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Was Redfall developed by Arkane Austin or Arkane Lyon? (Or both?) I'm sure I'm not the only one to recall that when Arkane Lyon's studio management team was working on Deathloop, they actively avoided learning lessons from their colleagues at Arkane Austin's recent work, Mooncrash. The studios are probably more like sister organizations than close collaborators, but I imagine that might depend on the project.
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Jun 3, 2023 21:42
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I can't say what happened with Redfall, but I know at least sometimes both studios work on the same game together, and sometimes they work separately on different projects.
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Jun 3, 2023 21:59
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Teledahn posted:Was Redfall developed by Arkane Austin or Arkane Lyon? (Or both?) Just whatever was left of Austin. I think that both studios began operating more or less completely independently from one another after Dishonored was released.
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Jun 3, 2023 22:20
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Lol, it’s Ion Storm all over again, but with less John Romero and more corpo interference.
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Jun 4, 2023 01:26
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aniviron posted:The writing was on the wall when Colantonio left/was forced out. He gave the boilerplate "Spend more time with my family, less time making games" statement then immediately founded a new studio to make games, which is not what a person who is leaving the profession behind does. I'd guess he was pushed out by Zenimax. IIRC in interviews he said he was tired of AAA development, not making games in general. Smaller budget endeavors don't necesseraly conflict with spending more time with family/friends. Especially if they're exculsively working from home. Anyway, hope Arkane Lyon are doing ok. Edit: That being said, I'm sure artistic control had something to do with it. itry fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 12:07
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So I've been replaying Prey for at least the 6th time, and I've realised a couple of things I never noticed before (I am dumb) The cook you meet in Crew quarters who asks you to collect something for him? the extremely obvious fake 'Will Mitchell', who, for some reason, wants the real WMs award from his room. Well, duh, the fake just realised who you are and is sending you away for long enough from him to set up a trap Another detail, down near the power plant, you find a dead person near a broken component, you listen to her transcribe, and she says the drat thing just melted when she installed it an email further on in the area mentions that when it melted it smelled like burning organic matter, ergo it was a bloody mimic Game's not perfect, but the level of thought that went in to so much of it is simply glorious. Pookah fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 17:12
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That first spoiler is a forehead-slap moment, I'm pretty sure it shoulda been obvious almost instantly in hindsight. Forearmed with the knowledge of what's gonna happen thanks to quicksaves, you can mess with the 'ambush', kind of like a competition of forward planning. Which is the ongoing theme from then onwards, I love it. That being said I'm sure I missed a dozen other even more obvious things -_-
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Jun 4, 2023 17:30
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Serephina posted:That first spoiler is a forehead-slap moment, I'm pretty sure it shoulda been obvious almost instantly in hindsight. Forearmed with the knowledge of what's gonna happen thanks to quicksaves, you can mess with the 'ambush', kind of like a competition of forward planning. Which is the ongoing theme from then onwards, I love it. Yeah, in my first play-through, I didn't spot it either , even though it should be incredibly obvious going by the various transcribes you find all over the crew quarters.
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Jun 4, 2023 17:41
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aniviron posted:I can't say what happened with Redfall, but I know at least sometimes both studios work on the same game together, and sometimes they work separately on different projects. My understanding with Mooncrash/Deathloop is that it's not just a matter of "working separately on different projects" but that the Deathloop team intentionally avoided playing Mooncrash or learning anything at all about it, including learning from their mistakes or what went well.
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Jun 4, 2023 18:07
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itry posted:IIRC in interviews he said he was tired of AAA development, not making games in general. Smaller budget endeavors don't necesseraly conflict with spending more time with family/friends. Especially if they're exculsively working from home. Yea he went on to found Wolfeye Studios who made Weird West. Also a bunch of Arkane people went with him.
