Sorry, but you got this totally bad way around, and this "immersive sim" wtf are you talking about? This is another SShock or Bioshock...not Prenumbra or such. Prey was boycotted because of Prey 2 kill-off. Game is great, but what's the point in calling it Prey if it has nothing to do with either Prey 1 or Prey 2 ...? Those who knew old Prey and waited for Prey 2 hated this move, and those who knew nothing about whole case or did not care would not be interested in "Prey" universe to begin with so game could be called "Phantoms" or anything...and sold more copies.
Yeah, only to give 8 after they completed it again... this kind of reviewer are just one of the cause that made unique games like Prey or Dishonored 2 to not receiving the success they deserve
@@TheMaskedWarrior92 This is the kind of thing that allows gaming publications to create their own stories - they can say things in five years time like "Revisiting Prey, the underappreciated masterpiece", despite the fact that their own review score made people look away from the game, making it underappreciated.
One of my favorite games ever. And now in 2020 we are officially in the cycle where a lot of the outlets that put down Prey 2017 are making articles like "it's the bioshock we all just missed, a hidden gem" bullshit.
Yea people were really mixed about it at launch but you gotta just enjoy the game. Pretty much every immersive sim seems less impressive when you dig deep into every aspect. Enjoy the game for what it is, not what it’s trying to do.
I love this game. It's totally way more dreadful a scenario than any other horror survival scenario, and the ending... let's get that sequel already, we want a future perfect scenario here.
@@nepdisc3722 ImSims aren't dead. They never will be. It's the aspiration that gaming has always reached for. They will always be made when a passionate group of people with the skills and resources are provided the opportunity to reach as far as they possibly can. They will likely never be the most popular games, because they require you to think (the horror!), but they will never be gone. With all of the technology available to indie developers now, I expect ImSims will be even more common from places not owned by one of the big five or whatever corporations. Where profit isn't the only motivation and seeing what can be done with the format is is where ImSIms will live.
Me: "Nah I think I was pretty thorough and found most of the secrets--" Charlatan: "Certain fire alarms on Talos station are actually secret cupboards containing--" Me: "Wait, what?!? WHAT!?!?"
Maxie Karn I remember the smugglers but I always sorta... didn’t listen to well to it. Honestly that and the Aircraft hanger are the two places I don’t frequent.
Feels like it was almost created deliberately to become a hidden gem... maybe they're playing the long-game and have huge plans for something in 10 or so years time.
From the first helicopter ride to the final decision Prey gave me so many incredible and unforgettable moments, more than a hidden gem Prey is a true classic.
1:19 - 1:34, The way you recount Prey's development history is inaccurate. After Prey 2 was taken from Human Head, Bethesda tried to get Obsidian to finish the game, but in the end they couldn't because Human Head made tons of modifications to ID Tech 4 that Bethesda did not have to source code to, so the game remained unfinished. Arkane's Prey was a completely separate project and idea. Bethesda greenlit development for the game under the condition that it was under the Prey IP because the two games share some similarities in concept and it's easier to market an existing IP rather than a new IP. Arkane didn't scrap anything from Prey 2, this is their original project.
I still wish we had gotten the original vision of Prey 2. The reboot/whatever the new one would be was good, but being a space bounty hunter looked so fucking cool. Star Wars Bounty Hunter was one of my favorite games as a kid, so Prey 2 had me hyped as hell.
@@gnarkillguch Same here. I just want to make sure that no one puts any blame on Arkane, because this video makes it sound like they had a chance to finish Prey 2 which is not the case at all.
@Shurryy Namegenerator It's not, its mediocre. The fact that few people bought it or played it, speaks volumes to how much interest there was in Arkane Studios' version of Prey in comparison to Human Head's sequel. You have to bare in mind I was there in the Bethesda forums, and others, when they announced and showcased both of these games. When Human Head's sequel was announced, every forum related to Bethesda was alight with hype for that game. But when Arkane Studios' version of Prey was announced, it practically fell on deaf ears, and no one who I spoke to was the least bit excited for this game. This was because people were massively disappointed that they weren't getting the game they saw back in 2011; which many, even to this day, see as superior compared to the game they got.
@Shurryy Namegenerator Have you seen the gameplay? The story they had, prey 2 would have innovated the fps genra, the developers at HumanHead even said in 2015 I believe talking about the future movements games like advanced warfare, bo3 and Titanfall had, they said they were doing all that years before those studios even had the idea's! Hell even that shoulder cannon that Doom eternal has Prey 2 even had that years before! Prey 2 would have exploded but bethesda got too greedy and tried to buy them out, after they refused they gave them unreasonable deadlines and tried to bleed them dry so they can be bought at a pretty penny, but after fallout 76 bethesda's true colors shined they are not the saints you're eluding too! Thank heaven's that HumanHead managed too survive!
2017 was a really good gaming year. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is perhaps the best RPG game ever made and also it was one of the best strategy games that year and it was very long so that pulled people away from playing many other games.
It’s so deep. I’ve been gaming since the early 90s and there are certain titles I’ve just kept going back to over the years, no matter how dated they get. Prey is going to be one of them.
Prey was the last time I got full throttle hyped for a game bought it day 1 and it met every expectation I had. Since then there has not been a single game to meet my expectations at launch.
The absolutely absurd expectations and expenses of triple A games are the noose around their neck. They hobble themselves and make it impossible to really do anything out of the box.
I don't know if you know this, but the stun gun and the Mindjack psychic power (or one of them, at any rate) safely disable mind-controlled people, so that should make the Telepaths a lot easier on a kill-no-one run.
Yep, I found that when in an audio a guy says that a coworker went mad and he had to stun him, that's when it clicked for me and well, now I let them come in and I stun the mind controlled one by one and then kill the Telepath
This is one of my favorite games of all time. I love absolutely everything about it, it’s a flat out masterpiece to me. I cannot get enough of this game
Excellent video. Prey is by far one of the most under-appreciated games of the last decade. But it's nice to see it slowly turning into a cult classic game. And about that bit at the end about whether we'll have more immersive sims or not, we DO have them. But in a different way. After all four AAA immersive sims of this generation (Dishonored 2, Death of the Outsider, Prey and Deus Ex Mankind Divided) flopping in sales, immersive sims are taking a lower budget and experimental route, especially among indie developers. For example, Prey Mooncrash mixing up the genre with rogue lite elements, The Blackout Club being a 4 player coop immersive sim, the recently announced Void Bastards essentially being the love child of XCOM and System Shock, and The Occupation, which is basically an immersive sim without weapons within 4 real time hours. We also had Underworld Ascendant earlier this month, being sort of a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld games. But sadly it turned out to be a bit of a stinker. And that's not all! More and more games are borrowing and using elements of the immersive sim genre like Breath of the Wild, Far Cry, and the new Hitman games which could almost be considered immersive sims, due to their highly systemic and multi-approach design. My point is that immersive sims aren't dead. In fact they are coming back stronger in different forms and I couldn't be happier about that.
🙂 yes it does feel like a cult classic, i mite be getting Dishonored 2 soon cause its on clearance at my Microcenter, mite be worth checking it out since alot of people mention it, thanks for ur insights too 😊
@@MrSamadolfo Oh please do get that game! It has some of the best level design you'll ever see in a game. Easily one of my favorites of this generation!
I loved Prey but it's definitely a more "it's about the journey than the destination" sorta games. The game really runs out of steam toward the end and beating the game was as easy as just traveling from point A to point B. I had a bad feeling that's how it was gonna be also as I was getting closer to the end and stockpiling ammo and whatnot. The game really hits its high point for me when you go to the Psycotronics (?) division to get that psycho scope (?) thingy. You really feel at that point in the game like you're not quite powerful enough and that maybe you've ventured a bit too deep into enemy territory and every little victory feels like territory gained and it's so satisfying and the tension is great in that whole part of the game. Lots of games shine most in that part of the progression, where you're starting to get a bit more powerful that you take a risk into a harder section of the game, but once you're there you're actually not sure if you have what it takes.
You said it dude the destination was total shite. Afte that i didnt wanna play because theres no compelling characters and the combat isnt that great anyway
@vin 950 LOL Right? How many times will I shoot them with my gloo gun to just hack them. Boy did I get sick of that mini game.I did it like hundreds of times and maybe failed it once. There should be an option after that many times to just have a prompt to hack the the thing and there be no mini game.
@@peergynt9852 You're exactly right. Even though in DS every area is pretty hard, Blighttown is when you are looking back at its entrance and thinking, "Um....I can still back out."
Arkane reminds me so much of looking glass studios. It is unfortunate the immersive sims are not sold well cause those are the games that truly make use videogames as a true medium. I hope deathloop sells well.
This was a really, really good video. I love Prey, it's not a game I go back to and play for a few hours - it's something that I'll suddenly get an urge to escape to when life feels monotonous and bleak. It demands your concentration and respect, then rewards you with intangible beauty and understanding. The only bad thing I have to say is that the enemies needed greater variety of design. Oh - and something that could have boosted monetary overheads that I would have been able to live with would have been product placement. Remember Parasite Eve 2? Weird game, shouldn't have existed (although I'm glad it does) - but you can drink Coca-Cola to restore MP, and see prominent adverts for it, including a vending machine that is part of an early cutscene.
@@deadshr00m54 I love how you can explore new ways to solve problems you face, or read an email you previously didn't and learn someting intriguing. Love this game, doing my fourth playthrough right now ahah
Prey is in some respects old school. It needs a couple brain cells activated and is more addressed to the adult gamer than the 12 year old console jockey the industry loves so much. It is a good fps/rpg hybrid and as such it simply cant be a megaseller,because economic success is in 95% of all cases bought by the lowest common denominator. But developers know that,because games are not just made since last year but for decades now.
@@fistedasian9594 hey man, don't be like that I was 15 when it came out and absolutely loved it Same goes for other classics like OG Thief for example or VtMB
The difficulty of Prey wasn't a turn-off to most people it was due to how meticulous the game was. Like how often you have to search through chests and how slowly you progress. The reason why people are turned off to it but aren't turned off to something like Fallout is due to how that is considered more of an action game where you have to pay attention a lot less. Something to bear in mind is when games like System Shock 2 released it was considered an extremely niche game. When Night Dive re-released it a decade and a half later, it sold better digitally than it ever did at retail due to its reputation. One of the reasons why Bioshock sold amazingly well was due to how focused it was on action and much of the sim elements were downplayed. The action game demographic is much larger than the type that wants a more complicated and slower paced game and developers have known this for decades now. It's also why certain genres like the flight sim have gone the way of the dinosaur.
YES. I hate it when people talk about Bioshock like it's an immersive sim - it totally isn't. It has a wrench melee weapon, some light RPG mechanics and atmospheric storytelling but that's it. It's very linear. You are required to have certain specific powers to progress. It's full of scripted sequences and there are unskippable boss battles. The stealth system is very basic and is completely unusable in many sitations. Bioschock is a first-person shooter with some light RPG elements and an immersive aesthetic.
@@thesupremegentlemanatheist7382 yup, first time i played i played super stealthy not using any of my resources. And at mid game, i had so much ammo and skills i realized, i can kill anything , included the nightmare without being stealthy. Then it became a doom game with platforming.
The raising price idea itself is a stupid one. Because that's not how economics work. You either spend less money on the product or raise the price. And the former is scary for the consumers. No one is paying 80$ for a normal game (unless it included extras but even then most people wouldn't accept it) it's just that games that aren't guaranteed to sell as franchises are supposed to start as AA as in dark souls the new call of cthulu game and hellblade which all three were not just excellent games but they sold well compared to thier budget and for darksouls? Iy created and popularised a new freaking genre and proceeded to produce three AAA games that also did well. Publishers and developers should stop selling with expensive ads and graphics and make fun games with less money (hellblade is a gorgeous game without being relatively expensive to make) so the risk of flopping is less and profit is more guaranteed. Plus on top of that things like mocap and the like are extremely cheap now. You can get a set for 16k so there's no excuse that games are costing more to make because the top companies are just spending more in general. But aside from that this is an extremely good video good job
If they would have tried to make Prey a AA game instead of a AAA game it wouldn't have worked. Less budget would have meant less features. They would have had to cut a lot of the game and that would likely have severely impacted its quality for the worse.
