Prey 2017

They advertised it as action adventure for normies when it's just another immersive sim
Bioshock is nothing like Prey at all

I've been playing the system shock remake and it really reminds me of prey in some ways
it's also a lot more engaging because it's just pure dungeon crawling and resource management with a few puzzles and no modern big budget brain rot

Prey is more of a "shock" game than Bioshock.
The whole Prey misnomer and marketing failure cost this game the wide audience recognition. Thankfully it survived as a cult classic. Can't say for sure which outcome is better considering the state of the modern vidya industry, and Bethshit in particular.

Confusing title, plus it did a poor job of communicating how the game should be played. Also the first few sections aren't great causing alot of people to bounce off it

This is a game where one of the earliest and most integral 'weapons' is a toy crossbow and your first combat encounters involve trying to jizz on little crabs jumping about the screen and thwack them with a wrench. Imagine the average CoD/FIFA retard on a controller being presented with that. Then they walk into the medical centre and get buttraped firing ineffective pistol shots at a phantom. The aspects of Prey that are beloved by hardcore gamers are also the reasons it failed with the casual crowd.

Better story

Bioshock's story is just a rehash of SS2's.

Better atmosphere

I agree here.

Better horror elements

Bioshock is only a horror game in like the first 10 minutes. After that you'll too many supplies to be afraid of anything.

Better powers

Whoa, you can electroduce puddles!

Better weapon feel

People were shitting on Bioshock's gunplay even when it came out. Prey at least has the excuse of being a proper immersive sim.

Thankfully it survived as a cult classic. Can't say for sure which outcome is better considering the state of the modern vidya industry, and Bethshit in particular.

It's good that we have it ultimately, but it will be the last big budget new shock game/imm sim for a while. And in an industry that refuses to finance anything in between massive AAA spectacle and small cheap indie game with high projected returns, that essentially means the genre is on ice apart from remakes of games with built in appeal.

And it's not fun to use shotgun or pistol. Only conventional weapons in that game.

every game needs a gorillion similiar rifles like my cowa duty

the game has like 3 guns

Shooting isn't fun

It has 3 enemy types

Shooting isn't effective either, most of the combat is cheesing enemies with grenade types or turrets or superpowers

Yeah, no wonder Prey flopped lol. It's not even like Dishonored which offers 2 good playstyles, Prey has 1 playstyle(combat) and it's shit. You either engage in combat in Prey or you avoid enemies since it doesn't have stealth system as good as Dishonored games.

It's almost like... like the game... is not a shooter. Whoa!

it literally is

Dishonored also isn't a shooter but combat is fun. Prey's combat isn't. Puzzle solving and immersive aspects are good but since gameplay itself isn't fun it's not enough to carry a game itself.

Wrong. Just because the game has guns in it doesn't make it a shooter. Prey is an RPG.

>Shooting isn't effective either

Shotgun shits on everything except for flying enemies.

And...

4 grenades

4 damaging powers

turrets

explosive tanks

enviromental hazards you can use to your advantage

make enemies fight for you

...

yeah sure, but the other problem is that the powers are way too strong and you can just faceroll everything after the halfway point if you try
the game feels like the most fun way to play should be mostly using guns for combat, but there's no guns

No real marketing, and a lack of understanding about what type of game it was. I only got it because it had a demo and the demo blew me away.

the game feels like the most fun way to play should be mostly using guns

No? It doesn't.

Where's all the pew pew I need to heckin' blast the bad guyerinos or it's no fun!

I mean, it's not that either. (You) are always Morgan Yu not really, but you're always the same typhon. It's a first person stealth action game, or an immersive sim if you like buzzwords

It's fun... It just is!!!

the game feels like the most fun way to play should be mostly using guns

But the GLOO gun is the most fun way to play

It is. If you need someone to explain fun to you, you're NGMI

You're always the Nerevarine in Morrowind, and it's an RPG. It's an RPG because of the choices you make, not because it has custom character creation.
(And a bunch of other mechanical stuff, like skill trees, inventory, etc.) In comparison, Bioshock is an FPS in that regard.

