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Prey (2017) is the game of the year no one played

Yeah it's an incredible game, it will be high on my personal list without a doubt. Bethesda has had a killer year of games that I love, I wish they would have all paid off financially like I feel they absolutely deserve.
 

Truant

Member
I feel the first two thirds of the game is one of the best games I have ever played. The final hours definitely pulls it down a bit, but it's still amazing. The freedom and systemic nature of the game puts it miles above most games released this year.

With that said, there are some strange design choices. For example, most 0451-style games have had very powerful pistols. Why is the pistol in this game so weak? They give you a ton of ammo, but each shot barely does any damage. I want a mod that balances this in reverse. You get less ammo, but each shot does a lot of damage.
 

Flying Fish

Neo Member
Would I like this if I didn't like System Shock 2 but thought Deus Ex was a GOAT? I haven't played Bioshock recently enough to have an up-to-date opinion.
 

Truant

Member
Would I like this if I didn't like System Shock 2 but thought Deus Ex was a GOAT? I haven't played Bioshock recently enough to have an up-to-date opinion.

I would say that gameplay and design wise, Prey is what Bioshock should have been. It's the natural evolution of that style of game, with a lot of modernization and QoL improvements. I do think Bioshock has better writing in general, but both games suffer from weak third acts.

Prey has a lot of player freedom, though. Much more than System Shock 2 and Bioshock. It's probably on the level of Deus Ex, maybe a tad more. You can, for example, kill every NPC/character you encounter and the game will account for that and continue.
 

Z..

Member
Just like Arx Fatalis and Dishonored, Prey is a pretty damn good game.

GOTY, though? Insanity. Breath of The Wild, Persona 5, Nier Automata, Divinity 2, Sonic Mania, Splatoon 2, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Cuphead, Horizon Zero Dawn, Hollow Knight, Yakuza 0, Steamworld Dig 2, etc etc etc. It's been too good a year.

The future looks even brighter too with Mario looking nearly perfect and then there's also Wolfenstein 2 and Xenoblade Chronicles 2.

Prey is probably the king of B tier games this year, though. It's either Prey, Crash Trilogy or Gravity Rush 2 from what I've played. Gotta check out Hellblade and Dishonored 2 too, I suppose.
 
It was interesting. I liked the world and mythos they created and I liked on how station felt like a self contained community, isolated. Cool idea for a type of alien life form too.

I thought the last 1/3 of the game or so was pretty bad though. Lots of running from level to level, waiting through load screens.

I also hated any time I had to float around in 0 gravity.
 

Z..

Member
I would say that gameplay and design wise, Prey is what Bioshock should have been. It's the natural evolution of that style of game, with a lot of modernization and QoL improvements. I do think Bioshock has better writing in general, but both games suffer from weak third acts.

Prey has a lot of player freedom, though. Much more than System Shock 2 and Bioshock. It's probably on the level of Deus Ex, maybe a tad more. You can, for example, kill every NPC/character you encounter and the game will account for that and continue.

Regarding the bolded... I'd say it's what Bioshock Infinite should have been, not OG Bioshock. This would've been a serious contender for my personal GOTY in 2013 (though 3D world and Pikmin 3 would still have dethroned it much like they did TLoU).
 

Vintage

Member
I love how the game, it's mechanics and the world is built. It's so systematic.

Basically it establishes a set of basic rules like how physics, upgrades, interactions work and then uses them for building everything, including other rules and it almost always follows them strictly. These same rules also apply to the player

For example, if there's a physical object, then enough force will move it, if there's a keypad then there's a combination to unlock it, if there's a ledge that appears like someone can climb on it, it means you can do it, if there's a small gap that an object can fit through, nothing is stopping you from doing it. There a no invisible walls. The game doesn't cheat on you. All this gives you a big playground of possibilities.

This means that a lot of times you'll think that you are breaking the game, and in fact you will be, but the game is ok with that. And that is the beauty of this game.
 
It's much better than the nintendo garbage that's gonna dominate this year's award season, that's for sure

Garbage indeed. So many people are wrong in thinking that Zelda BotW, and I can only assume, Mario Odyssey are are great games, when they are in fact, garbage.

But you sir, YOU ALONE, have seen through the bullshit, and I commend you.
 

Glass Rebel

Member
I played the demo on PS4 and thought it controlled terribly. I will give the PC demo a try in the hopes that it feels better because what I played looked pretty great.
 
Garbage indeed. So many people are wrong in thinking that Zelda BotW, and I can only assume, Mario Odyssey are are great games, when they are in fact, garbage.