The fire alarm secret is actually not that hard to find, there is an audio log that explains it in Shuttle Bay and one you can find earlier that gives you the quest to find the smuggler caches, but doesn't explain what they look like. Granted, Shuttle Bay is really late so most people probably didn't go around checking everything on the station after finding that log, but you are told about it and it's a game that's build to be replayed anyway. The thing that made me realize I was going to love this game is when I got the taser gun early in the first area by getting creative with the gloo gun and climbing up somewhere I wasn't supposed to. The only two big complaints I have are that combat gets too easy if you invest in the right skills to the point were even Nightmares don't feel like a threat anymore (I'll experiment with the survival options next, maybe that fixes it) and the shitty bugged quest for dragging Dahl into the Medbay in zero G.
I freakin love the gloo gun and the nerf crossbow. They make getting to places i should'nt be able to enter so much easier and fun to figure out how XD instead of just relying on the skills needed to hack or move stuff.
@@sionteemo9697 I just love in general how half the weapons you get are two different tools and a literal toy that deals no damage. Really adds to the feeling that you're out of your depth and have to get creative with what you have. Especially because the shotgun requires you get close, and the Q-Beam works best as a finisher on already damaged or stunned enemies, so even the two good weapons still rely on you using the rest of your arsenal and abilities.
;o The smuggler caches were basically the only thing in the game I didn't do because I could never find them. And they're all in the fire alarms? Lmao Man, this fkn game...
the longer playtime isn't a valid reason as to why it could potentially turn off consumers. Persona 5 had 2 million copies sold and its playtime can range from 70-100 hours. MGS5 takes 45 hours if you're just doing the missions and 85 otherwise, and that sold 6 million. It's FAR, FAR more likely that the big discrepancy between Deus Ex Mankind Divided/Tomb Raider's sales figures and Prey's is due to the consumer perception that it's a new IP because nobody remembers Prey 2006. If Bethesda had name it something like "FutureShock" or licensed the System Shock name and named it System Shock 3 it easily would've moved 3-4 million units. As well Prey had significantly less marketing as a lot of other immersive sim type games like Bioshock. Which by comparison had television commercials featuring things like the Big Daddies and Plasmids. Prey had a trailer and a few other marketing bits but most people didn't even know what the game was about until after it released and people went "oh you can do this, and this in the game". They did an extremely poor job with the marketing for the game and they really should've been specific and focused with it.
I think his point about the playtime is that you can't experience that much of the game in one playthrough, and multiple playthroughs of a long game are not super popular
@@thomasshaw6938 I wouldn't say that's accurate. There are notable examples of games that require playing multiple times that are extremely popular. A REALLY good example is the Mass Effect trilogy all require at least 2 playthroughs per game to experience everything and those sold extremely well.
@@finnfeaver1196 I played and beat the witcher 3,prey (10 times) dishonored (9 times) dishonored 2(15 times) my attention span is fine thanks you stupid fuck
I tend to be pretty picky with what first-person titles I play, but Prey reminded me a lot of some of my favorites. Metroid Prime, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Fallout New Vegas. I know none of these are direct inspirations to Prey, but the sense of mood, a finely crafted open-world experience that wasn't just about collecting tokens all over the map, and the fact that you could give yourself so many objectives really had me enamored with all these games and Prey too. It really is good in the kind of way where you have to play it at length to understand it.
@@distane8376 🙂 cool, could u recommend me any youtube videos that could help me play the game as easy as possible, i heard that the game is very dificult even on Easy dificult, thanks ☺️
The second I started playing Prey, I just fell in love with it. I started recommending it to everyone I know and I was so surprised I was the only one who loved it. But what you're saying about how it's a bit unapproachable for people not used to these type of games makes sense. I'm glad we got Prey but it's a shame they can use it to not greenlight games like this. Also I agree with the DLC... was kind of disappointed tbh
So true. I really liked mooncrash tho, I think the roguelike was a good addition mostly because it just fits really well into the story. Mimic hunt or whatever was a slap in the face tho. Instead of doing that they could have made mooncrash better or maby put in some new typhon. I'm pretty sure litterly no one has ever played it. I tryed litterly no servers
I was beddriden for 3 weeks and spent those weeks playing prey. That was at launch. Now i have over 300 hours in prey and have found every ending possible. Cool thing is. Im still finding new things about the game.
Prey is a bit overrated to me. It's a fantastic game, don't get me wrong, but the enemies are so lame it kinda tarnishes the entire experience for me. Such a shame.
I need to give this game another chance, but I can't with the abandoned, attractively retro deco hotel and the prop hunt head crabs. Oh, and the tourist attraction of "find every crew member's dead body"
Before I watch this video, I just want to say the title is exactly why I have the notification on for your channel. Prey appreciation from you, heck yes!!!!!!
The "games didn't become more expensive in 10 years" argument is factually incorrect - for PC, at least. Don't remember when exactly it happened but PC games used to cost 50 bucks. Period. Full content, disc, handbook and maybe some goodies. Nowadays everything is downloaded, so the publishers save tons of money for having to print less hard copies. On top of that we have DLC, microtransactions, season passes etc. And yet we pay 60 instead of 50. Why? Greed. Simple as that. The stupid consumers will pay for it. And for everything else.
Super Mega SS 88 Ultra Rightwing Purity Death Squad I heard about this because I’m a Bioshock junky and saw ads that were like “oh, a spiritual successor to Bioshock?” And I was pretty interested either way, never bought it though.
Its not like this game was really quiet either. Plenty of press articles, discussion around it, ads at stores, even the face of a magazine or two. On top of all that, a controversy with people trying to blame this game for somehow canceling the other. This wasn't what I call poor marketing. If you never heard of it, I'm not quite sure what happened, but that sounds more like its on you.
My favorite detail in Prey is that Morgan has a bunch of red envelopes from Chinese New Year in their apartment, despite it being like a month after the holiday; but that month time period lines up with how long they've been trapped in the groundhog day loop, IIRC, so they still have holiday cards from early February lying around their apartment, they haven't cleaned them up or changed anything because of the loop.
Just beat Prey and I loved it. Never found it intimidating but I play Morrowind regularly and learned to pick your battles from survival horrors such as my all time favorite game Silent Hill 2, so I transitioned better than most gamers probably did. Also, I got the most empathetic ending with no typhon neuromods, which was really satisfying.
Prey. Im so sorry. I only started playing you today and I’m enthralled. Only now did I actually give you some attention. This game is truly a prime example of the term underrated. Congratulations to the developers. I just can’t understand why you fell low. So saddening. It’s like dead space meets bioshock meets portal and more.
Prey was the closest thing to System Shock style of gameplay i've seen in a modern game. Too bad that it didn't do better... :-( Oh and i'm SOOO glad it had NOTHING to do with the horrible thing from early 2000s...
"Horrible thing from the early 2000s" Had proper native american representation Outsold 2017 version Also dealt with alien monsters from space Beat Portal series to the same game mechanics by a year Prey 2006 won 2 awards (Best Action Game + Best Multiplayer Game) vs Prey 2017 which won 0 awards.
The fire alarm panels that open on 3 taps are part of a pretty detailed little side-quest/story about some employees moving contraband off the station. They were drop-off points for the goods.
In my oppinion the reason why prey failed was because it was not publicized correctly. It was not sold as an immersive sim but as an survival game and it didnt have enough poblicity for people to even try this kind of new game. Of course people are going to be cautios when buying a new type of game, so you have to make alot more publicity for them.
even going through the marketing material on the steam page in 2024, I expected a vastly different product than what I got. I'm glad I stuck around for it, but I could see people disliking it just bc they were expecting something different, and even still, nobody really knows what it is going into it unless they have watched a 5-10 or 20 minute video explaining it. The marketing is terrible. They basically mismarketed it to try and make it sell on broad appeal, but you can't promise a game that doesn't exist, and then have the game players get be harder and simmier. If I paid more than a low price for it, I probably would have been turned off enough from the disconnect in marketing vs product to refund it on principle. what cyberpunk did reminds me of what prey marketing was likely trying to do, push units by any means necessary. Problem is there was not any hype train or simps defending it on release when it didn't turn out as promised. It's ironic. You can make a bad game and sell 13+ million copies, or you can make a good one and sell 1.5 million.
iirc, I think there was a demo for prey? and it didn't help very much, as it just introduced players to the most frustrating part of the game. All they needed was a trailer that ACTUALLY sold the features of the game. "Upgrade you character how you want, solve puzzles in a multitude of ways, kill enemies or sneak past them to save resources. Check every nook and cranny for untold treasures if you need to give yourself an edge. All your choices have consequences, every campaign plays different." Show gameplay, show skill tree, show off skills like combat focus, psychoshock, and mimic. Boom, actual marketing. Show solving the same puzzle with leverage, with exploding canister, with gloo gun, with mimic, with recycler, and with kinetic blast. Boom. Actual marketing. They could have won me over just by showing using the the gloogun to make a ladder or to cheese up a lift. There was no trailer at all that conveyed what this game was ACTUALLY like and what makes it good/what to expect. Instead they tried to mismarket the game on mass appeal components that sorta barely exist in the game, and it didn't work at all. They smashed their game w a hammer to try and sell copies to people who would never play this game, while mismarketing it to the people who actually would. IMO, the game failed most bc the false/poor marketing as well as them not directly addressing the ign score and bashing tf out of them like the hacks they are.
you know there's a hole in the sattelite door that gives you enough line of sight to hit the manual release button inside with a nerf dart, right? you don't have to farm neuromods for that one, just be observant and think outside of the box.
Phenomenal game. I'm so glad I went back and gave it another shot - thanks to your im-sim tier list! I just finished it and I will only say this... aside from some technical issues, almost any complaint you will hear/ read about this game comes from people who simply misunderstood, didn't appreciate, or didn't pay enough attention. I fucking loved the various characters, their stories, the world, the massively detailed cohesiveness of it all... and I loved the endings and how they flesh out the whole picture, how they speak to both the characters and you as a player... I honestly don't know how folks could bitch or nitpick about any of these aspects.
In my preferred universe, Bioshock Infinite is called something like 'AeroShock' or 'Adventure in the Clouds' or just 'Columbia' and Prey 2017 is called 'Neuro Shock' -- oh, and the real Prey 2 was still released 6ish years ago too.
Yeah, wished it was called Neuroshock and Bethesda didn't cut funding because the studio that was developing Prey 2 didn't want to get bought by Bethesda(Publisher)/Zenimax. Prey 2 would have been another immersive sim from what I seen.
I'm entirely sure that why Prey didn't sell too well was because of its advertising. The gameplay trailers were horrible and barely representative of it at all.
Fallout 76 is neither an RPG or an immersive sim. It's just a plain old shooter. It's a good thing it bombed. Hopefully Bethesda will learn from this and the next Fallout will return to the serie's roots... And while I'm dreaming aloud, they'll get Chris Avellone as the main writer/quest designer.
Huge fan of immersive sims here, but I really struggled with Prey at first. The world felt vague, the enemies were formless and weird, and I had no idea what I was doing. Started to regret buying it. Then about 3-4 hours in somehing clicked and I fell in love with it. I think it was the first time I space-walked outside the station and the realization of what I was playing and the fact that the station was one huge interconnected, incredibiy detailed world, so I no longer felt lost all the time (even if I was). Ended up being one of my favourite games of recent years.
Good games don't make money anymore, hype, loot boxes and micro transactions do and we need to hold idiots and parents and there credit cards with these kids responsible for the rape and destruction of games today. This is an unsustainable business model and a legit gaming crash is more then just plausible, I feel it is inevitable at this point. Great video.