Today i learned that if you climb on the recycler chamber, find a half closed vent and mimic yourself you get into the waves & beams lab without the need for repair upgrades.

If you think "generic title for chosen one" is the same as a specific dude with a set history and relationship then you are a retard

GLOO is fun to play with, but maybe not so fun to use in a fight. Although, you should still be utilizing it to exploit the enemy weakness. People who use just the guns for combat are retarded. If you combine the tools and the special powers you have with weapons (which you can upgrade), you can take down the toughest enemy in the game in just a couple of shots.

You are put in equally specific circumstances in either game. And neither constrain the player from playing the way they want. You can just go apeshit and murder (almost) every NPC, including those you're supposed to have "set history and relationship" with, and the game won't lock your progress.

Because multiplex adventure games rely on word of mouth and other people's stories to sell you on the idea that they actually are fleshed out, and whenever you talked about Prey: if you managed to get past the name-hate or schmucks like this making poor comparisons they then get mad about, the most common thing you hear was this: your choices don't matter because it was all just a simulation, which destroys the fundamental choice-driven flesh of the game.

Frankly, it is Arkane's fault. I mean, look at the shitfit g*mers threw over Dishonored and how the high chaos ending was the bleaker one. They acted like it was a punishment that was lecturing them about their choices, and thus became a permanently-discussed sore point that also left them feeling like they couldn't use most of their powers (even though, only a couple are actually for lethal usage, one is just the lethal upgrade of a non-lethal power, and you'd have to do a LOT of killing for it to become High Chaos). With that mindset/lack of maturity amongst them, it's no surprise they would feel like the twist invalidates everything they do and the whole point of playing the game.

Lowkey the best survival horror game since RE4

Eh Dishonored's biggest problems were that the non lethal options just weren't as fun and that blink was so OP that the game would have heavily benefited from removing it.

Boring.

I disagree. As far as lethal options go, any individual one is never especially interesting compared to what you have when going non-lethal. It's only how they matter in regards to how you can weave them into not being lethal, but full-blown combat. Granted, that should be a strong argument, given how you can go from crossing swords to whipping people around to blasting them in the face while their compadres get eaten by rats before you stop time to dodge bullets and put a springrazor on a dude in the crowd of enemies....until you get to the more prudent fact that combat is over in seconds and incredibly easy, so you never get those things going outside of the trial mode.

As far as the encounters in actual missions go, lethal and non-lethal are honestly extremely similar, and if anything, going non-lethal can have some edgecase more interesting fights where you're trying to knock people out and while knocking them around. It's just that such things are gated by the fact that people think going loud inherently means lethal, or they reload instead of having fun chases with their non-lethal powers.

or they reload instead of having fun chases with their non-lethal powers.

True, i have that problem. In any stealth focused game i just let myself die or reload if i fail.

Both released around it and modern gamers (even compared to 360 dudebro gamers) are mentally fucking retarded. It isn't the best imsim at all but it's the only good one in the last fucking decade.

pic unrelated

She makes me dick hard like RTL shame they are trapped in an ass game.

Why didn't they just call it Neuroshock?

they didn't bother advertising it to normies, and the core audience they did court were suspicious of how derivative it looked
generally you don't want reaction to your big new game to be "actually it doesn't suck"

Bethesda wanted to use the IP they were sitting on. IMO the name Prey fits.

Headcanon

I remember Prey being heavily marketed. Bethesda published it

Yeah, but the marketing was stupid. The tagline was "be the weapon" and the trailers were all action set to pumping music. Like it was a generic FPS or something.

That is, in fact, exactly why it failed. If games don't do that, drooling neurotypicals won't be able to enjoy them.

you remember wrong then. they made some noise in E3, but they advertised it as a weird action FPS and neglected the most important detail, that it was a System Shock spiritual successor
they then went silent until launch
that's not how you grab people

How do you even market an immersive sim?