But you sir, YOU ALONE, have seen through the bullshit, and I commend you.
So I can't express my opinion if it is different than that of "many people"?
 

Surfside

Banned
With that said, there are some strange design choices. For example, most 0451-style games have had very powerful pistols. Why is the pistol in this game so weak? They give you a ton of ammo, but each shot barely does any damage. I want a mod that balances this in reverse. You get less ammo, but each shot does a lot of damage.

I found the silenced Pistol to be one of the best weapons in the game, when upgraded. It makes killing Phantoms from a safe distance so easy. Because the weapons accuracy is so great. Low damage isn't a problem, if used from a distance. And you don't make nearby other Phantoms or Mimics aware of you. Great weapon!
 

Surfside

Banned
So I can't express my opinion if it is different than that of "many people"?

You can give give your opinions, alright. You just have to live whith the echoes it creates.
You choose to be coarse, so you have to expect that the responses to you will be as well.

Sorry for the double post.
 

Memnoch

Member
I played through roughly have of the game, but found it just an awful slog that was not fun. I've decided as I get older I'm only going to continue with games I find enjoyable and not finish them out of some ethereal obligation. After finishing Doom out of spite, as I thought it was absolutely dreadful, that was the turning point.
 

MikeBison

Member
Probably doesn't even break my top 10 for the year.
Which is a shame because I thought it would be my jam. It kinda was, but it's a solid 7-8/10 in a year of great games.
 

Mifec

Member
Just like Arx Fatalis and Dishonored, Prey is a pretty damn good game.

GOTY, though? Insanity. Breath of The Wild, Persona 5, Nier Automata, Divinity 2, Sonic Mania, Splatoon 2, Resident Evil 7, Nioh, Cuphead, Horizon Zero Dawn, Hollow Knight, Yakuza 0, Steamworld Dig 2, etc etc etc. It's been too good a year.

It's a better game than all of those save BOTW, P5, Divinity 2 and is as good as Hollow Knight.
 

KORNdoggy

Member
playing this at the moment, and it's a shame it took them so long to fix the game on PS4 because it's so much better than the crappy demo made it seem. it's why i didn't buy it until it was £10, i was just waiting for the input lag to be fixed.

only thing i don't like, and this is true for most games like this, but there is way too much world building and story all entirely within in-game emails. i mean, there are better ways to do this sort of thing than reading long reams of text. otherwise it's great so far. not perfect. not GOTY, but it's good.
 
It’s good. Could have been a lot better. But the immersive sum genre is pretty paltry this gen so if you want to play one of those kind of games, absolutely pick this up.
 
I love how the game, it's mechanics and the world is built. It's so systematic.

Basically it establishes a set of basic rules like how physics, upgrades, interactions work and then uses them for building everything, including other rules and it almost always follows them strictly. These same rules also apply to the player

For example, if there's a physical object, then enough force will move it, if there's a keypad then there's a combination to unlock it, if there's a ledge that appears like someone can climb on it, it means you can do it, if there's a small gap that an object can fit through, nothing is stopping you from doing it. There a no invisible walls. The game doesn't cheat on you. All this gives you a big playground of possibilities.

This means that a lot of times you'll think that you are breaking the game, and in fact you will be, but the game is ok with that. And that is the beauty of this game.

It's brilliant. I needed to get into a room but an enemy was blocking my path and I was out of ammo and didn't want to use all my medkits.

So I went into another direction, jumped on a piece of art that was hanging on the ceiling, ran over it, jumped to the window of the room I needed to be in, smashed the glass window with my wrench and entered.

Awesome game that gives you tons of agency.
 

gypsygib

Member
I felt it started off great but really got boring in the middle then picked up in the end. It was the quintessential 8/10 game for me. The actual gameplay got pretty boring.
 
I also really appreciate that in an era of bungled PC ports, Prey was extremely well optimized at launch and ran well on all kinds of machines.
 