Schmitty lmao nigga, calm down. Sorry we didn’t buy your boring ass niche video game 😂. Games aren’t bad at all in fact gaming is at an all time high in terms of the amount of money studios are making and the quality of the games coming out not to mention the life span of games that come out. Prey is mediocre at BEST. Monotonous, lame story, mediocre gun play, boring enemies. Games are meant to be FUN, the vast majority of people play games to have FUN and of course the games that sell fun are gonna be the ones that sell the best
Them naming this game Prey was the biggest disservice they could have possibly done themselves and I can't, for the life of me come up with a single reason why they did it anyway.
Still my favorite game after roughly 3 years and 3 playthroughs! I loved every minute of the game. Quite honestly, this game ruined other games for me because of how much better it is than anything else I’ve played!
I supposed you tried the system shock series too? Prey is quite an obvious spiritual sucessor to system shock 2, if you liked prey, you may like it too!
Oh, yes. I played the game, and I totally agree with you. The game is absurdly big and full with little things, but is exhausting to Play, and specially starting other game can leech your energy pretty quickly. But the game is totally worth it, and it has a wonderful world with well defined races as enemies. I played two runs, but just playing one makes the momey worth because it makes you feel opressed, nervous, amazed, angry and happy. It's one of the best games I have played, and the fact that it was so underrated is just sad, in my opinion.
Great video and loved how deep you went into the reasons of why immersive sims don't appeal to "core gamers". I believe Arkane knows this. They're not trying to sell to everyone, they're only trying to sell to immersive sim fans. Everyone who likes this type of game knew about Prey and played the hell out of it, but it was still largely unheard of to the greater gaming audience. And I think this is a GOOD thing. If a game needs to be marketed to a larger audience purely for the sake of sales, then it tends to get dumbed down significantly. Fallout 4 is a good example. Fans unanimously agree that it's a good game, but a bad Fallout game. No dialogue skill checks, little to no RPG mechanics, de-emphasized exploration, and a huge focus on gunplay put off longtime fans who liked the franchise for its sense of roleplaying your way through a wasteland, not customizing guns or building settlements. If Prey had to sell well, it would've had to be a worse immersive sim (if that makes any sense). It would've had to be dumbed down to a point where its systems were more accessible to the "core gamers", at which point the real fans of the genre wouldn't enjoy it as much. So overall, I think it's a good thing that it didn't get overhyped out of proportion and I think Arkane knew this all along. They weren't expecting it to sell 5-6 million, and I sure to god hope Bethesda wasn't either. I have to disagree with you about Mooncrash, though. I don't believe they adapted the rogue-lite formula in order to appeal to a larger audience. Heck, if anything, roguelikes are even more niche than immersive sims. There's many developer interviews where they mentioned that they had been tinkering with rogue-lite mechanics for a while and wanted to play with what it would feel like to mix it into an immersive sim. I personally thought it was fantastic and fit the level design of Prey extremely well. It's literally the first time a roguelite x immersive sim mashup happened and it was really freaking good. The fact that Prey happened is great. The fact that Bethesda didn't completely halt the project post-release and the fact that the team continued to work on it for over a year later delivering us Mooncrash and Typhon Hunter means that Bethesda still believes in the power of immersive sims. It's meant for a niche audience that really appreciates these special games. And I'd personally be okay with only getting a game of this quality every 4-5 years from a studio that knows what it's doing rather than have the genre turn into what the FPS / open-world genre has turned into, with cookie-cutter games that feel like they all have copy+paste mechanics with a slight twist on the formula released annually as part of a franchise.
Prey is the most underrated game of this generation and probably my favorite game of 2017. I just finished it and the story was so good, the gameplay is everything I like about deus ex and more, the music is amazing and the graphics are really good (altho some models look a bit rigid). I spent 30h on my playthrough not even completing everything!
I loved Prey. It was a great horror game. I'm not really sure what you mean by immersive sim, but this game is amazing. I'm hopeful that another sequel will come along, but how a story would play out is beyond me. Great game, top 5 ever.
The secret safes in the fire alarms is told to you through an email or log (can't remember exactly) and it even starts a little quest to find them all. To tell them apart from the regular fire alarms, the ones with safes have an extra red light right next to them
If people can play Dark Souls, but are intimidated by several systems I barely even blinked at and find more realistic... While I sympathize with what you're saying in this video, might I ask those people to rise to the challenge and, as they say "Git Gud". Personally, I feel extremely intimidated and put off every time I try to figure out how to get into Dark Souls, and every time I'm reminded why I don't play it. But I will continue to try to Git Gud
While yes not perfect I just wish they could have another chance after this it doesn't look like we are going to get another game like this in a long time.
I hated this game until I started a new game of story mode. I am not ashamed to admit this game is difficult. ESP in the very beginning where you can die easily. I wish you could toggle the difficulty though cuz after around hour 5 it is way too easy on story mode.
9:00 This part isn't difficult at all. Stealth your way through the cafeteria, stunning all crew members while avoiding the Telepath. I had no trouble keeping myself hidden even without neuromods invested in stealth. The hardest part of the game is the very beginning when you don't have any upgrades and few weapons, and I could see how that would put off some people. However as soon as you get a shotgun and a few neuromods the game really picks up and becomes much easier regardless of your chosen difficulty. The complexity of the game isn't what caused the game to sell "poorly" Your views on the subject of video game sales are problematic also. Do you really think raising the price of video games is going to change the current trend of microtransactions and season passes? Or do you think that's okay too because the "cost of development is too high"? Games do not need a price increase. More and more people are buying video games each year, allowing publishers to put more money into more ambitious projects. If they started charging $80 for a base game sales would decrease dramatically, and on top of that consumers will be expected to pay for a season pass, DLC, and microtransactions. How about no on that one chief.
Prey Mooncrash is a totally worth expansion/sequel to Prey and fantastic value for money. You get 3 (and a bit) full new areas on the same scale as those in the original game. There is very much a story (or rather stories) - you just have to look for them - just like in the base game. On top of that there are cool new systems of random loot, meta progression and multiple player characters. I think the rogue-lite/reogue-lite gametype applies really well to the Immersive Sim genre. It stops you from always using your tried-and-true techniques for dealing with problems and forces you to improvise which highlights the strength of immersive sims. I certainly don't think Prey: Mooncrash is the strongest implementation of the Rogue-Like+Immerive Sim combo. The balance is a little off and the first couple of runs can be very frustrating without the Mule operator to dump your stuff into prior to escape. It runs into the same problem as the base game (and Shadow of Mordor I feel) in that the early game is much harder than the mid-game. But get past that and it's incredibly fun and replayable.
The reason the industry is adding all the micro is because investors want continual growth, something that is impossible in any industry. So they keep adding shit and not changing the price and ramping up marketing and getting more and more desperate to make money so investors dont draw out. Granted, the price to make games has increased, but i very much doubt its enough to put off the growth he industry has already seen and off put the sales if the game is actual good. But whats the point of trying when you can release the same continual shit like Activisions Call of Duty every single year and then cut content out and sell it to people.
"Immersive Sim" is what we're calling System Shock-likes now? Also gonna have to disagree with you on game prices. Jim Sterling is right, games don't cost $60 anymore, the entry level version of a game costs $60. You're out of your mind if you think most triple-A games are complete experiences with just the $60 starting point and the $30-$60 season pass content is just "extra" content that wasn't cut off from the main game to make extra money.
@@innoclarke7435 Sorry but I don't religiously follow interviews of game developers, I tend to just play video games and occasionally read an interview of some insane Japanese auteur like Yoko Taro or from the heads of smaller indie studios I like like Swen Vincke from Larian. Most interviews of your typical game developers are too corporate executive buzzword for me with horrible dehumanizing buzzwords like "re-engage the core" or "live services". Though I DO remember one thing from an interview with Warren Spector I remember reading around the time Epic Mickey was announced, he didn't like being called the guy who made Deus Ex because Deus Ex, like all games aside from 1-person projects, were made by a team who all deserve credit for a games success. Reading that has had a profound effect on me to where I no longer get excited to see some big name on a development team because I know that person is only as good as the team they have behind them. This knowledge unfortunately makes me a downer because I'm always pointing out shit like "From the original creators of Fallout" are meaningless marketing and the fact that two old fucks who were heads of a team that made a good game 20 years ago doesn't mean they are going to make anything good now. Thanks Warren Spector, you've saved me a lot of meaningless hype over the years while simultaneously getting me called a hipster.
It's fine, mate. Now you know where it originated from. Warren Spector is correct, though. The industry, starting primarily with Hideo Kojima, has moved towards this concept of 'auteurs'. But with games, it doesn't work that way. Warren Spector is a fantastic producer and director, but the important thing about games development is that the director relies on his team to be able to translate his vision into reality. This is why Deus Ex is phenomenal, but Epic Mickey ended up leaving something to be desired. The Ion Storm Austin team was simply better at translating Spector's vision than the team at Junction Point. That said, knowing that a game has a director that's proven himself time and time again is at least some degree of a good sign. A good director with a shit team is still better than a bad director with a shit team, after all. I just want to know what the fuck happened with Underworld: Ascendant. That game was supposed to be the fantastic return of the Looking Glass quality and design mindset, but... nope. That was Paul Neurath that headed that game, I think. Here's hoping Spector's direction of the team on System Shock 3 leads to a better product than Ascendant, or else his reputation will go up in flames for a fucked up System Shock sequel.
I loved the beginning of Prey, it really got me intrigued and wanting to see more. But then the clunky and overly difficult combat, plus the tedious inventory management turned me off and I eventually quit before getting through a third of the game. Just my 2c.
"We haven't raised the price of a game in a DECADE. It has been locked at $60." Hahahahahahahahahahaha heheh.....heh.... Oh. Wait. You actually believe that. I honestly envy whatever Kool Aid you are drinking.
I actually ended up feeling very meh on this game. Its definetely well made, but as an immersive sim fan, it just felt like it was too stuck in the past of immersive sim games, too much like just a smorgasborg of previous games. Was really hoping this would have pushed the boundaries more and been more unique, but I get they were also stuck between making the game commercially viable and making what they wanted. Oh well.
Yeah it's a really weird game in it's own right, presented as a sim within a sim from the very start... definitely deserves analysis as a separate game..
An advice for your chair situation: try lifting the chair. Most cats don't like to be moved like that and will jump off. There are a few that will consider this a free joyride though.
I finally checked out Prey this week since I heard a lot of people saying it was ALOT like System Shock 2, which is in my top 3 favorite games of all time, and im really upset with myself for not checking it out sooner. Prey is like SS2 but not limited by the technology of it's time, it's seriously became one of my top 10 games of all time within the first day I had it. It's the kind of game I've been wanting for YEARS and it just... flew under my radar. guys if you're watching this video and haven't tried prey for whatever reason, I IMPLORE you to try it out. I've had a really hard time thinking about anything else, I've already started my second playthrough just because i'm addicted to it. It's seriously one of the best games of the last decade, maybe ever, in my opinion.
Yeah yeah, but there was a lot of weak spots in the game too, don't get me wrong, I quite love it, but I think you're sorta cherry picking here. Outside from the mimic, for instance, the other enemies are extremely boring to fight, I finished the game in the highest difficulty and it was still a walk in the park. Which is weird, considering the theme you'd think that other enemies would mimic stuff, imagine if the ''ghosts'' actually mimic people that you could talk to but the moment you turned your back boom, so you'd be in constant paranoia when talking to people. The ctulhu thingie that controls turrets and people is solid tho'. The plot is...It was fun, I noticed the twist 1 hour in, and thought it was gonna be stupid and undo everything, and it was. Same issue infinite had plotwise if you ain't got a good twist, don't do a twist, go ham with a villain, that's more fun than pulling a Shyamalan. The open world is dreadful to navigate to be honest, I 100% everything and It's just a drag really, especially the ''fast travel'' which i'm fine with, I love the space, I just wish the map was better. Not to mention the time that a sidequest marker broke and I couldn't find one body floating in space for 100% so I had to look other people finding on youtube and use my big boy guessing pants to fly there, it was just with me tho', but it really peeved me off. Again, the game's pretty good, it's above many games and one of my fav's that year, but there's lot's of stuff, including the map, that are just not user-friendly and makes navigation sometimes a drag. And don't let me get started on the GUTS sections, fuck that shit, I love space, the GUTS can fuck off. I just feel like it's Too Big for its own good, and too long of a game for its own good considering how the twist makes you feel nothing happened. System Shock 2 is like a 4-hour game, Bioshock 1 and 2 are like 8 tops. Here you just get tired really quick of it. But it's a good game, with a lot of attention to detail, and I wish it was called something else since it'd avoid the controversy. Granted haven't played the DLC yet, it looks pretty solid too, gonna get it when money comes by.