Immersive sim curse + retarded marketing

There's no flashy gimmick to pull people in. Black goo ghost enemies are really boring at first glance. They could have leaned hard on the Nightmare monster in marketing, and touted it as a highly intelligent predator (and actually made that true in the game).

It doesn't after the final reveal.

The nightmare was the most depressing wasted potential I've experienced in a while. I only just played Prey for the first time this year and went in mostly blind. The genuine terror and confusion I felt the first time the objective of "You are being hunted: HIDE" first appeared was my top gaming moment so far. Diving for a hiding spot the first few times it appeared and trying to catch glimpses of it to understand what I was working with.

Then I fought it and realised what a push over it was and that it was going to be a constant minor annoyance for the rest of my playthrough. The side mission to sort out the radio signals was also such a let down. I was expecting it to be a way to permanently remove it, with it getting more aggressive and hunting me down desperately to try and survive. Then it turned into just floating about in space for a bit to get a temporary use feature I used more to summon it to farm resources than to repel it.

It should have been much more intelligent, with the tradeoff being some sort of extremely difficult side mission to disab

i mean, the game is still about prey-predator relationships on a cosmic scale, it's just that for the entire game you believe you are the prey, but then it turns out that (You) are a prey and Morgan is a predator and the whole game is essentially about trying to make the cat feel bad for the mice, except cat can have empathy for each other and Typhon don't even have a concept of empathy.

the game wasn't good

anything could be a mimic so be careful!

here have this tool that detects mimics

I like the game, I'm glad I played it, but I'll stick to my rather harsh original critique: to me it feels like a rehash of better games, and I see no reason to recommend it to others. Ultimately, it left me very cold. I remember it as a series of cool ideas (the GLOO gun, the mimics, the space actions) that left litle to no trace beside their basic concept themselves. I couldn't tell you of any memorable execution, which is never a good sign for that kind of games.
I hear the DLC is pretty good. Still need to get around to that.

"actually it doesn't suck"

I'm reminded of Human Revolution, which managed success on that very same initial impression. while not being that good either. Cargo cult prequel.
There was a point when we were so enthused at the idea that the modern iteration of a game wasn't awful we were willing to give it a chance. We're past that.

or they reload instead of having fun chases with their non-lethal powers.

I'm still thinking if there's one game that needed a dark-souls like save system that forced players to live with their mistakes, it's Dishonored. I mean, it fits its central themes and story.

Make it about the freedom of choice in the level and quest design, Dishonored had some beyond kino marketing with the game informer magazines and the general aesthetic being about having so many choices and powers while entering. Unfortunately the game would get it's budget raped by Bethesda so few of the cool ideas (recurring guards/people, race car levels, dynamic levels) got into the game though what we did get was pretty well made. Ironically though it's something a AAA game studio is incapable of doing since they're vicegripped into making something as able to hook people into buying the game as possible instead of honesty

I think WRATH: Aeon of Ruin set up a great framework for what saving should be in games where they want people to commit but not be too restrictive in doing so. It has two main ways to save:
1) Shrines, one-time save locations set throughout the map
2) Skulls, quicksaves you can use anywhere but as a finite pickup
It's a fantastic compromise between quicksaves and checkpoints. Quicksaves make it so you don't rely solely on the devs' decided checkpoints, but they're finite so you can't save scum and will likely need to rely on the shrines at some point anyways; yet, those shrines don't auto-activate like checkpoints, so if you want, you can push your luck until you feel the need to double back and save. For an immersive sim, where you choose your path through a level and often double back both as exploration and intended level flow, that last bit would be especially interesting.

Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter did something similar though a bit more restrictive (limited number of hard-save tokens only usable at choice points, ability to save anywhere, but that temporary save would self-delete on load).
All in all, there's no single perfect solution, what matters is that the one used fits with the rest of the game design.

WRATH: Aeon of Ruin

Game totally went under my radar, will have to check it. Thanks.

Immersive sims have always failed and they will continue to do so, they are too complicated for the average single player game fan that's just how it is, they prefer shit like the Sony movie games that have barely any gameplay so they can just turn their brains off. It will be 10+ years until there is another AAA attempt at the genre