consider it a Prey title.

It isn't, but any brand recognition gives you a boost. Years ago we already knew that nothing from Prey was in Prey 2. There was virtually no connection at all beyond the name, and now that so many years have passed, I just don't see the point. Prey was about Tommy, Jen, and the sphere. If you're going to call it Prey, it should be about at least some of those things.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Micky C, on 06 June 2016 - 03:08 PM, said:

Perhaps it's a "Prey spinoff"? Although it's been so long since the original, I don't see much point in associating it with the franchise.

Beyond Zenimax owning the property, there's likely zero reason to call Arkane's System Shock homage Prey. The only connection they have at the studio is Jason Bergman who was an executive producer on the first game. I bet the reveal trailer will include some superficial nod to the original before launching into a completely unrelated game. Like a title card saying, "The world is full of stories, and from time to time, they permit themselves to be told," [cue retro-futurist stealth action game starring Danielle Sho].

Commando Nukem, I'm only anxious to see how Bethesda go about positioning the game in relation to Prey. Also, aside from Jen (who Tommy still talked about in the game) who died in Prey, Human Head's sequel featured all the things you mentioned.

[----]

Mr. Tibbs, on 06 June 2016 - 08:10 PM, said:

Commando Nukem, I'm only anxious to see how Bethesda go about positioning the game in relation to Prey. Also, aside from Jen (who Tommy still talked about in the game) who died in Prey, Human Head's sequel featured all the things you mentioned.

One question, just to make clear if I remember things right or if I dreamt that:

Wasn't it so in Prey that Jen only died when you shoot the upper part of the monster/boss-enemy she got turned into? I seem to remember her surviving when you shoot the lower part of the boss only.

I could be wrong though.


Nevermind, I dreamt that or remembered it wrong.

[PikaCommando]

I thought the core essence of Prey has always been about being trapped in an alien environment. That's the only thing that stuck from the 1995 space martial arts version.

[Lunick]

Prey Reboot confirmed

[HulkNukem]

[HiPolyBash]

What the fuck is this? Why even use the Prey IP?

[Mr. Tibbs]

HiPolyBash, on 12 June 2016 - 06:39 PM, said:

What the fuck is this? Why even use the Prey IP?

Space and aliens. Besides that, fuck all.

[KaijuTurtle]

Couldn't even give it a subtitle, eh? Nice.

And with the original off steam these days, looks like they're banking on it going away and being forgotten. The bounty hunter game they teased a while back looked 1000x more interesting than this. What a let down.

[Mr. Tibbs]

Former HH dev:

[HulkNukem]

This Bethesda conference just screams trying too hard. The one last year was a fun surprise and a good reveal of Doom and Fallout 4. This one is just ehhh trying too hard to get the good will the first one did.

[Malgon]

What Nathan Cheever said.

[Lunick]

It's probably hard for Bethesda since all this leaked in some form. Not that I like what they have revealed at all but they are good people... trying a little too hard.

[HiPolyBash]

Lunick, on 12 June 2016 - 06:58 PM, said:

...but they are good people...

Nah, they're really not. See: the attempted failed hostile take-over of Human Head/Prey 2 through arbitrarily rejecting milestones and exactly the same thing with Arkane except Arkane sold out.

This game doesn't look /bad/ but it doesn't seem like it should be under the Prey banner and that seems to be the general consensus: http://www.neogaf.co...d.php?t=1232339

As I said in the other thread:

A completely pointless use of the Prey IP but I suppose this is the end result of a failed hostile take over and wanting to use the IP they purchased anyway. Go fuck yourself Bethesda.

[HulkNukem]

Looking back, it was really fitting in the trailer that the guy in the reflection says "You are not going to like what I say next..." and then the name Prey appears.

[icecoldduke]

HulkNukem, on 12 June 2016 - 06:39 PM, said:

"It looks like we have some tests to run through today"...what the hell, is this game a Portal remake under the Prey IP?

[Mr. Tibbs]

RIP Human Head's Prey 2.

[Daedolon]

I guess Bethesda, in addition to the IP, also seized all of the assets of Prey 2. Like someone pointed out in that NeoGAF thread, HH could've released it as something else. I guess Bethesda just likes to fuck up everything.

[HiPolyBash]

[Daedolon]

The gun diminishes the effect the cover has, but I still like its minimalistic style.