Exactly, there aren't enough enemy types to justify it's length and the enemies aren't fun to fight they're just annoying, pile on top of that the fact they respawn and ammo doesn't it's just a bad game. The story is just uninspired drek and the characters are as dull as dishwater. There's no main antagonist, how do you have a game without an antagonist?
thanks, my exact feeling. I love immersive sims but after 10h I got so bored by the game and these problems and since the story was absolutely uninteresting or at least badly presented that I just stopped playing.
@@MaitreMechant This was a long time ago haha, but honestly, I really think the lack of enemy variety is the worst thing, theres very few enemies that make the way you approach situations differently, the game is at its best at the start, where you're weak, mimics are fresh, ghosts are tanky, so you john mclane it. i got over the map thing, but mostly cause by now I played it.so much that I know things by heart, still hate the guts, I don't mind the ending that much, but, my point still stands that that ending is worse due to the lenght of the game and how much you're distracted and taking your sweet time. Still, the atmosphere is great, it is the best System Shock in a while(Gloomwood tho, gloomwood will challenge this, by being system shock and thief merged with a laser focus in doing that one thing without distractions, loved the demo). But yeah hum, i still recommend you finishing it, its a good experience and theres some cool stuff in the end, just follow the plot and ignore the faffing about, its a good experience, its just easy to get distracted.
As someone who's a prolific gamer for most of his life, all i can say about Prey is that it looks and feels basic... and i don't mean either of those descriptions from the perspective of someone who's played it. i seldom ever play multiplayer games, i pretty much stick to solo experiences; so you'd think this game should be exactly for me. but Prey just... looks to much like Bioshock. and i think that's the flaw, because the gaming crowd is completely full of it's share of Bioshock... with Bioshock. It's like saying Nioh is allot like Dark Souls, now sure Nioh could've have been better than Dark Souls (in some weird alternative universe) but even if it had been it's not the point, the Spotlight has already been stolen. Prey needed more identity for itself. the Engine, the Art style, it just seems like another dime a dozen game you'd pick up in a £5 bin on it's own release day.
I felt the same as you, now that i remember that was exactly the reason why stopped playing the game, the game itself isnt bad it just felt like a bioshock reskin in the end i feel bad taking in account how polished of a game it's.
5:15 I actually saw that argument from the opposite of the looking glass because I went through IT on my first playthrough to get up there because I forgot where the office was and didn't look at the map lol.
Although prey is a pretty good game, I can’t help but wonder what could have been if Prey 2 by Human head studio actually manage to finished development. It looks pretty cool from what I’ve seen in the footage and I certainly wouldn’t mind playing a bounty hunter in space game
@Subt1eOG I love how you present your opinion as fact immediately presenting yourself as idiotic. Prey 2017 isn't the best but it's far from bad and prey 2 had footage but no one played it. So many games LOOKED good but turned really really shit in the end and there was no guarantee at all despite how much you'll cry that prey 2 was going to be good, there was going to be speculation if it was good but ultimately there's no proof. Now tell me how do you think prey is shit what is your experience with the game.
@@johnmirra6707 yet meanwhile you complain about not getting the game you wanted, I replied to an asshat that said the game was made by cockhead developers etc when there is genuine love in prey, so if you're gonna tell me to calm down delete that comment up there complaining about not getting the prey you wanted because "it's just a game" mkay? Cool
Damn, when you put it like that, it sounds amazing. Saw it on sale at a local store, but after seeing reviews saying it was mediocre, boring, short, etc. All the reviews I saw mentioned none of this. Should have grabbed it, this looks amazing.
I think I put around 15 to 20 hours into prey. I liked the game but some of the mechanics threw me off, like the Typhon that comes after you after you use enough Typhon neuromods. The issue I found was that a lot of encounters became a game of patience more than skill. For example, waiting for dangerous enemies to come close one by one instead of engaging a few at a time.
I just think the game was unpopular from the start I don't think it has anything to do with how to game is. It just didn't catch much people's eye unless they are an active gamer. Gamers are slowly just becoming more casual where there is this section that only plays Rockstar games and fortnite and those are the games that blow up while smaller games like prey stay small because it's for true gamers. Nothing to do with the game itself more to do about the landscape and type of games that get big. There will never be another Vampire or System Shock because people like their hands to be held. It's sad but it's how it is.
What? Game is boring? In my eyes it is fun with loads of attention to detail. I played it on normal on my first playthrough. Your friends really must suck playing this game on easy. It is a game with lots of aspect like scavenging for resources and such. Makes it immersive. I am still lacking some archiements like the No Needle Run. Btw you don't need to fight the Nightmare. Find a corner where it can't get to you and just wait it out and it will go away.
It’s good to see people showing love for Prey. I honestly thought this was one of the best games of 2017, and now replayed again, I appretiate it even more. Fuck no-gravity sections tho.
😃 yay Mr Bioshock ☺️ what a coincidence, I bought Bethesdas Prey for Thanksgiving, its on sale at Microcenter, they also have on sale Dishonored 2 i mite go pu if I have a chance. I watched several review videos, according to one guy he says the game is inspired by Systemshock and that the game is more of an rpg & puzzle & brainy game, but too many people simply saw it as a 'shooter' game and harshly misjudged it on that alone. I like the game because it doesnt feel like a typical crappy bethesda game, it has a retro vibe, and the engine seems highly optimized with a good wide range of settings so u can get it to run decently on low spec hardware, i think this is one of those games that people should give it a chance, its feels like its going to be a legacy & historic gaming industry type game that u can go back to every once in a while, everyone shud have it in their library now and its cheap enuf so go pick it up, just pease take ur time and play the game as if its an rpg puzzle adventure game, if u can make more videos on Prey that would be great, and also checkout the Mooncrash DLC, looks neat so pick it up also when its on sale, Thanks Everyone✌️😎👍
Can confirm that it runs really well for how good it looks on mid to low range hardware. I was put of from buying it initially because a) I didn't know it was a Systemshock clone and shooters that don't fall into the Systemshock/Deus Ex niche don't really interest me b) When I found out, I thought it would fry my laptop, but it runs really well, with the exception of the long load time and the teleport ability that caused some lag.
Prey isn't great but its just good and the most accessible immersive sim ever, and i can't believe you'd call a listening to an audiolog intimidating or that this game has no handholding when you have waypoint markers. Saying that it failed due to its demands for experimentation or that its too long is complete horseshit in a world where Breath of the Wild or stupidly large open-world games exist. What killed this game was 2 things for me, the poor marketing that obfuscated and didn't really show this game for what it is aside from a few gameplay videos which never went into the depth as to the full extant of emergent gameplay that you can emply and the fact that the game is not that interesting beyond its basic gameplay loops, its aesthetics (i don't need to mention Bioshock), and some of the characters although i was a lot more disappointed with some than others. Once you figure out all the basic weaknesses for each enemy, the game turns into a complete cakewalk on every subsequent playthrough up until you get the annoyin shit in the second half. It loses most of its replayability once you learn the ins and outs unless you want to do some extreme things.
www.humblebundle.com/store/prey-deluxe?partner=charlatan PREY IS 80% OFF RIGHT NOW WHY DON'T YOU OWN IT??? (Affiliate link that helps the channel)
I do! Got it from Steam -80% Played it and I was checking other endings from TH-cam and thats how I found your video. -80% was steal. Awesome game.
Kreifi lol same here
Sorry, but you got this totally bad way around, and this "immersive sim" wtf are you talking about? This is another SShock or Bioshock...not Prenumbra or such.
Prey was boycotted because of Prey 2 kill-off. Game is great, but what's the point in calling it Prey if it has nothing to do with either Prey 1 or Prey 2 ...? Those who knew old Prey and waited for Prey 2 hated this move, and those who knew nothing about whole case or did not care would not be interested in "Prey" universe to begin with so game could be called "Phantoms" or anything...and sold more copies.
Star citizen takes about 10 to 15 minutes to load from desktop to a loaded game on ssd. I think its closer to 15, though it could be ten.
Picked up a physical copy yesterday. 8 euros well spent.
So PREY became a Cult Classic, much like its predecessor, Prey.
What are the odds.
Which, like Prey (2017) was nothing like the initially leaked designs.
We were robbed of sci fi bounty hunting Prey 2 but hell, this is fine too.
@@thesquirtof8759 To be fair, that game was dead before PREY was even concieved
@@lukeduran12 you preach your lies somewhere else heretic
@@thesquirtof8759 are you informed and just being willfully ignorant?
You forgot that IGN gave the game a 4 in their first review of the game. That influences sales A LOT. It's not something that shouldn't be mentioned.
yeah
jim sterling gave it a 5
Yeah, only to give 8 after they completed it again... this kind of reviewer are just one of the cause that made unique games like Prey or Dishonored 2 to not receiving the success they deserve
@@atlas8827 ah yes, the guy who gave MW3 a 10, he's to be trusted.
@@JustSkram I've never understood why anyone gives him any credit.
@@TheMaskedWarrior92 This is the kind of thing that allows gaming publications to create their own stories - they can say things in five years time like "Revisiting Prey, the underappreciated masterpiece", despite the fact that their own review score made people look away from the game, making it underappreciated.
One of my favorite games ever. And now in 2020 we are officially in the cycle where a lot of the outlets that put down Prey 2017 are making articles like "it's the bioshock we all just missed, a hidden gem" bullshit.
Yea people were really mixed about it at launch but you gotta just enjoy the game. Pretty much every immersive sim seems less impressive when you dig deep into every aspect. Enjoy the game for what it is, not what it’s trying to do.
I liked the game aside from some of the most annoying puzzles
I love this game. It's totally way more dreadful a scenario than any other horror survival scenario, and the ending... let's get that sequel already, we want a future perfect scenario here.
The unfortunate thing about this is that the damage has already been done. Immersive Sims as a genre is practically dead in 2022.
@@nepdisc3722 ImSims aren't dead. They never will be. It's the aspiration that gaming has always reached for. They will always be made when a passionate group of people with the skills and resources are provided the opportunity to reach as far as they possibly can. They will likely never be the most popular games, because they require you to think (the horror!), but they will never be gone. With all of the technology available to indie developers now, I expect ImSims will be even more common from places not owned by one of the big five or whatever corporations. Where profit isn't the only motivation and seeing what can be done with the format is is where ImSIms will live.
Me: "Nah I think I was pretty thorough and found most of the secrets--"
Charlatan: "Certain fire alarms on Talos station are actually secret cupboards containing--"
Me: "Wait, what?!? WHAT!?!?"
There's an entire sidequest dedicated to the smuggler ring using the fire alarms...
Must've not looked around well enough.
@@MaxiemumKarnage i found the sidequest but never read that it was firealalarms i found out just by hitting thing with tbe wrench like an idiot lol.
This quest is unmissable, really. It's literally in the middle of freaking Arboreto tunnel.
Maxie Karn I remember the smugglers but I always sorta... didn’t listen to well to it. Honestly that and the Aircraft hanger are the two places I don’t frequent.
I also learnt that from speed runners, it surprised me how earlier in the game you can already get so many neromods
it always warms my heart to see people showing love for prey. it's such an under appreciated gem.
Prey+Prey: Mooncrash are immersive sim masterspieces. Pretty much anythin Arkane Studios does.
Haven't played mooncrash yet but idk about masterpiece... Its "A" tier for sure but the story is kinda lacking imo. Phenomenal game play though.
What about the original Prey ?, nobody even remembers it.