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Jun 4, 2023 18:13
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The chef sequence was the part of PREY I most loved, tbh. It's the most pronounced point at which the game plays with the player in a way that only immersive sims do. Or at least, I read it as a sort of variation on what a lot of ppl (including myself) remember as their "Immersive Sim Awakening": the ladies bathroom bit in DEUS EX's first Liberty Island sequence. That bathroom bit was essentially calling you out for treating the game space as though it were a sandbox, regarding spaces and objects as necessarily accessible and manipulable just because they existed... kind of funny, actually, that the new ZELDA is the most popular immersive sim ever made (and frankly more "pure" as an immersive sim than the nearest contender, which is probably BIOSHOCK), given that the DX bit more or less raps the player's knuckles for treating the bathroom the way classic ZELDA treated its spaces. Pots in a village hut were there for no other reason than to be smashed and looted by Link. That orientation toward game spaces is precisely what DX exposed. The ladies bathroom is clearly labeled, but your conditioning as a player to see every door you do not open as a missed opportunity overrides your awareness of the basic logic that JC Denton has no reason to enter the ladies bathroom, and it shows you, playfully, how stupid and deranged it would be to seriously make the choices you do. Anyway, the chef sequence in PREY does basically the same thing, but with quest design instead of level design. Generally we are conditioned, as game players, to see tasks presented and then do them. You don't not do; the value of refusing an offered quest is profoundly low even in the most acclaimed choice-and-consequence RPGs, because getting content is the point of play and it's hard to design around non-engagement. By that point in PREY it has demonstrated that its quests and tasks are not signaled and gated in ways that most games (including most immersive sims, including DX and the DISHONOREDs) do; it has a journal log, but beyond the opening of the game there are (iirc) no cutscenes of any kind. Quests are executed purely by the standard interactions you make within the game world, which is to say there is never a point at which the game stops its flow and boxes in your focus until you make a choice. Even given up-or-down choice prompts in the one-shot dilemma scenes (eg Walton Goggins's cell in Psychotronics, the shuttle headed for earth), the way you make those choices is seamless within the flow of gameplay -- you do it the same way you interact with any computer. And those choices when presented can be walked away from at any point. Your typical player goes into PREY expecting it to function under certain modern design standards, one of which is that a fair game explicitly warns you when you are about to make a decision. It stops everything and says "FYI this is a threshold, watch your step". FALLOUT does this, THE WITCHER does this, DEUS EX does this. Most games pursue this design under the (pretty sound!) logic that players will be more invested in and find choices "fairer" if choices and quest steps are brought to chokepoints of play, the better to make the player aware of and bring them to "own" the choice presented. Choice points in most RPGs are actually minigames, from a design perspective. They have their own special UIs and they take place outside the timescale of normal play. But PREY critiques and complicates that approach by forgoing the leash-tug signaling of traditional RPG quest design (other notable games that don't: FROM Software's souls-likes.) Even though I knew by that point in the game that there were no Bethsoft-style stop-and-talk dialogue trees, or WITCHER choice wheels where my character stands there until I choose between coke and pepsi or whatever, there was still the Pavlovian part of me that insisted at some point all the things I am doing will culminate to a single point of synthesis, everything I'm doing is leading up to a minigame that presents choices, the things I learn do not actually matter until that specific moment. But PREY does not work like that. You don't do things in order to set up a choice. Doing things is the choice! Players will already know this if they assumed October would just sit tight until the player gets around to meeting up and October gets got as a result. It's telling you to pay attention. So I, and frankly most people I know who've played, got to the chef sequence and surmised, almost immediately, that the vibes were rancid and the guy could not be trusted. But games do that all the time and still expect you to play along, and PREY is not subtle about the dude's terrible deception. Next to the medal in the cabin is a loving picture of the chef and it is clearly not the guy you're fetching for. So at every step of the sequence, I was like "the big choice is coming, I'll play along to see what happens, the game will surely let me get the upper hand in the end." I said this to myself even as he was inviting me into the freezer. After that, you're supposed to feel stupid, because the stupid prize you received was won through a game that was stupid from the jump, and yet you chose to play it anyway. Like DX it asked you to pay attention and clowned on you when you didn't. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Jun 4, 2023 |
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Jun 4, 2023 20:06
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i most loved YOUR USE OF CAPITALS. it's the most SCREAMING point.
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Jun 4, 2023 20:51
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I broadly speaking agree. I seem to recall that in addition to the chef's photo, you also need to listen to an audio log of him, and there are several more audio logs of him scattered around. It set off every alarm bell for me that this guy wasn't who he claimed he was and then I did what he asked anyway. Except also the freezer is full of goodies so who got the last laugh huh?
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Jun 5, 2023 01:24
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I went in the freezer because that's how you get more quest in video games. Including Prey. If you don't go in the freezer you don't get the freezer sequence and you don't get anything else in return.
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Jun 5, 2023 02:02
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I distinctly remember going through my PDA and replaying the chef’s audio logs when I got to that point because I knew something was up just to confirm my memory, but I played along anyway.
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Jun 5, 2023 03:13
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Phigs posted:I went in the freezer because that's how you get more quest in video games. Including Prey. If you don't go in the freezer you don't get the freezer sequence and you don't get anything else in return. Very true. The only way to get people to opt out of content is to make it mutually exclusive with other content, such as branching paths. Which means that they're replay value, which is good, but also means you're working double-time for stuff some people will never see, which is bad. I still go into the freezer.
