Arkane PREY - Arkane's immersive coffee cup transformation sim - now with Mooncrash roguelike mode DLC

[LESS T_T]

Well, FWIW I assume most, if not all, of these demonstration videos are showing gameplay on the easiest difficulty. (Though it's not like I expect their hardest will be SS2 "Impossible" hard or even just hard.)

 

[agris]

RoSoDude dude, the answer to all your bads and uglies are: because it makes the game easier, and thus ameniable to the widest possible audience. how on earth are you unfamiliar with the thought processes behind such design decisions?

You think I don't know this? When I ask "why", it's rhetorical. I know it's to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I can still lament the fact anyway.

I'm complaining about them because this game has/had potential, and it's a shame to see what appears to be a legitimate spiritual successor to System Shock 2 dumbed down right before our very eyes. It's a further shame that Arkane is getting heaps of praise for "bringing back the immersive sim" on top of it all.

My bad, I haven't followed the thread that closely and misunderstood the context of your post.

 

[RoSoDude]

RoSoDude dude, the answer to all your bads and uglies are: because it makes the game easier, and thus ameniable to the widest possible audience. how on earth are you unfamiliar with the thought processes behind such design decisions?

You think I don't know this? When I ask "why", it's rhetorical. I know it's to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I can still lament the fact anyway.

I'm complaining about them because this game has/had potential, and it's a shame to see what appears to be a legitimate spiritual successor to System Shock 2 dumbed down right before our very eyes. It's a further shame that Arkane is getting heaps of praise for "bringing back the immersive sim" on top of it all.

My bad, I haven't followed the thread that closely and misunderstood the context of your post.

Yeah, I get that. My reply started out a lot ruder but I edited it since I figured you're used to people with <50 posts who haven't gotten the picture yet. and all that.

 

[MuscleSpark]

We Daft Punk now?

 

[LESS T_T]

You won't enjoy the commentary.

 

[Siel]

I like the slow pace. Definitely SS2 relatable. The complexity of systems looks rather interesting.
I fucking hate all theses UI tips tho...

 

[ciox]

You won't enjoy the commentary.

You weren't kidding.
I see the oxygen is still out but the Status tab is back at least.

 

[Morgoth]

 

[LESS T_T]

Ricardo Bare on today's "immersive sims": http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-04-07-its-not-the-michael-bay-of-games

[...]

That's not to say the game has no proper predecessors. Like Bare said, it's part of a tradition of immersive sims that has been trending upward in the last decade. Bare acknowledged that 2007's BioShock sparked the genre in a big way, but prior to that, Arkane was one of a handful of studios carrying the torch with titles like Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. When asked why the genre fell out of favor for a stretch, Bare said it was at least partly because immersive sims are just really difficult to make.

"They're hard to communicate to people exactly why they're special," Bare said. "It's not something that's super obvious. Because the games ask a lot of players; it's like playing an instrument. To get the most out of this kind of game, you have to work a little harder as a player. It plummets depths. It's not the Michael Bay of games, it's a little more complex. And it's harder to develop. There are more difficult problems to solve. And then if you take into account bigger teams, and higher art fidelity and budget, transitioning platforms, it sort of took a while for all those things to converge where we were like, 'OK, we know how to do this really complex game and manage the high art bar that there is for games, and the long development cycles and things like that.'"

Fortunately for fans of the genre, Bare doesn't see the genre's profile sliding that low anytime soon.

"Even if a pure immersive sim--whatever that is--does [fade], we are seeing other kinds of games," Bare said. "There's a philosophy behind the immersive sim, and other kinds of games that aren't even first-person games do those things. Some do them consciously. Some are just unrelated to immersive sims but have those properties. So we're seeing that stuff in other games. There are more first-person games right now that have interesting RPG mechanics layered onto them that allow more player expression. The Bethesda guys have been doing that stuff for the same amount of time. Skyrim and Fallout have that cool open-ended design to them."

"Cool open-ended design" isn't the only thing you're likely to find frequently in immersive sims. It's not uncommon to find bugs and exploits and a general lack of polish in the genre.

"There's definitely a trade off between the more features you want to jam into a game and the more complexity," Bare said. "And if you still want to ship at a specific point and you only want to spend a certain amount of money, then there's going to be a priority. This feature is going to get more polish than that feature, just out of necessity."

That friction between the genre's push to have complex interacting systems and the AAA industry's insistence on polish crops up from time to time, but Bare suggested much can be forgiven if the right things have been polished.

"There's a lot of stuff players are willing to forgive if the right things scratch the itch they're looking for," Bare he said. "Players are going to forgive some glitchy animation if that means they get this vast, open world that's beautiful with lots of depth to it that not a lot of other people are doing as well."