@@vitrolic_mind4830 haven't played. Heard mixed reviews
@@vitrolic_mind4830 original prey was a oldschool corridor style shooter and not an immersive sim.
@@pr3historic647 Its a masterpiece imho. More than excels at delivering a better story than anything you'll play in recent memory.
Probably going to become a cult classic I hope, either way I’m sad I didn’t play it when it came out
Feels like it was almost created deliberately to become a hidden gem... maybe they're playing the long-game and have huge plans for something in 10 or so years time.
it just came out a year ago....
Whats ur pfp from lmao
@@Spectresilencer hentai
@@Spectresilencer looks like pd2 sydney lol
From the first helicopter ride to the final decision Prey gave me so many incredible and unforgettable moments, more than a hidden gem Prey is a true classic.
1:19 - 1:34, The way you recount Prey's development history is inaccurate. After Prey 2 was taken from Human Head, Bethesda tried to get Obsidian to finish the game, but in the end they couldn't because Human Head made tons of modifications to ID Tech 4 that Bethesda did not have to source code to, so the game remained unfinished. Arkane's Prey was a completely separate project and idea. Bethesda greenlit development for the game under the condition that it was under the Prey IP because the two games share some similarities in concept and it's easier to market an existing IP rather than a new IP. Arkane didn't scrap anything from Prey 2, this is their original project.
I still wish we had gotten the original vision of Prey 2. The reboot/whatever the new one would be was good, but being a space bounty hunter looked so fucking cool. Star Wars Bounty Hunter was one of my favorite games as a kid, so Prey 2 had me hyped as hell.
@@gnarkillguch Same here. I just want to make sure that no one puts any blame on Arkane, because this video makes it sound like they had a chance to finish Prey 2 which is not the case at all.
I'll never forgive Bethesda for what they did to Human Head studios, nor how they stole their game from them.
@Shurryy Namegenerator It's not, its mediocre. The fact that few people bought it or played it, speaks volumes to how much interest there was in Arkane Studios' version of Prey in comparison to Human Head's sequel. You have to bare in mind I was there in the Bethesda forums, and others, when they announced and showcased both of these games.
When Human Head's sequel was announced, every forum related to Bethesda was alight with hype for that game. But when Arkane Studios' version of Prey was announced, it practically fell on deaf ears, and no one who I spoke to was the least bit excited for this game. This was because people were massively disappointed that they weren't getting the game they saw back in 2011; which many, even to this day, see as superior compared to the game they got.
@Shurryy Namegenerator Have you seen the gameplay? The story they had, prey 2 would have innovated the fps genra, the developers at HumanHead even said in 2015 I believe talking about the future movements games like advanced warfare, bo3 and Titanfall had, they said they were doing all that years before those studios even had the idea's! Hell even that shoulder cannon that Doom eternal has Prey 2 even had that years before! Prey 2 would have exploded but bethesda got too greedy and tried to buy them out, after they refused they gave them unreasonable deadlines and tried to bleed them dry so they can be bought at a pretty penny, but after fallout 76 bethesda's true colors shined they are not the saints you're eluding too!
Thank heaven's that HumanHead managed too survive!
Best of 2017, still finding new things.
2017 was a really good gaming year. Divinity: Original Sin 2 is perhaps the best RPG game ever made and also it was one of the best strategy games that year and it was very long so that pulled people away from playing many other games.
It’s so deep. I’ve been gaming since the early 90s and there are certain titles I’ve just kept going back to over the years, no matter how dated they get. Prey is going to be one of them.
Prey was the last time I got full throttle hyped for a game bought it day 1 and it met every expectation I had. Since then there has not been a single game to meet my expectations at launch.
I just finished alien isolation and it gave me Prey feelings.
The absolutely absurd expectations and expenses of triple A games are the noose around their neck.
They hobble themselves and make it impossible to really do anything out of the box.
I don't know if you know this, but the stun gun and the Mindjack psychic power (or one of them, at any rate) safely disable mind-controlled people, so that should make the Telepaths a lot easier on a kill-no-one run.
Yep, I found that when in an audio a guy says that a coworker went mad and he had to stun him, that's when it clicked for me and well, now I let them come in and I stun the mind controlled one by one and then kill the Telepath
I just stealthed to a point that the crewmates couldn't reach me and then pistol sniped the telepath.
The game tells you that when you pick up stun gun for the first time
people don't know this? the game literally tells you lol
This is one of my favorite games of all time. I love absolutely everything about it, it’s a flat out masterpiece to me. I cannot get enough of this game
Excellent video. Prey is by far one of the most under-appreciated games of the last decade. But it's nice to see it slowly turning into a cult classic game.
And about that bit at the end about whether we'll have more immersive sims or not, we DO have them. But in a different way.
After all four AAA immersive sims of this generation (Dishonored 2, Death of the Outsider, Prey and Deus Ex Mankind Divided) flopping in sales, immersive sims are taking a lower budget and experimental route, especially among indie developers. For example, Prey Mooncrash mixing up the genre with rogue lite elements, The Blackout Club being a 4 player coop immersive sim, the recently announced Void Bastards essentially being the love child of XCOM and System Shock, and The Occupation, which is basically an immersive sim without weapons within 4 real time hours. We also had Underworld Ascendant earlier this month, being sort of a spiritual successor to the Ultima Underworld games. But sadly it turned out to be a bit of a stinker.
And that's not all! More and more games are borrowing and using elements of the immersive sim genre like Breath of the Wild, Far Cry, and the new Hitman games which could almost be considered immersive sims, due to their highly systemic and multi-approach design.
My point is that immersive sims aren't dead. In fact they are coming back stronger in different forms and I couldn't be happier about that.
🙂 yes it does feel like a cult classic, i mite be getting Dishonored 2 soon cause its on clearance at my Microcenter, mite be worth checking it out since alot of people mention it, thanks for ur insights too 😊
@@MrSamadolfo Oh please do get that game! It has some of the best level design you'll ever see in a game. Easily one of my favorites of this generation!
@@ryanzojaji8683 🙂 ok cool, next time I go to Microcenter i will look for it and pick it up, hopefully its still there, thx buddy 😏👍📀
@@MrSamadolfo No problem mate!
And don't forget, Heat Signature!
I loved Prey but it's definitely a more "it's about the journey than the destination" sorta games.
The game really runs out of steam toward the end and beating the game was as easy as just traveling from point A to point B. I had a bad feeling that's how it was gonna be also as I was getting closer to the end and stockpiling ammo and whatnot.
The game really hits its high point for me when you go to the Psycotronics (?) division to get that psycho scope (?) thingy. You really feel at that point in the game like you're not quite powerful enough and that maybe you've ventured a bit too deep into enemy territory and every little victory feels like territory gained and it's so satisfying and the tension is great in that whole part of the game. Lots of games shine most in that part of the progression, where you're starting to get a bit more powerful that you take a risk into a harder section of the game, but once you're there you're actually not sure if you have what it takes.
You said it dude the destination was total shite. Afte that i didnt wanna play because theres no compelling characters and the combat isnt that great anyway
When I read your post all I could think about was the Depths and Blighttown.
@@peergynt9852 lol thanks now i wanna replay dark souls
@vin 950 LOL Right? How many times will I shoot them with my gloo gun to just hack them. Boy did I get sick of that mini game.I did it like hundreds of times and maybe failed it once. There should be an option after that many times to just have a prompt to hack the the thing and there be no mini game.
@@peergynt9852 You're exactly right. Even though in DS every area is pretty hard, Blighttown is when you are looking back at its entrance and thinking, "Um....I can still back out."
Arkane reminds me so much of looking glass studios. It is unfortunate the immersive sims are not sold well cause those are the games that truly make use videogames as a true medium. I hope deathloop sells well.
This was a really, really good video.
I love Prey, it's not a game I go back to and play for a few hours - it's something that I'll suddenly get an urge to escape to when life feels monotonous and bleak. It demands your concentration and respect, then rewards you with intangible beauty and understanding. The only bad thing I have to say is that the enemies needed greater variety of design.
Oh - and something that could have boosted monetary overheads that I would have been able to live with would have been product placement. Remember Parasite Eve 2? Weird game, shouldn't have existed (although I'm glad it does) - but you can drink Coca-Cola to restore MP, and see prominent adverts for it, including a vending machine that is part of an early cutscene.
every now and then I throw an entire weekend into a new playthrough
@@deadshr00m54 I love how you can explore new ways to solve problems you face, or read an email you previously didn't and learn someting intriguing. Love this game, doing my fourth playthrough right now ahah
Prey is in some respects old school. It needs a couple brain cells activated and is more addressed
to the adult gamer than the 12 year old console jockey the industry loves so much.
It is a good fps/rpg hybrid and as such it simply cant be a megaseller,because economic success is
in 95% of all cases bought by the lowest common denominator. But developers know that,because
games are not just made since last year but for decades now.
I was 12 when this game came out and I fucking loved it.
@@fistedasian9594 hey man, don't be like that
I was 15 when it came out and absolutely loved it
Same goes for other classics like OG Thief for example or VtMB
The difficulty of Prey wasn't a turn-off to most people it was due to how meticulous the game was. Like how often you have to search through chests and how slowly you progress. The reason why people are turned off to it but aren't turned off to something like Fallout is due to how that is considered more of an action game where you have to pay attention a lot less.
Something to bear in mind is when games like System Shock 2 released it was considered an extremely niche game. When Night Dive re-released it a decade and a half later, it sold better digitally than it ever did at retail due to its reputation. One of the reasons why Bioshock sold amazingly well was due to how focused it was on action and much of the sim elements were downplayed. The action game demographic is much larger than the type that wants a more complicated and slower paced game and developers have known this for decades now. It's also why certain genres like the flight sim have gone the way of the dinosaur.
It's meticulous in the early game, but by midgame if you build down the security tree you can play it like Doom.
It was not that hard.
The lacklaster story is what turned me off
YES. I hate it when people talk about Bioshock like it's an immersive sim - it totally isn't. It has a wrench melee weapon, some light RPG mechanics and atmospheric storytelling but that's it. It's very linear. You are required to have certain specific powers to progress. It's full of scripted sequences and there are unskippable boss battles. The stealth system is very basic and is completely unusable in many sitations. Bioschock is a first-person shooter with some light RPG elements and an immersive aesthetic.
@@thesupremegentlemanatheist7382 yup, first time i played i played super stealthy not using any of my resources. And at mid game, i had so much ammo and skills i realized, i can kill anything , included the nightmare without being stealthy. Then it became a doom game with platforming.
The raising price idea itself is a stupid one. Because that's not how economics work. You either spend less money on the product or raise the price. And the former is scary for the consumers. No one is paying 80$ for a normal game (unless it included extras but even then most people wouldn't accept it) it's just that games that aren't guaranteed to sell as franchises are supposed to start as AA as in dark souls the new call of cthulu game and hellblade which all three were not just excellent games but they sold well compared to thier budget and for darksouls? Iy created and popularised a new freaking genre and proceeded to produce three AAA games that also did well. Publishers and developers should stop selling with expensive ads and graphics and make fun games with less money (hellblade is a gorgeous game without being relatively expensive to make) so the risk of flopping is less and profit is more guaranteed. Plus on top of that things like mocap and the like are extremely cheap now. You can get a set for 16k so there's no excuse that games are costing more to make because the top companies are just spending more in general. But aside from that this is an extremely good video good job
But now they're raising the prices of next-gen games. It's going to be a nightmare.
Gotta stop you right there buddy. I like Call of Cthulu and so do people who are into it but I don't think it's a good game.
If they would have tried to make Prey a AA game instead of a AAA game it wouldn't have worked. Less budget would have meant less features. They would have had to cut a lot of the game and that would likely have severely impacted its quality for the worse.
Hands down one of the most atmospheric titles out there. Still playing in 2020 taking my time exploring every nook and cranny ;)
The fire alarm secret is actually not that hard to find, there is an audio log that explains it in Shuttle Bay and one you can find earlier that gives you the quest to find the smuggler caches, but doesn't explain what they look like. Granted, Shuttle Bay is really late so most people probably didn't go around checking everything on the station after finding that log, but you are told about it and it's a game that's build to be replayed anyway.