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Jun 5, 2023 03:15
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Phigs posted:I went in the freezer because that's how you get more quest in video games. Including Prey. If you don't go in the freezer you don't get the freezer sequence and you don't get anything else in return. It would have been better if there was some way you could outsmart him and set a reverse trap. Once again, Deus Ex is the GOAT, letting you set a LAM on Lebedev's plane to intercept Navarre.
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Jun 5, 2023 04:46
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That LAM not really an intended mechanic from the devs, that's just Navarre being psuedo-hostile as she spawns in and you getting the drop on her. Likewise, there's nothing stopping you from shooting the Prey dude in the face. Well I suppose there's some dialogue for killing Navarre, which is an intended outcome, while killing the dude just stops all the fun events from happening. Which I suppose proves your point, hrm.
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Jun 5, 2023 04:51
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There’s not much that’s gated if you don’t enter the freezer — obviously you can enter the freezer whether or not the “chef” is there to lock you in. What you miss out on if you don’t take the bait are a few ominous phone calls and a whole lot of recycler traps. At the end of all that, there’s not any loot or the like that you’d miss out on if you clocked the guy on the head.
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Jun 5, 2023 08:54
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I guess being able to shoot him in the face before the trap even happens is a step up. Usually these types of games protect NPCs by talking to the player only through phone/video calls and audio logs until you're supposed to be able to kill them (or from behind nuke-proof glass, like in Deus Ex: Invisible War).
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Jun 5, 2023 12:33
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Also being able to save/reload really changes the dynamic for something like the chef. You can know it's a trap and walk into it anyway to see what will happen (DE:HR putting the consequence of getting the chip upgrade far down the road helps with this) because you you know you can just reload if you die.
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Jun 5, 2023 12:42
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One of these days I have to replay Prey, which I loved. The only issue I had that, if you were a thorough explorer (and why wouldn't you be it, in this type of game), you ended up with so many resources it trivialized the game. Oh no, this dangerous drone foe in a tunnel, what I will do... wait, I have like, 55 emp grenades on my inventory. I think there is a 'hard difficulty' mod somewhere, I have to try to use it.
Turin Turambar fucked around with this message at 13:34 on Jun 5, 2023 |
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Jun 5, 2023 12:43
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A Good Post, but I wanted to dig into this a bit:Basic Chunnel posted:Your typical player goes into PREY expecting it to function under certain modern design standards, one of which is that a fair game explicitly warns you when you are about to make a decision. It stops everything and says "FYI this is a threshold, watch your step". FALLOUT does this, THE WITCHER does this, DEUS EX does this. Does DX do this? For the most part, the choices you make are entirely "by the standard interactions you make within the game world". Capturing or killing the NSF leader on liberty island, killing Lebedev vs. letting Anna kill him vs. killing Anna to save him vs. tranquilizing him and carrying him around until you can leave him someplace safe¹, choosing whether to approach Castle Clinton through the front door or the back, whether you rescue the hostages in the subway and the 'ton, standing your ground with Paul vs. fleeing, even which ending you get. Some of these are pretty minor and only affect a few lines of dialogue in the next level, others are pretty major (by DX standards, we aren't going to get Alpha Protocol levels of branching here). There's a few places where it sits you down and asks you via the dialogue interface What Do You Do, but those are relatively rare; the only one I can think of offhand that is relatively major in effect is whether or not you use the killphrases and whether you ask Jaime to stay behind. ¹ the game treats this the same as killing him; I like to think of it as faking his death
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Jun 5, 2023 12:50
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Turin Turambar posted:One of these days I have to replay Prey, which I loved. The only issue I had that, if you were a through explorer (and why wouldn't you be it, in this type of game), you ended up with so many resources it trivialized the game. Oh no, this dangerous drone foe in a tunnel, what I will do... wait, I have like, 55 emp grenades on my inventory. I think there is a 'hard difficulty' mod somewhere, I have to try to use it. A Typhon-only run solves that problem by never letting you upgrade your inventory space 
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Jun 5, 2023 13:34
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I did the Typhon only run with all three survival modifiers they added in an update. Some of the traumas really suck, because the limited inventory space means you're going to avoid bringing the specific meds to deal with them with you. You can end up having some nasty debuffs until you make it back to place you dumped all the excess inventory items that were too important to turn into resources.
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Jun 5, 2023 14:04
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I've only played with the survival mods on, and I think carrying 3 tiny slots for 'just-in-case medkits' was a far preferable fate to listening to my bones crunch as I walk on them, egad.
