universo-virtual.com

buytrendz.net

thisforall.net

benchpressgains.com

qthzb.com

mindhunter9.com

dwjqp1.com

secure-signup.net

ahaayy.com

soxtry.com

tressesindia.com

puresybian.com

krpano-chs.com

cre8workshop.com

hdkino.org

peixun021.com

qz786.com

utahperformingartscenter.org

maw-pr.com

zaaksen.com

ypxsptbfd7.com

worldqrmconference.com

shangyuwh.com

eejssdfsdfdfjsd.com

playminecraftfreeonline.com

trekvietnamtour.com

your-business-articles.com

essaywritingservice10.com

hindusamaaj.com

joggingvideo.com

wandercoups.com

onlinenewsofindia.com

worldgraphic-team.com

bnsrz.com

wormblaster.net

tongchengchuyange0004.com

internetknowing.com

breachurch.com

peachesnginburlesque.com

dataarchitectoo.com

clientfunnelformula.com

30pps.com

cherylroll.com

ks2252.com

webmanicura.com

osostore.com

softsmob.com

sofietsshotel.com

facetorch.com

nylawyerreview.com

apapromotions.com

shareparelli.com

goeaglepointe.com

thegreenmanpubphuket.com

karotorossian.com

publicsensor.com

taiwandefence.com

epcsur.com

odskc.com

inzziln.info

leaiiln.info

cq-oa.com

dqtianshun.com

southstills.com

tvtv98.com

thewellington-hotel.com

bccaipiao.com

colectoresindustrialesgs.com

shenanddcg.com

capriartfilmfestival.com

replicabreitlingsale.com

thaiamarinnewtoncorner.com

gkmcww.com

mbnkbj.com

andrewbrennandesign.com

cod54.com

luobinzhang.com

bartoysdirect.com

taquerialoscompadresdc.com

aaoodln.info

amcckln.info

drvrnln.info

dwabmln.info

fcsjoln.info

hlonxln.info

kcmeiln.info

kplrrln.info

fatcatoons.com

91guoys.com

signupforfreehosting.com

faithfirst.net

zjyc28.com

tongchengjinyeyouyue0004.com

nhuan6.com

oldgardensflowers.com

lightupthefloor.com

bahamamamas-stjohns.com

ly2818.com

905onthebay.com

fonemenu.com

notanothermovie.com

ukrainehighclassescort.com

meincmagazine.com

av-5858.com

yallerdawg.com

donkeythemovie.com

corporatehospitalitygroup.com

boboyy88.com

miteinander-lernen.com

dannayconsulting.com

officialtomsshoesoutletstore.com

forsale-amoxil-amoxicillin.net

generictadalafil-canada.net

guitarlessonseastlondon.com

lesliesrestaurants.com

mattyno9.com

nri-homeloans.com

rtgvisas-qatar.com

salbutamolventolinonline.net

sportsinjuries.info

topsedu.xyz

xmxm7.com

x332.xyz

sportstrainingblog.com

autopartspares.com

readguy.net

soniasegreto.com

bobbygdavis.com

wedsna.com

rgkntk.com

bkkmarketplace.com

zxqcwx.com

breakupprogram.com

boxcardc.com

unblockyoutubeindonesia.com

fabulousbookmark.com

beat-the.com

guatemala-sailfishing-vacations-charters.com

magie-marketing.com

kingstonliteracy.com

guitaraffinity.com

eurelookinggoodapparel.com

howtolosecheekfat.net

marioncma.org

oliviadavismusic.com

shantelcampbellrealestate.com

shopleborn13.com

topindiafree.com

v-visitors.net

qazwsxedcokmijn.com

parabis.net

terriesandelin.com

luxuryhomme.com

studyexpanse.com

ronoom.com

djjky.com

053hh.com

originbluei.com

baucishotel.com

33kkn.com

intrinsiqresearch.com

mariaescort-kiev.com

mymaguk.com

sponsored4u.com

crimsonclass.com

bataillenavale.com

searchtile.com

ze-stribrnych-struh.com

zenithalhype.com

modalpkv.com

bouisset-lafforgue.com

useupload.com

37r.net

autoankauf-muenster.com

bantinbongda.net

bilgius.com

brabustermagazine.com

indigrow.org

miicrosofts.net

mysmiletravel.com

selinasims.com

spellcubesapp.com

usa-faction.com

snn01.com

hope-kelley.com

bancodeprofissionais.com

zjccp99.com

liturgycreator.com

weedsmj.com

majorelenco.com

colcollect.com

androidnews-jp.com

hypoallergenicdogsnames.com

dailyupdatez.com

foodphotographyreviews.com

cricutcom-setup.com

chprowebdesign.com

katyrealty-kanepa.com

tasramar.com

bilgipinari.org

four-am.com

indiarepublicday.com

inquick-enbooks.com

iracmpi.com

kakaschoenen.com

lsm99flash.com

nana1255.com

ngen-niagara.com

technwzs.com

virtualonlinecasino1345.com

wallpapertop.net

nova-click.com

abeautifulcrazylife.com

diggmobile.com

denochemexicana.com

eventhalfkg.com

medcon-taiwan.com