Wink

Member
I would love to agree with this. The design ideas are extremely appealing to me. It's so reminiscent of the early 2000s pc games era. It respects its players, expects from them a kind of freeform, open approach that has become rare. Yet I could not learn to love it for two reasons.
The enemies are boring me to tears. Despite the intriguing backstory, their designs as these black gooy things is so unappealing and while sneaking around should be incredibly fun in this game, a big technical problem keeps it from being that for me: the sound design is just broken. The directional audio from the sounds of these creatures makes no sense, it's generally annoying as hell, unbalanced and takes me out of the game so hard. I would have loved to explore this whole thing if it literally were just a space station of traversal puzzles, but everything having to do with encountering the enemies that is fun on paper is completely destroyed by how immensely fucked the audio is. I am this harsh because I really wanted to play more of this game. I usually have no problems overlooking technical problems of games that bring interesting design ideas to the table, but in this case these problems were so deeply annoying that I couldn't deal with it.
 

black070

Member
15 hours in and I'm finding it really overwhelming with all these objectives in all these different directions - loving the game but really wishing there werent minute long load screens between each and every area.
 
15 hours in and I'm finding it really overwhelming with all these objectives in all these different directions - loving the game but really wishing there werent minute long load screens between each and every area.

Yeah the game starts off with you having one side quest at a time, but by the time you reach the later areas you have about 7/8 active at once and it's just not really possible to follow the threads.

I started ignoring them and stuck to the main story.
 
*Breath in* My Body is Read *Breath out*

This game sucked. I found the combat dull, the enemies dull, the story dull. The only thing I enjoyed was the visuals.

I just felt like it was so close to greatness, but why was everything so meh.
 
D

Deleted member 325805

Unconfirmed Member
I finished it, hated it, read reviews, comments etc and realised I played it "wrong" so I did something I've never done before and replayed it despite not enjoying it and it clicked for me. My second playrough was much better and I enjoyed it a lot. Basically I did what I always do, focus the main arc and skip the rest (I tend to struggle to finish games out of boredom if I do all the filler content), this resulted in me being extremely weak which meant I died a lot, I also missed a ton of mechanics and it turns out the side quests were actually great and not just filler content. So definitely take it slow and take it all in if anyone plans to play it soon.
 
I finished it, hated it, read reviews, comments etc and realised I played it "wrong" so I did something I've never done before and replayed it despite not enjoying it and it clicked for me. My second playrough was much better and I enjoyed it a lot. Basically I did what I always do, focus the main arc and skip the rest (I tend to struggle to finish games out of boredom if I do all the filler content), this resulted in me being extremely weak which meant I died a lot, I also missed a ton of mechanics and it turns out the side quests were actually great and not just filler content. So definitely take it slow and take it all in if anyone plans to play it soon.

how did you played it " wrong " at first ?
 
I'm about to finish it the coming days. It's really an incredibly good game. I really enjoyed it. It's not GotY though, not this year at least. But it's sad to see it not getting the attention it deserved
 

Bunga

Member
I finished it, hated it, read reviews, comments etc and realised I played it "wrong" so I did something I've never done before and replayed it despite not enjoying it and it clicked for me. My second playrough was much better and I enjoyed it a lot. Basically I did what I always do, focus the main arc and skip the rest (I tend to struggle to finish games out of boredom if I do all the filler content), this resulted in me being extremely weak which meant I died a lot, I also missed a ton of mechanics and it turns out the side quests were actually great and not just filler content. So definitely take it slow and take it all in if anyone plans to play it soon.

how did you played it " wrong " at first ?

He says in his post haha.
 

Althane

Member
*Breath in* My Body is Read *Breath out*

This game sucked. I found the combat dull, the enemies dull, the story dull. The only thing I enjoyed was the visuals.

I just felt like it was so close to greatness, but why was everything so meh.

So, in a post-mortem state, I will agree with everything but the first sentence. I wouldn't say it sucked, I actually rather liked it.

But combat later on got to be pretty simple, especially with the psychoscope and some of the Typhoon powers. Enemies were repetitive, and the only 'new' enemy in the latter part of the game was a pain in the ass version of robots you were fighting earlier, that I usually just ran away from to get around.

I did like the story, although I didn't try to 'predict' where it was going. I didn't explicitly call the final twist, but given the genre of games it is in, it wasn't really all that surprising to me.

Still, had a lot of fun playing it, even if it turned into a slog, so I can't say "It Sucked". I will settle with, "It could have been better", even if I could really pinpoint HOW it could have been better. I had the same issue with Bioshock, Bioshock 2... eventually you got to a point where you were easily solving every combat situation and it got kinda boring.
 

black070

Member
The second half of the game is far far weaker then the first, and it really is enough to change my opinion on the game.
 

highrider

Banned
I just played the demo, I couldn’t see that combat substaining my interest but I still might pick it up when super cheap.
 

Inuteu

Member
I got it in a promo on Xbox live

great game

Its sad that good single player oriented games like this pass unouticed
 
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