The thing that made me realize I was going to love this game is when I got the taser gun early in the first area by getting creative with the gloo gun and climbing up somewhere I wasn't supposed to. The only two big complaints I have are that combat gets too easy if you invest in the right skills to the point were even Nightmares don't feel like a threat anymore (I'll experiment with the survival options next, maybe that fixes it) and the shitty bugged quest for dragging Dahl into the Medbay in zero G.
I freakin love the gloo gun and the nerf crossbow. They make getting to places i should'nt be able to enter so much easier and fun to figure out how XD instead of just relying on the skills needed to hack or move stuff.
@@sionteemo9697 I just love in general how half the weapons you get are two different tools and a literal toy that deals no damage. Really adds to the feeling that you're out of your depth and have to get creative with what you have. Especially because the shotgun requires you get close, and the Q-Beam works best as a finisher on already damaged or stunned enemies, so even the two good weapons still rely on you using the rest of your arsenal and abilities.
@@Nodoga1 That's true, but you don't really have any incentive to go there early. Still really cool that you can just wander there whenever you want.
;o The smuggler caches were basically the only thing in the game I didn't do because I could never find them. And they're all in the fire alarms? Lmao Man, this fkn game...
That's what I love that you can bend the game to your will if you have enough creativity. It's so satisfying to do.
Me discovering this video: "I love Prey"
Me watching this video: "Knack II babeeey"
Game publishers make more money than many nations have in GDP
We do not need to increase game price.
We need to end CEO bonuses.
the longer playtime isn't a valid reason as to why it could potentially turn off consumers. Persona 5 had 2 million copies sold and its playtime can range from 70-100 hours. MGS5 takes 45 hours if you're just doing the missions and 85 otherwise, and that sold 6 million.
It's FAR, FAR more likely that the big discrepancy between Deus Ex Mankind Divided/Tomb Raider's sales figures and Prey's is due to the consumer perception that it's a new IP because nobody remembers Prey 2006. If Bethesda had name it something like "FutureShock" or licensed the System Shock name and named it System Shock 3 it easily would've moved 3-4 million units.
As well Prey had significantly less marketing as a lot of other immersive sim type games like Bioshock. Which by comparison had television commercials featuring things like the Big Daddies and Plasmids. Prey had a trailer and a few other marketing bits but most people didn't even know what the game was about until after it released and people went "oh you can do this, and this in the game". They did an extremely poor job with the marketing for the game and they really should've been specific and focused with it.
I think his point about the playtime is that you can't experience that much of the game in one playthrough, and multiple playthroughs of a long game are not super popular
@@thomasshaw6938 I wouldn't say that's accurate. There are notable examples of games that require playing multiple times that are extremely popular. A REALLY good example is the Mass Effect trilogy all require at least 2 playthroughs per game to experience everything and those sold extremely well.
@@finnfeaver1196 I played and beat the witcher 3,prey (10 times) dishonored (9 times) dishonored 2(15 times) my attention span is fine thanks you stupid fuck
@@stealthbrawler don't be mean to Finn Feaver he is just another frustrated kid behind a screen
@@neliiinhu I suppose.
I tend to be pretty picky with what first-person titles I play, but Prey reminded me a lot of some of my favorites. Metroid Prime, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and Fallout New Vegas. I know none of these are direct inspirations to Prey, but the sense of mood, a finely crafted open-world experience that wasn't just about collecting tokens all over the map, and the fact that you could give yourself so many objectives really had me enamored with all these games and Prey too.
It really is good in the kind of way where you have to play it at length to understand it.
Chris avellone worked on this, I definitely noticed the his work. The game felt a lot like a massive new vegas DLC.
I'm so sad these games don't sell well, this is my absolute favorite genre. Prey might be the last great game of its kind
Happy to see others who appreciate Prey for what it is!
Probably one of the best games ever made
EVERYONE PLEASE BUY PREY MOONCRASH
😰👍 OK! OK! 😰👍
How about.. No!
Got Prey and Mooncrash. I beat Prey twice. 90 hours total played time for a shooter. Loved it. So worth.
@@distane8376 🙂 cool, could u recommend me any youtube videos that could help me play the game as easy as possible, i heard that the game is very dificult even on Easy dificult, thanks ☺️
Done
I heard you say "Preythrough".
Intended or not, beautiful pun.
The second I started playing Prey, I just fell in love with it. I started recommending it to everyone I know and I was so surprised I was the only one who loved it.
But what you're saying about how it's a bit unapproachable for people not used to these type of games makes sense.
I'm glad we got Prey but it's a shame they can use it to not greenlight games like this.
Also I agree with the DLC... was kind of disappointed tbh
So true. I really liked mooncrash tho, I think the roguelike was a good addition mostly because it just fits really well into the story. Mimic hunt or whatever was a slap in the face tho. Instead of doing that they could have made mooncrash better or maby put in some new typhon. I'm pretty sure litterly no one has ever played it. I tryed litterly no servers
I was beddriden for 3 weeks and spent those weeks playing prey. That was at launch. Now i have over 300 hours in prey and have found every ending possible. Cool thing is. Im still finding new things about the game.
Prey is a bit overrated to me. It's a fantastic game, don't get me wrong, but the enemies are so lame it kinda tarnishes the entire experience for me. Such a shame.
I love the enemies
@@atlas8827 I agree, the enemies seemed very uninspired to me and are a nasty smudge on an otherwise amazing game.
I constantly play Prey (2017), and I love using a fully upgraded shotgun to destroy Nightmares with Combat Focus
The bottom line is they shouldn’t have called it Prey. It couldn’t be further removed from the IP, it’s just false advertising.
It was an example of a lame commercial decision I bet no one in studio wanted to take. Blame the guys on suits for this one.
I need to give this game another chance, but I can't with the abandoned, attractively retro deco hotel and the prop hunt head crabs. Oh, and the tourist attraction of "find every crew member's dead body"
Before I watch this video, I just want to say the title is exactly why I have the notification on for your channel. Prey appreciation from you, heck yes!!!!!!
The "games didn't become more expensive in 10 years" argument is factually incorrect - for PC, at least.
Don't remember when exactly it happened but PC games used to cost 50 bucks. Period. Full content, disc, handbook and maybe some goodies.
Nowadays everything is downloaded, so the publishers save tons of money for having to print less hard copies.
On top of that we have DLC, microtransactions, season passes etc.
And yet we pay 60 instead of 50. Why? Greed. Simple as that. The stupid consumers will pay for it. And for everything else.
I never even heard they made this. Speaks more to their failure to market than game quality.
Also you sold me on this game.
🙂 i heard about the game because it was used at one of amds promocion expo shows running on their cpu and graphics card
Super Mega SS 88 Ultra Rightwing Purity Death Squad I heard about this because I’m a Bioshock junky and saw ads that were like “oh, a spiritual successor to Bioshock?” And I was pretty interested either way, never bought it though.
Its not like this game was really quiet either. Plenty of press articles, discussion around it, ads at stores, even the face of a magazine or two. On top of all that, a controversy with people trying to blame this game for somehow canceling the other. This wasn't what I call poor marketing. If you never heard of it, I'm not quite sure what happened, but that sounds more like its on you.
You must've been living under a fucking rock then. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the marketing for this game.
My favorite detail in Prey is that Morgan has a bunch of red envelopes from Chinese New Year in their apartment, despite it being like a month after the holiday; but that month time period lines up with how long they've been trapped in the groundhog day loop, IIRC, so they still have holiday cards from early February lying around their apartment, they haven't cleaned them up or changed anything because of the loop.
Just beat Prey and I loved it. Never found it intimidating but I play Morrowind regularly and learned to pick your battles from survival horrors such as my all time favorite game Silent Hill 2, so I transitioned better than most gamers probably did.
Also, I got the most empathetic ending with no typhon neuromods, which was really satisfying.
Morrowind is pretty hardcore, you can't act stupid like you can in ES4 and beyond, you will get one shotted just for looking at a guard wrong lol.
Prey.
Im so sorry. I only started playing you today and I’m enthralled. Only now did I actually give you some attention.
This game is truly a prime example of the term underrated. Congratulations to the developers.
I just can’t understand why you fell low. So saddening. It’s like dead space meets bioshock meets portal and more.
Ah shit, reinstalling
Prey was the closest thing to System Shock style of gameplay i've seen in a modern game. Too bad that it didn't do better... :-( Oh and i'm SOOO glad it had NOTHING to do with the horrible thing from early 2000s...
"Horrible thing from the early 2000s"
Had proper native american representation
Outsold 2017 version
Also dealt with alien monsters from space
Beat Portal series to the same game mechanics by a year
Prey 2006 won 2 awards (Best Action Game + Best Multiplayer Game) vs Prey 2017 which won 0 awards.
@@Amgarrak awards and sales don’t make a game good though
The fire alarm panels that open on 3 taps are part of a pretty detailed little side-quest/story about some employees moving contraband off the station. They were drop-off points for the goods.
truly a fantastic videogame! oldfashioned, no handholding, smart gameplay, really good story, fantastic ending...superb!
In my oppinion the reason why prey failed was because it was not publicized correctly. It was not sold as an immersive sim but as an survival game and it didnt have enough poblicity for people to even try this kind of new game. Of course people are going to be cautios when buying a new type of game, so you have to make alot more publicity for them.
even going through the marketing material on the steam page in 2024, I expected a vastly different product than what I got. I'm glad I stuck around for it, but I could see people disliking it just bc they were expecting something different, and even still, nobody really knows what it is going into it unless they have watched a 5-10 or 20 minute video explaining it. The marketing is terrible. They basically mismarketed it to try and make it sell on broad appeal, but you can't promise a game that doesn't exist, and then have the game players get be harder and simmier. If I paid more than a low price for it, I probably would have been turned off enough from the disconnect in marketing vs product to refund it on principle.
what cyberpunk did reminds me of what prey marketing was likely trying to do, push units by any means necessary. Problem is there was not any hype train or simps defending it on release when it didn't turn out as promised.
It's ironic. You can make a bad game and sell 13+ million copies, or you can make a good one and sell 1.5 million.
iirc, I think there was a demo for prey? and it didn't help very much, as it just introduced players to the most frustrating part of the game.
All they needed was a trailer that ACTUALLY sold the features of the game. "Upgrade you character how you want, solve puzzles in a multitude of ways, kill enemies or sneak past them to save resources. Check every nook and cranny for untold treasures if you need to give yourself an edge. All your choices have consequences, every campaign plays different." Show gameplay, show skill tree, show off skills like combat focus, psychoshock, and mimic. Boom, actual marketing.
Show solving the same puzzle with leverage, with exploding canister, with gloo gun, with mimic, with recycler, and with kinetic blast. Boom. Actual marketing. They could have won me over just by showing using the the gloogun to make a ladder or to cheese up a lift.
There was no trailer at all that conveyed what this game was ACTUALLY like and what makes it good/what to expect. Instead they tried to mismarket the game on mass appeal components that sorta barely exist in the game, and it didn't work at all. They smashed their game w a hammer to try and sell copies to people who would never play this game, while mismarketing it to the people who actually would. IMO, the game failed most bc the false/poor marketing as well as them not directly addressing the ign score and bashing tf out of them like the hacks they are.
you know there's a hole in the sattelite door that gives you enough line of sight to hit the manual release button inside with a nerf dart, right? you don't have to farm neuromods for that one, just be observant and think outside of the box.
and if you don't want to do that, just mimic matter into a coffee cup and roll inside
Onfg how did I not see that. I just said fuck it and spammed kinetic blast and phycoshock so I dont have to wait 3 minutes
Phenomenal game. I'm so glad I went back and gave it another shot - thanks to your im-sim tier list! I just finished it and I will only say this... aside from some technical issues, almost any complaint you will hear/ read about this game comes from people who simply misunderstood, didn't appreciate, or didn't pay enough attention. I fucking loved the various characters, their stories, the world, the massively detailed cohesiveness of it all... and I loved the endings and how they flesh out the whole picture, how they speak to both the characters and you as a player... I honestly don't know how folks could bitch or nitpick about any of these aspects.