life-himawari.com

myriamshomes.com

nightmarevue.com

allstarsru.com

bestofthebuckeyestate.com

bestofthefirststate.com

bestwireless7.com

declarationintermittent.com

findhereall.com

jingyou888.com

lsm99deal.com

lsm99galaxy.com

moozatech.com

nuagh.com

patliyo.com

philomenamagikz.net

rckouba.net

saturnunipessoallda.com

tallahasseefrolics.com

thematurehardcore.net

totalenvironment-inthatquietearth.com

velislavakaymakanova.com

vermontenergetic.com

sizam-design.com

kakakpintar.com

begorgeouslady.com

1800birks4u.com

2wheelstogo.com

6strip4you.com

bigdata-world.net

emailandco.net

gacapal.com

jharpost.com

krishnaastro.com

lsm99credit.com

mascalzonicampani.com

sitemapxml.org

thecityslums.net

topagh.com

flairnetwebdesign.com

bangkaeair.com

beneventocoupon.com

noternet.org

oqtive.com

smilebrightrx.com

decollage-etiquette.com

1millionbestdownloads.com

7658.info

bidbass.com

devlopworldtech.com

digitalmarketingrajkot.com

fluginfo.net

naqlafshk.com

passion-decouverte.com

playsirius.com

spacceleratorintl.com

stikyballs.com

top10way.com

yokidsyogurt.com

zszyhl.com

16firthcrescent.com

abogadolaboralistamd.com

apk2wap.com

aromacremeria.com

banparacard.com

bosmanraws.com

businessproviderblog.com

caltonosa.com

calvaryrevivalchurch.org

chastenedsoulwithabrokenheart.com

cheminotsgardcevennes.com

cooksspot.com

cqxzpt.com

deesywig.com

deltacartoonmaps.com

despixelsetdeshommes.com

duocoracaobrasileiro.com

fareshopbd.com

goodpainspills.com

kobisitecdn.com

makaigoods.com

mgs1454.com

piccadillyresidences.com

radiolaondafresca.com

rubendorf.com

searchengineimprov.com

sellmyhrvahome.com

shugahouseessentials.com

sonihullquad.com

subtractkilos.com

valeriekelmansky.com

vipasdigitalmarketing.com

voolivrerj.com

zeelonggroup.com

1015southrockhill.com

10x10b.com

111-online-casinos.com

191cb.com

3665arpentunitd.com

aitesonics.com

bag-shokunin.com

brightotech.com

communication-digitale-services.com

covoakland.org

dariaprimapack.com

freefortniteaccountss.com

gatebizglobal.com

global1entertainmentnews.com

greatytene.com

hiroshiwakita.com

iktodaypk.com

jahatsakong.com

meadowbrookgolfgroup.com

newsbharati.net

platinumstudiosdesign.com

slotxogamesplay.com

strikestaruk.com

trucosdefortnite.com

ufabetrune.com

weddedtowhitmore.com

12940brycecanyonunitb.com

1311dietrichoaks.com

2monarchtraceunit303.com

601legendhill.com

850elaine.com

adieusolasomade.com

andora-ke.com

bestslotxogames.com

cannagomcallen.com

endlesslyhot.com

iestpjva.com

ouqprint.com

pwmaplefest.com

qtylmr.com

rb88betting.com

buscadogues.com

1007macfm.com

born-wild.com

growthinvests.com

promocode-casino.com

proyectogalgoargentina.com

wbthompson-art.com

whitemountainwheels.com

7thavehvl.com

developmethis.com

funkydogbowties.com

travelodgegrandjunction.com

gao-town.com

globalmarketsuite.com

blogshippo.com

hdbka.com

proboards67.com

outletonline-michaelkors.com

kalkis-research.com

thuthuatit.net

buckcash.com

hollistercanada.com

docterror.com

asadart.com

vmayke.org

erwincomputers.com

dirimart.org

okkii.com

loteriasdecehegin.com

mountanalog.com

healingtaobritain.com

ttxmonitor.com

bamthemes.com

nwordpress.com

11bolabonanza.com

avgo.top

Prey: Breaking and remaking the rules, as BioShock meets Dishonored - Game News

Prey: Breaking and remaking the rules, as BioShock meets Dishonored

For a long time, I’ve bemoaned this generation’s lack of a BioShock moment. Don’t get me wrong, games have been brilliant since 2013. The console hardware has increasingly shown its might, and game designs have evolved very nicely indeed from their last-gen roots. But it’s been a process of small, incremental upgrades rather than true revolution. Both visually and in terms of gameplay, there hasn’t been one, single game that has stepped forward to claim ‘Things have changed’. Not the way that BioShock did, when its combination of FPS, RPG, and sumptuously blended world, narrative, and emotional and philosophical heft landed in 2007.