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Jun 5, 2023 14:31
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ToxicFrog posted:A Good Post, but I wanted to dig into this a bit: This is all true! I put too much weight on the existence of dialogue trees in the first place. Definitely works to a different degree than a trad RPG
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Jun 5, 2023 18:52
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Turin Turambar posted:One of these days I have to replay Prey, which I loved. The only issue I had that, if you were a thorough explorer (and why wouldn't you be it, in this type of game), you ended up with so many resources it trivialized the game. Oh no, this dangerous drone foe in a tunnel, what I will do... wait, I have like, 55 emp grenades on my inventory. I think there is a 'hard difficulty' mod somewhere, I have to try to use it. Side note, I'm playing the System Shock Remake and I'm counting the bullets in my gun in a way I haven't done since the mid-90s, it's frustrating and tense in the best way cuz I'm having to pick and choose my fights, altering my route through the station appropriately, but I'm still surviving. The only thing that poured cold water on that was the single scripted event I ran into, a loving Cortex Reaver dropping into your face on the Flight Deck, which basically gated me out of that room until I come back with a poo poo load more ammo
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Jun 5, 2023 20:16
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ElectricSheep posted:The only thing that poured cold water on that was the single scripted event I ran into, a loving Cortex Reaver dropping into your face on the Flight Deck, which basically gated me out of that room until I come back with a poo poo load more ammo That was in the original game and I'm so glad they kept it in the remake.
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Jun 5, 2023 20:51
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Mierenneuker posted:I did the Typhon only run with all three survival modifiers they added in an update. Oh that was posterior to when I played it. What are the three possible modifiers?
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Jun 5, 2023 20:55
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ToxicFrog posted:That was in the original game and I'm so glad they kept it in the remake. Plus the Game Over button lol
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Jun 5, 2023 21:00
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Turin Turambar posted:Oh that was posterior to when I played it. What are the three possible modifiers? https://prey.fandom.com/wiki/Survival_Mode Weapon Degradation had some awkward moments early on, but stopped being a problem after the early game (might be just be once I got the recipe to create the shotgun on demand). Oxygen never really was an issue for me. I think I was a bit more cautious when outside the station. Traumas is the main one. Those medical operators become your best friend.
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Jun 5, 2023 21:31
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I appreciate the trauma systems but the nature of the gameplay, at least by a certain point, makes them not as interesting as they should be. The point of them is to introduce some friction: you got this far, but now you have to make a choice either have to go on with the constraint, bearing through it or hoping to find a fix going forward, or go back through the dangers you already faced, but with the constraint added. The problem is that Talos I is a sumptuously designed space which in many cases allows you to avoid the combat in which the traumas really come to bear — most players aren’t going in with one of two possible guns blazing anyway. Add to that the fact that if you’ve cleared an area to loot it thoroughly, the game is pretty forgiving with respawns — a regular phantom, maybe an etheric — so your backtracking to a medical drone is probably not super complicated. Also, if you’re playing PREY now you’ve probably completed it already and already know where everything you could need is. MOONCRASH with its time constraints and substantial spawns is obviously built more around trauma, but even then most of them are pretty easy to avoid in practice. Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 17:31
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Yeah, outside of an inconveniently timed bit of hemorrhaging which usually meant that survivor was about to abruptly have their run end, the big trauma problem in Mooncrash was getting concussed and not being able to install new neuromods.
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Jun 6, 2023 23:22
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I'm playing through Mooncrash and I have unlocked a lot of fab plans but I still can't make the hourglasses to reverse corruption. Anywhere to look for that one?
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Jun 13, 2023 05:26
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It's random. You might be able to learn the schematic by disassembling enough of them as the engineer.
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Jun 13, 2023 05:31
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Also, do yourself a favor and never fab that item, it totally breaks the game if you have an easy supply of those things instead of having to fight minibosses for them. Nobody ever heeds to this advice, we just echo it to the next fool who won't listen.
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Jun 13, 2023 05:44
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I only made some for the final “everyone out” run but they were largely superfluous by that point since I had everyone kitted and statted out well enough that I was able to speed on through before the sim level would have gotten too high. But yeah, use the ones you find but don’t make a habit of them else a lot of the edge and tension comes off the experience.
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Jun 13, 2023 15:22
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Ravenfood posted:Also being able to save/reload really changes the dynamic for something like the chef. You can know it's a trap and walk into it anyway to see what will happen (DE:HR putting the consequence of getting the chip upgrade far down the road helps with this) because you you know you can just reload if you die. Maybe if you have no honour, but I do and I delete my saves after a death.
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Jun 13, 2023 15:57
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Serephina posted:Also, do yourself a favor and never fab that item, it totally breaks the game if you have an easy supply of those things instead of having to fight minibosses for them. Yeah, I found the fab shortly after posting and I see what you mean. I was able to get 4 of my guys off the island without it anyway
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Jun 13, 2023 17:03
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