Take a shot every time he says “core gaming audience”
Insane how you only have 1 video about this game, and such an old one
In my preferred universe, Bioshock Infinite is called something like 'AeroShock' or 'Adventure in the Clouds' or just 'Columbia' and Prey 2017 is called 'Neuro Shock' -- oh, and the real Prey 2 was still released 6ish years ago too.
Yeah, wished it was called Neuroshock and Bethesda didn't cut funding because the studio that was developing Prey 2 didn't want to get bought by Bethesda(Publisher)/Zenimax.
Prey 2 would have been another immersive sim from what I seen.
I'm entirely sure that why Prey didn't sell too well was because of its advertising. The gameplay trailers were horrible and barely representative of it at all.
Fallout 76 is neither an RPG or an immersive sim. It's just a plain old shooter. It's a good thing it bombed.
Hopefully Bethesda will learn from this and the next Fallout will return to the serie's roots...
And while I'm dreaming aloud, they'll get Chris Avellone as the main writer/quest designer.
Huge fan of immersive sims here, but I really struggled with Prey at first. The world felt vague, the enemies were formless and weird, and I had no idea what I was doing. Started to regret buying it. Then about 3-4 hours in somehing clicked and I fell in love with it. I think it was the first time I space-walked outside the station and the realization of what I was playing and the fact that the station was one huge interconnected, incredibiy detailed world, so I no longer felt lost all the time (even if I was). Ended up being one of my favourite games of recent years.
Good games don't make money anymore, hype, loot boxes and micro transactions do and we need to hold idiots and parents and there credit cards with these kids responsible for the rape and destruction of games today. This is an unsustainable business model and a legit gaming crash is more then just plausible, I feel it is inevitable at this point. Great video.
Schmitty lmao nigga, calm down. Sorry we didn’t buy your boring ass niche video game 😂. Games aren’t bad at all in fact gaming is at an all time high in terms of the amount of money studios are making and the quality of the games coming out not to mention the life span of games that come out. Prey is mediocre at BEST. Monotonous, lame story, mediocre gun play, boring enemies. Games are meant to be FUN, the vast majority of people play games to have FUN and of course the games that sell fun are gonna be the ones that sell the best
Calm down. Everyone enjoys different games.
you can thank casuals for that
God of War is on the line and wants a word with you. Then Spider-Man PS4 would also like a word.
I see your inevitable and raise you to desireable.
The only part I disliked - the ending.
Them naming this game Prey was the biggest disservice they could have possibly done themselves and I can't, for the life of me come up with a single reason why they did it anyway.
Arkane studios had nothing to do with the naming of Prey, thank Bethesda for that.
Just checked the price on PS4 now, and It's currently at 12€ for Prey+DLC.
Got to take that bargain!
Still my favorite game after roughly 3 years and 3 playthroughs! I loved every minute of the game. Quite honestly, this game ruined other games for me because of how much better it is than anything else I’ve played!
I supposed you tried the system shock series too? Prey is quite an obvious spiritual sucessor to system shock 2, if you liked prey, you may like it too!
Oh, yes. I played the game, and I totally agree with you. The game is absurdly big and full with little things, but is exhausting to Play, and specially starting other game can leech your energy pretty quickly. But the game is totally worth it, and it has a wonderful world with well defined races as enemies. I played two runs, but just playing one makes the momey worth because it makes you feel opressed, nervous, amazed, angry and happy. It's one of the best games I have played, and the fact that it was so underrated is just sad, in my opinion.
Great video and loved how deep you went into the reasons of why immersive sims don't appeal to "core gamers". I believe Arkane knows this. They're not trying to sell to everyone, they're only trying to sell to immersive sim fans. Everyone who likes this type of game knew about Prey and played the hell out of it, but it was still largely unheard of to the greater gaming audience. And I think this is a GOOD thing. If a game needs to be marketed to a larger audience purely for the sake of sales, then it tends to get dumbed down significantly. Fallout 4 is a good example. Fans unanimously agree that it's a good game, but a bad Fallout game. No dialogue skill checks, little to no RPG mechanics, de-emphasized exploration, and a huge focus on gunplay put off longtime fans who liked the franchise for its sense of roleplaying your way through a wasteland, not customizing guns or building settlements.
If Prey had to sell well, it would've had to be a worse immersive sim (if that makes any sense). It would've had to be dumbed down to a point where its systems were more accessible to the "core gamers", at which point the real fans of the genre wouldn't enjoy it as much. So overall, I think it's a good thing that it didn't get overhyped out of proportion and I think Arkane knew this all along. They weren't expecting it to sell 5-6 million, and I sure to god hope Bethesda wasn't either.
I have to disagree with you about Mooncrash, though. I don't believe they adapted the rogue-lite formula in order to appeal to a larger audience. Heck, if anything, roguelikes are even more niche than immersive sims. There's many developer interviews where they mentioned that they had been tinkering with rogue-lite mechanics for a while and wanted to play with what it would feel like to mix it into an immersive sim. I personally thought it was fantastic and fit the level design of Prey extremely well. It's literally the first time a roguelite x immersive sim mashup happened and it was really freaking good.
The fact that Prey happened is great. The fact that Bethesda didn't completely halt the project post-release and the fact that the team continued to work on it for over a year later delivering us Mooncrash and Typhon Hunter means that Bethesda still believes in the power of immersive sims. It's meant for a niche audience that really appreciates these special games. And I'd personally be okay with only getting a game of this quality every 4-5 years from a studio that knows what it's doing rather than have the genre turn into what the FPS / open-world genre has turned into, with cookie-cutter games that feel like they all have copy+paste mechanics with a slight twist on the formula released annually as part of a franchise.
Prey is the most underrated game of this generation and probably my favorite game of 2017. I just finished it and the story was so good, the gameplay is everything I like about deus ex and more, the music is amazing and the graphics are really good (altho some models look a bit rigid). I spent 30h on my playthrough not even completing everything!
I loved Prey. It was a great horror game. I'm not really sure what you mean by immersive sim, but this game is amazing.
I'm hopeful that another sequel will come along, but how a story would play out is beyond me.
Great game, top 5 ever.
The secret safes in the fire alarms is told to you through an email or log (can't remember exactly) and it even starts a little quest to find them all. To tell them apart from the regular fire alarms, the ones with safes have an extra red light right next to them
Anyone still playing in 2019?
Charles D it’s 2020 and I just got it because the bio shock collection was free on psn last month and I loved them so here I am now lol
If people can play Dark Souls, but are intimidated by several systems I barely even blinked at and find more realistic... While I sympathize with what you're saying in this video, might I ask those people to rise to the challenge and, as they say "Git Gud". Personally, I feel extremely intimidated and put off every time I try to figure out how to get into Dark Souls, and every time I'm reminded why I don't play it. But I will continue to try to Git Gud
First half of the game was one of the best immersive Sim experiences since system shock 2 not sure about the second half tho...
The second half felt like they ran out of time, money, an executive's patience, or all 3. It felt really rushed.
While yes not perfect I just wish they could have another chance after this it doesn't look like we are going to get another game like this in a long time.
@James Bell same, I just stopped playing, and can't even remember why and when that was
I hated this game until I started a new game of story mode. I am not ashamed to admit this game is difficult. ESP in the very beginning where you can die easily. I wish you could toggle the difficulty though cuz after around hour 5 it is way too easy on story mode.
9:00 This part isn't difficult at all. Stealth your way through the cafeteria, stunning all crew members while avoiding the Telepath. I had no trouble keeping myself hidden even without neuromods invested in stealth.
The hardest part of the game is the very beginning when you don't have any upgrades and few weapons, and I could see how that would put off some people. However as soon as you get a shotgun and a few neuromods the game really picks up and becomes much easier regardless of your chosen difficulty.
The complexity of the game isn't what caused the game to sell "poorly"
Your views on the subject of video game sales are problematic also. Do you really think raising the price of video games is going to change the current trend of microtransactions and season passes? Or do you think that's okay too because the "cost of development is too high"? Games do not need a price increase. More and more people are buying video games each year, allowing publishers to put more money into more ambitious projects. If they started charging $80 for a base game sales would decrease dramatically, and on top of that consumers will be expected to pay for a season pass, DLC, and microtransactions. How about no on that one chief.
Prey Mooncrash is a totally worth expansion/sequel to Prey and fantastic value for money. You get 3 (and a bit) full new areas on the same scale as those in the original game. There is very much a story (or rather stories) - you just have to look for them - just like in the base game. On top of that there are cool new systems of random loot, meta progression and multiple player characters.
I think the rogue-lite/reogue-lite gametype applies really well to the Immersive Sim genre. It stops you from always using your tried-and-true techniques for dealing with problems and forces you to improvise which highlights the strength of immersive sims. I certainly don't think Prey: Mooncrash is the strongest implementation of the Rogue-Like+Immerive Sim combo. The balance is a little off and the first couple of runs can be very frustrating without the Mule operator to dump your stuff into prior to escape. It runs into the same problem as the base game (and Shadow of Mordor I feel) in that the early game is much harder than the mid-game. But get past that and it's incredibly fun and replayable.
The reason the industry is adding all the micro is because investors want continual growth, something that is impossible in any industry. So they keep adding shit and not changing the price and ramping up marketing and getting more and more desperate to make money so investors dont draw out. Granted, the price to make games has increased, but i very much doubt its enough to put off the growth he industry has already seen and off put the sales if the game is actual good. But whats the point of trying when you can release the same continual shit like Activisions Call of Duty every single year and then cut content out and sell it to people.
Good game, wrong name. It's a shame we never saw Prey 2 and I blame Bethesda for it.
"Immersive Sim" is what we're calling System Shock-likes now?
Also gonna have to disagree with you on game prices. Jim Sterling is right, games don't cost $60 anymore, the entry level version of a game costs $60. You're out of your mind if you think most triple-A games are complete experiences with just the $60 starting point and the $30-$60 season pass content is just "extra" content that wasn't cut off from the main game to make extra money.
I just call em Shocklikes.
They've been called immersive sims since Warren Spector made the term known in 2000, dude.
@@innoclarke7435 Sorry but I don't religiously follow interviews of game developers, I tend to just play video games and occasionally read an interview of some insane Japanese auteur like Yoko Taro or from the heads of smaller indie studios I like like Swen Vincke from Larian. Most interviews of your typical game developers are too corporate executive buzzword for me with horrible dehumanizing buzzwords like "re-engage the core" or "live services".
Though I DO remember one thing from an interview with Warren Spector I remember reading around the time Epic Mickey was announced, he didn't like being called the guy who made Deus Ex because Deus Ex, like all games aside from 1-person projects, were made by a team who all deserve credit for a games success. Reading that has had a profound effect on me to where I no longer get excited to see some big name on a development team because I know that person is only as good as the team they have behind them. This knowledge unfortunately makes me a downer because I'm always pointing out shit like "From the original creators of Fallout" are meaningless marketing and the fact that two old fucks who were heads of a team that made a good game 20 years ago doesn't mean they are going to make anything good now. Thanks Warren Spector, you've saved me a lot of meaningless hype over the years while simultaneously getting me called a hipster.
It's fine, mate. Now you know where it originated from.
Warren Spector is correct, though. The industry, starting primarily with Hideo Kojima, has moved towards this concept of 'auteurs'. But with games, it doesn't work that way. Warren Spector is a fantastic producer and director, but the important thing about games development is that the director relies on his team to be able to translate his vision into reality. This is why Deus Ex is phenomenal, but Epic Mickey ended up leaving something to be desired. The Ion Storm Austin team was simply better at translating Spector's vision than the team at Junction Point. That said, knowing that a game has a director that's proven himself time and time again is at least some degree of a good sign. A good director with a shit team is still better than a bad director with a shit team, after all.