But I think we might be about to hit that moment. Because Prey, coming in 2017 from Dishonored developer Arkane Studios, might well be that game. Set in a world where Kennedy was never assassinated, and redoubled his efforts in the space race, it presents a 2035 in which the Talos One space station has orbited the moon for 70 years. Humanity has evolved its presence in space exponentially since the station’s launch, building layer upon layer on the habitat to create a technological onion of different eras, modern sheen peeling back to reveal the ‘70s, and then deeper still, the environment’s chunky, clunky Russian roots.

But humanity is trying to evolve in other ways. Experiments are being done in an attempt to expand the human experience. And they’re about to succeed, though not in the ways intended. The human experience is about to get really shitty.

As Morgan Yu – the gender-agnostic name is deliberate; you can choose at the start – you wake up on Talos One immediately after an unnamed atrocity has begun wreaking carnage through every deck and hall. Alien beasts are running rampant, swirling, skittering nightmares of rag and fog and shadow. People are dying unpleasant deaths, and the monsters are everywhere. The monsters are everything. These extraterrestrial wraiths have the ability to mimic any object on the station, only revealing their true form when they’re close enough to strike. That trash can on the floor? Don’t trust it. That suitcase discarded in the lobby? Better double-tap it, just to be sure. And hang on, did that chair just move?

But if you can’t trust the world around you, at least you can trust yourself, right? Well not necessarily. Where BioShock brought us DNA-warping Plasmids, Prey allows you to upgrade yourself with both human tech and alien material. Get close enough to the monsters and survive, and you can study their abilities. Learn enough, and you can emulate their behaviour. But should you? The choice is entirely yours. You can harness or reject any alien ability you wish. They bring great power, naturally, but Prey’s dynamic, reactive world will be watching you, and it may not like what it sees.

“When you do that there are consequences”, Arkane’s Ricardo Bare tells me. “The more alien material you put into yourself, the more things start to change. Things like the station’s turrets. They protect humans and shoot aliens. But guess what? You’ve got alien material in your head now. And some of the aliens themselves are sensitive to other creatures that have powers like them. So they’ll start to detect the fact that you are upgrading yourself that way, and they’ll come after you.”

That’s the risk, but what about the reward? Well here’s where it gets silly. Forget the simple process of jamming oversized hypodermics into your arm to gain multiple elemental Hadokens. In Prey, things are much more freeform. Much more Dishonored, in fact. Your abilities aren’t so much solutions to specific problems, as malleable tools to do with whatever the hell you wish. In much the same way that Dishonored’s Blink teleport is ostensibly a handy traversal tool, but also opens the way to as many ludicrous, almost game-breaking combat puzzle strategies as one can imagine, so too are Prey’s powers building blocks rather than linear solutions. You might use them to kill enemies and bypass obstacles, but Prey’s gameplay looks to be far more about creation than destruction.

Take the Gloo Gun, for instance. A large, sticky goo cannon, its ammo will rapidly set, freezing any enemy you train it upon. So far, so good. Throw in a grenade. Hit them with a flame attack. That will work. Or maybe those stricken bodies will work as cover? Or maybe you can skip the fight altogether. Maybe you can sneak to a safe spot at the side of the room – stealth is abundantly viable in Prey – and spray the goo up the wall, letting it coalesce into a set of convenient platforms with which you can merrily skip up to a higher level.