Immersive sims have also been thriving outside the AAA space. Bare said plenty of developers who worked on bigger AAA immersive sims have since brought those design philosophies into the indie world and are making "more stripped down, concentrated versions" of the larger scale counterparts. He referenced Fullbright Studios (Gone Home, Tacoma) as one such example, and pointed to 2D games like Gunpoint and Mark of the Ninja as pushing the immersive sim approach into new forms.

Arkane is unquestionably dealing with a lot more competition in the immersive sim genre than it was a decade ago, but Bare clearly wouldn't have it any other way.

"If you rewind time 10-15 years, even further back, a very small, privileged subset group of people could even make games," Bare said. "Not everybody had access to that kind of stuff. So now, because the ability to make a game is way more accessible, and I think it's going to become more and more accessible as time goes on, it does necessarily make this glut of games. There's this detritus out there, but there's also so much good stuff. I think it just follows that the more diversity of developers means the more diversity of games, and that just means there are way more cool ideas in the ecology. And I think that's why we're seeing cool little indie games pop up all over the place. Some of them are retro throwbacks, but some are really fresh, cool ideas."

 

[Infinitron]

Fortunately for fans of the genre, Bare doesn't see the genre's profile sliding that low anytime soon.

It might if DX: MD, Dishonored 2 and Prey all flop lol

Also, no mention of OtherSide Entertainment? Tsk tsk.

 

[LESS T_T]

Also, no mention of OtherSide Entertainment? Tsk tsk.

Zenimaxing

Also I guess they're nervously watching the expansion of Otherside Austin.

 

[Morgoth]

The fact that DUMB 2016 has outsold Dishonored 2 by a factor of 3 or 4 tells be the market still prefers the Michael Bay treatment.

Sad!

 

[Excidium II]

Also, no mention of OtherSide Entertainment? Tsk tsk.

Zenimaxing

Also I guess they're nervously watching the expansion of Otherside Austin.

Maybe those snake oil salesmen arent even worth mentioning.

 

[RoSoDude]

The fact that DUMB 2016 has outsold Dishonored 2 by a factor of 3 or 4 tells be the market still prefers the Michael Bay treatment.

Sad!

Or a sign that people would rather not buy garbage PC ports with massive technical issues? You realize Dishonored 2 still has massive issues not only with average framerate but also with frame pacing even on high-end systems that can make it a total crapshoot whether you'll find the game naueseating to play.

Not to mention, DOOM 2016 seems slightly more aware of retro FPS design principles than does Dishonored games are with respect to its roots in Thief/Deus Ex. I won't deny that Arkane is making deeper games, but that doesn't instantly make them better executed than a simplistic violence romp with a high level of polish. Obviously the latter is aiming for a wider (read: more casual) demographic, but that isn't the whole story.

 

[Morgoth]

Dishonored 2 is perfectly playable if you know what to tweak. Do some research, put some little effort into it (like the heydays of PC gaming), and it will run well. Not great, but well enough.

 

[Excidium II]

D44M runs smooth as butter. Dishonored 2 requires you to have massive overkill hardware to run its 2011 grafics decently.

 

[Alienman]

I tried the Dishonored 2 demo and it ran very smooth. By reading the steam reviews I expected it to stutter like shit. Had stuff on high or very high. V-sync fucks up the game though. With it on it drops fps all over the place.

 

[Latelistener]

They fucked up the release of a game that no one asked for, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
Personally I could have been more enthusiastic about it if there were new characters, and it was set in Tyvia as the fake leak suggested.

 

[LESS T_T]

They're playing on highest difficulty mode.

 

[Morgoth]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-04-12-prey-demo-lets-you-play-the-first-hour-of-the-game

Bethesda will release a demo of Prey that lets you play the first hour of the game.

The demo comes out on Thursday 27th April on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (there's no mention of PC) - a week before the game launches proper on 5th May.

It's likely the same segment we already watched to death, but I'm grateful for the gesture anyway.

Edit: Apparently console only lol.

 

[sullynathan]

 

[MuscleSpark]

No mention of PC? WTF is this bullshit?
Are they afraid pirates are going to use it to crack Denuvo like they did with D44M or something?

 

[Morgoth]

Are they afraid pirates are going to use it to crack Denuvo like they did with D44M or something?

Likely. A sound business decision. Or do you think they're gonna throw first week sales away for charity?

 

[Cyberarmy]

My second guess is on shitty optimization.

 

[LESS T_T]

Also afraid of datamining (spoilers!), I guess.