I just want to know what the fuck happened with Underworld: Ascendant. That game was supposed to be the fantastic return of the Looking Glass quality and design mindset, but... nope. That was Paul Neurath that headed that game, I think. Here's hoping Spector's direction of the team on System Shock 3 leads to a better product than Ascendant, or else his reputation will go up in flames for a fucked up System Shock sequel.
Errant Signal's "0451" video makes a good case about this "genre"
I loved the beginning of Prey, it really got me intrigued and wanting to see more. But then the clunky and overly difficult combat, plus the tedious inventory management turned me off and I eventually quit before getting through a third of the game. Just my 2c.
"We haven't raised the price of a game in a DECADE. It has been locked at $60." Hahahahahahahahahahaha heheh.....heh....
Oh. Wait. You actually believe that. I honestly envy whatever Kool Aid you are drinking.
I remember the days when games costed around 45€.
Ahh
Good times...
I actually ended up feeling very meh on this game. Its definetely well made, but as an immersive sim fan, it just felt like it was too stuck in the past of immersive sim games, too much like just a smorgasborg of previous games. Was really hoping this would have pushed the boundaries more and been more unique, but I get they were also stuck between making the game commercially viable and making what they wanted. Oh well.
Yup, I can perfectly understand that. Do you have any suggestions how we can advance immersive sim as a genre?
Moon crash is not just a rouge like, it's his own thing
Yeah it's a really weird game in it's own right, presented as a sim within a sim from the very start... definitely deserves analysis as a separate game..
An advice for your chair situation: try lifting the chair. Most cats don't like to be moved like that and will jump off.
There are a few that will consider this a free joyride though.
_Neuroshock_
I finally checked out Prey this week since I heard a lot of people saying it was ALOT like System Shock 2, which is in my top 3 favorite games of all time, and im really upset with myself for not checking it out sooner. Prey is like SS2 but not limited by the technology of it's time, it's seriously became one of my top 10 games of all time within the first day I had it. It's the kind of game I've been wanting for YEARS and it just... flew under my radar. guys if you're watching this video and haven't tried prey for whatever reason, I IMPLORE you to try it out. I've had a really hard time thinking about anything else, I've already started my second playthrough just because i'm addicted to it. It's seriously one of the best games of the last decade, maybe ever, in my opinion.
Yeah yeah, but there was a lot of weak spots in the game too, don't get me wrong, I quite love it, but I think you're sorta cherry picking here.
Outside from the mimic, for instance, the other enemies are extremely boring to fight, I finished the game in the highest difficulty and it was still a walk in the park. Which is weird, considering the theme you'd think that other enemies would mimic stuff, imagine if the ''ghosts'' actually mimic people that you could talk to but the moment you turned your back boom, so you'd be in constant paranoia when talking to people. The ctulhu thingie that controls turrets and people is solid tho'.
The plot is...It was fun, I noticed the twist 1 hour in, and thought it was gonna be stupid and undo everything, and it was. Same issue infinite had plotwise if you ain't got a good twist, don't do a twist, go ham with a villain, that's more fun than pulling a Shyamalan.
The open world is dreadful to navigate to be honest, I 100% everything and It's just a drag really, especially the ''fast travel'' which i'm fine with, I love the space, I just wish the map was better. Not to mention the time that a sidequest marker broke and I couldn't find one body floating in space for 100% so I had to look other people finding on youtube and use my big boy guessing pants to fly there, it was just with me tho', but it really peeved me off.
Again, the game's pretty good, it's above many games and one of my fav's that year, but there's lot's of stuff, including the map, that are just not user-friendly and makes navigation sometimes a drag. And don't let me get started on the GUTS sections, fuck that shit, I love space, the GUTS can fuck off.
I just feel like it's Too Big for its own good, and too long of a game for its own good considering how the twist makes you feel nothing happened. System Shock 2 is like a 4-hour game, Bioshock 1 and 2 are like 8 tops. Here you just get tired really quick of it. But it's a good game, with a lot of attention to detail, and I wish it was called something else since it'd avoid the controversy.
Granted haven't played the DLC yet, it looks pretty solid too, gonna get it when money comes by.
Exactly, there aren't enough enemy types to justify it's length and the enemies aren't fun to fight they're just annoying, pile on top of that the fact they respawn and ammo doesn't it's just a bad game. The story is just uninspired drek and the characters are as dull as dishwater. There's no main antagonist, how do you have a game without an antagonist?
thanks, my exact feeling. I love immersive sims but after 10h I got so bored by the game and these problems and since the story was absolutely uninteresting or at least badly presented that I just stopped playing.
@@MaitreMechant This was a long time ago haha, but honestly, I really think the lack of enemy variety is the worst thing, theres very few enemies that make the way you approach situations differently, the game is at its best at the start, where you're weak, mimics are fresh, ghosts are tanky, so you john mclane it.
i got over the map thing, but mostly cause by now I played it.so much that I know things by heart, still hate the guts, I don't mind the ending that much, but, my point still stands that that ending is worse due to the lenght of the game and how much you're distracted and taking your sweet time.
Still, the atmosphere is great, it is the best System Shock in a while(Gloomwood tho, gloomwood will challenge this, by being system shock and thief merged with a laser focus in doing that one thing without distractions, loved the demo).
But yeah hum, i still recommend you finishing it, its a good experience and theres some cool stuff in the end, just follow the plot and ignore the faffing about, its a good experience, its just easy to get distracted.
the immersion is what makes it so awesome, what a shame people can't appreciate it's epic proportions, thank you so much for this legit review.
As someone who's a prolific gamer for most of his life, all i can say about Prey is that it looks and feels basic... and i don't mean either of those descriptions from the perspective of someone who's played it. i seldom ever play multiplayer games, i pretty much stick to solo experiences; so you'd think this game should be exactly for me. but Prey just... looks to much like Bioshock. and i think that's the flaw, because the gaming crowd is completely full of it's share of Bioshock... with Bioshock.
It's like saying Nioh is allot like Dark Souls, now sure Nioh could've have been better than Dark Souls (in some weird alternative universe) but even if it had been it's not the point, the Spotlight has already been stolen. Prey needed more identity for itself. the Engine, the Art style, it just seems like another dime a dozen game you'd pick up in a £5 bin on it's own release day.
It also apes system shock 2 like crazy
I felt the same as you, now that i remember that was exactly the reason why stopped playing the game, the game itself isnt bad it just felt like a bioshock reskin in the end i feel bad taking in account how polished of a game it's.
The cat's thinking "I didn't know this chair had a massage function".
Yeah yeah, but i'm still pissed that they scrapped the original Pray2 concept.
Bethesda did it, not creators of this Grey
Not Arkanes fault
@@randomguy6679 NEver said it it was. I'm pissed generally. To those who made the decision.
5:15 I actually saw that argument from the opposite of the looking glass because I went through IT on my first playthrough to get up there because I forgot where the office was and didn't look at the map lol.
Although prey is a pretty good game, I can’t help but wonder what could have been if Prey 2 by Human head studio actually manage to finished development. It looks pretty cool from what I’ve seen in the footage and I certainly wouldn’t mind playing a bounty hunter in space game
@Subt1eOG I love how you present your opinion as fact immediately presenting yourself as idiotic. Prey 2017 isn't the best but it's far from bad and prey 2 had footage but no one played it. So many games LOOKED good but turned really really shit in the end and there was no guarantee at all despite how much you'll cry that prey 2 was going to be good, there was going to be speculation if it was good but ultimately there's no proof. Now tell me how do you think prey is shit what is your experience with the game.
Perhaps The Outer Worlds? Trailer gave me a bit a dejavu feeling of that trailer from Prey 2.
My thoughts exactly, we were robbed by greedy corporate asshats and they served us sloppy seconds for our trouble.
@@stealthbrawler Chill out guy it's just a videogame.
@@johnmirra6707 yet meanwhile you complain about not getting the game you wanted, I replied to an asshat that said the game was made by cockhead developers etc when there is genuine love in prey, so if you're gonna tell me to calm down delete that comment up there complaining about not getting the prey you wanted because "it's just a game" mkay? Cool
Damn, when you put it like that, it sounds amazing. Saw it on sale at a local store, but after seeing reviews saying it was mediocre, boring, short, etc. All the reviews I saw mentioned none of this. Should have grabbed it, this looks amazing.
It is amazing! Best game that is not from fromsoftware.
I think I put around 15 to 20 hours into prey. I liked the game but some of the mechanics threw me off, like the Typhon that comes after you after you use enough Typhon neuromods. The issue I found was that a lot of encounters became a game of patience more than skill. For example, waiting for dangerous enemies to come close one by one instead of engaging a few at a time.
I just think the game was unpopular from the start I don't think it has anything to do with how to game is. It just didn't catch much people's eye unless they are an active gamer. Gamers are slowly just becoming more casual where there is this section that only plays Rockstar games and fortnite and those are the games that blow up while smaller games like prey stay small because it's for true gamers. Nothing to do with the game itself more to do about the landscape and type of games that get big. There will never be another Vampire or System Shock because people like their hands to be held. It's sad but it's how it is.
What? Game is boring? In my eyes it is fun with loads of attention to detail.
I played it on normal on my first playthrough. Your friends really must suck playing this game on easy. It is a game with lots of aspect like scavenging for resources and such. Makes it immersive.
I am still lacking some archiements like the No Needle Run. Btw you don't need to fight the Nightmare. Find a corner where it can't get to you and just wait it out and it will go away.
It’s good to see people showing love for Prey. I honestly thought this was one of the best games of 2017, and now replayed again, I appretiate it even more. Fuck no-gravity sections tho.
😃 yay Mr Bioshock ☺️ what a coincidence, I bought Bethesdas Prey for Thanksgiving, its on sale at Microcenter, they also have on sale Dishonored 2 i mite go pu if I have a chance. I watched several review videos, according to one guy he says the game is inspired by Systemshock and that the game is more of an rpg & puzzle & brainy game, but too many people simply saw it as a 'shooter' game and harshly misjudged it on that alone. I like the game because it doesnt feel like a typical crappy bethesda game, it has a retro vibe, and the engine seems highly optimized with a good wide range of settings so u can get it to run decently on low spec hardware, i think this is one of those games that people should give it a chance, its feels like its going to be a legacy & historic gaming industry type game that u can go back to every once in a while, everyone shud have it in their library now and its cheap enuf so go pick it up, just pease take ur time and play the game as if its an rpg puzzle adventure game, if u can make more videos on Prey that would be great, and also checkout the Mooncrash DLC, looks neat so pick it up also when its on sale, Thanks Everyone✌️😎👍
Can confirm that it runs really well for how good it looks on mid to low range hardware. I was put of from buying it initially because a) I didn't know it was a Systemshock clone and shooters that don't fall into the Systemshock/Deus Ex niche don't really interest me b) When I found out, I thought it would fry my laptop, but it runs really well, with the exception of the long load time and the teleport ability that caused some lag.
@@marthia8015 😏👍 yup pretty much my thoughts too
I recently played again without typhon mods saving everyone. Its still good the only issue is the space walk sections arent engaging.
Was I the only one who thought it looked so vanilla? I dunno, the monsters bored the crap outta me.
i loved them
the design was nice, i love them
Prey isn't great but its just good and the most accessible immersive sim ever, and i can't believe you'd call a listening to an audiolog intimidating or that this game has no handholding when you have waypoint markers. Saying that it failed due to its demands for experimentation or that its too long is complete horseshit in a world where Breath of the Wild or stupidly large open-world games exist. What killed this game was 2 things for me, the poor marketing that obfuscated and didn't really show this game for what it is aside from a few gameplay videos which never went into the depth as to the full extant of emergent gameplay that you can emply and the fact that the game is not that interesting beyond its basic gameplay loops, its aesthetics (i don't need to mention Bioshock), and some of the characters although i was a lot more disappointed with some than others. Once you figure out all the basic weaknesses for each enemy, the game turns into a complete cakewalk on every subsequent playthrough up until you get the annoyin shit in the second half. It loses most of its replayability once you learn the ins and outs unless you want to do some extreme things.