Sorry, did I say that was where it got silly? I lied. Because now I’m going to talk about that stealth. And this is where it gets silly. That thing I said about how the aliens can mimic objects on the station? And that other thing about how you can adopt the aliens’ powers? Yep. Becoming more alien might attract the aliens, but they’ll have a much harder time finding you if you’re a teacup.

And the best part? You maintain your other abilities whether you’re made of flesh or porcelain. So forget the Gloo Gun if you don’t want to use it – or perhaps aren’t in a position to. Turn into a ball, roll over to that platform – you can move around as any object, by the looks of it, including the cup – drop a kinetic charge underneath yourself, and tee off to wherever you want to go.

If all of this sounds potentially ‘exploitable’, then you’re right. And Arkane is not unaware of the issue. But, being Arkane, it doesn’t seem to care as long as the gameplay is good. As Director Raphael Colantonio explains,

“It’s a weird balance, allowing the things that are not initially pre-planned until it becomes a game-breaker. If something is too much of an exploit then we need to fix it. But usually – if there’s something that is cool, but it’s not quite polished, like some sort of weird interaction that works magically, but is a little bit of a problem – then we’ll support it, because now we want it to be part of the game. But ultimately we really like this. We like it when players break the game in a good way and find some weird shortcut to a situation, and feel really proud that they could beat the game in such a way.”

But isn’t that a nightmare from a designer’s point of view? After all, Prey is no linear, point-to-point game. It has far more in common with Metroid. While its story and missions will lead you along the ‘correct’ path, the whole station is being built as “one giant space-dungeon”, according to Bare. “You can go anywhere you want as long as you have the means to get there. And just like in those old-school RPGs, we let you go to parts of the station where you might not have any business being there, because the monsters there will just smash you down. But it’s still cool knowing that I can do that, that I can try if I want to.”

And with secrets, other survivors, and the overwhelmingly human instincts for exploration and rebellion driving you, you will want to. But how does a studio reconcile that sort of structure with the knowledge that – just as happened in Dishonored – its players could quickly concoct combinations of powers that no-one making the game ever considered? According to Colantonio, it’s all about breaking down obstacles into core challenge types, and trying to stay on top of – and open to – the appropriate tools the player might have.

“We look at it like challenges that are not quite directly linked to a power. So for example there could be the challenge of elevation. ‘How do I get on the other side of this thing?’. Then we have a set of systems that can deal with that. And so it doesn’t really matter which one you use. You could use the Gloo Gun there, you could have a lift power to create some sort of field of upward force which you could use to propel yourself.

“We could say also there’s the type of challenge where you have to get on the other side of a wall and there’s some opening somewhere. And you could turn yourself into a smaller object if there’s one around you, or just drop one from your inventory and turn into this object if you have the power. Or maybe you could turn into smoke and go through that way.”

Not that Prey is all puzzle solving and rule breaking – though there is a “heavy element” of that, according to Bare, growing from the team’s love of environmental disaster-management in games like FTL. The station is also “infested” with enemies, ranging from skittering crab-bastards to hulking great ghost-ogres. Direct combat is entirely feasible, but with weapons at a premium, you’ll again have to get more creative. And again, you’ll have to the tools to do that. Most interesting among them is the Recyclotron, a grenade that breaks down matter into its constituent parts and then hoovers it up into resource units for crafting. Imagine a throwable version of No Man’s Sky’s Multitool and you’re basically there. Only rather than deconstructing rocks and plants, the Recyclotron works on anything that isn’t nailed down.

And once you have those resources? Time for crafting. The crafting of pretty much anything you want, in fact. Weapons, gadgets, human tech to gain further abilities, or just nondescript junk for throwing on the floor and turning into. And if you’re still stuck for ideas after all of that, why not craft a propulsion system for your hazard suit and go outside for a nice, head-clearing space-walk? Because yes, you can do that too. You can freely fly around the station and re-enter the structure anywhere you fancy.

Prey is silly. Prey feels almost too freeform. It feels vaguely impossible to wrangle. But that’s why it’s exciting. That’s why it feels new and important. Most of all, it’s Arkane’s willingness to allow the game to get out of control, to only reel it in when needed, that makes it feel like a step forward. Prey’s developers seem as willing to break the rules and remake them as the game’s players will no doubt eventually be. And if the studio’s previous game proved anything, it’s that a blatant disregard for the rules is often where the most fun comes from. 

About Fox

Check Also

Best Spider-Man movies ranked, from No Way Home to Spider-Verse

Spider-Man has been brought to the big screen many, many times by now, so it …

Leave a Reply