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One of the best things about the qbeam is that when its upgraded, its one of the most ammo efficient weapons in the game. Also a fraction of a second on target means they will explode upon death even if you finish them off with a different weapon!
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Aug 26, 2017 16:44
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Question on chipset location: Where is the double jump chipset anyway? I never found it in my playthrough
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Aug 26, 2017 19:42
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CaptCommy posted:Question on chipset location: Where is the double jump chipset anyway? I never found it in my playthrough That one is always in the same place in briefcase next to Grant Lockwood, the guy from Disgruntled Employee quest, in space quite far from the station where radiation zone starts
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Aug 26, 2017 19:50
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Is there still an issue with input lag in the PS4 version?
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Aug 27, 2017 03:22
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Just finished this game. The ending loving floored me. I was so conflicted about whether to use the nullwave or explode the station. I chose to explode the station. Shook hands with Alex.
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Aug 27, 2017 03:43
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unwantedplatypus posted:Just finished this game. The ending loving floored me. I was so conflicted about whether to use the nullwave or explode the station. I chose to explode the station. Shook hands with Alex. For a second I thought that last bit occurred before the epilogue, and that you found a new ending permutation. Utopian Mind posted:Is there still an issue with input lag in the PS4 version? It's supposedly better than the demo, but a bit worse than when they screwed the game up with frame pacing issues (but fixed the lag).
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Aug 27, 2017 04:03
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unwantedplatypus posted:Just finished this game. The ending loving floored me. I was so conflicted about whether to use the nullwave or explode the station. I chose to explode the station. Shook hands with Alex. A lot of people hated the ending. I thought it was great and elevated all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:47
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It's... weird, it's neat how much stuff it pays attention to but it feels basically like an animated, ingame version of fallout 3 listing stuff after you finish it, also it was all a dreeeaaaammm. I kind of guessed that Moragan might be a typhon from the earlier logs, though it didn't make sense with the turrets not spotting you until you neuromodded yourself up, but I figured it would be a plot point somewhere at least. I like it a lot less than the sequence leading up to it, which is very cool. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Aug 27, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 04:50
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Neurosis posted:A lot of people hated the ending. I thought it was great and elevated all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding. Ending spoilers When I took Alex's escape pod, it occurred to me that it was probably a simulation, but my first thought was that they'd never do something so cliche, so I weirdly talked myself out of the twist. When I saw that it was a simulation anyway my knee-jerk reaction was to straight-up hate it, but the more I thought about it, the more it worked, and I'm glad the writers took the route they did. On later playthroughs it was fun seeing how well they seeded the idea with so many clues and parallel themes (that I somehow totally missed).
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Aug 27, 2017 04:55
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I agree with that last bit, the thing in Calvino's room, the themes of simulation running through everything, messing with your memory and stuff, it's thematic certainly, I just think it still feels like a cop out.
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Aug 27, 2017 04:58
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Ending spoilers Has anyone figured out how the game decides who wins the "duel" between Alex and January? In my game I decided to blow up the station, Alex shot January and tried to convince me to change my mind. But I've been watching a few other people play it and January always ends up zapping Alex in their games, even if they select to blow up the station too.
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Aug 27, 2017 05:04
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I like the ending as simulation as it more closely mirrors the relationship that the player has with the game itself. Morgan's actions are only meaningless in the sense that your actions through Morgan are meaningless, except for how it reflects on you. It also meshes really well with the game's central theme of identity. In general, people get frustrated with the simulation trope when its used to invalidate the player's decisions. However, the ending of Prey centers the story on the decisions themselves. Typho-Morgan is still important, and its decisions are still important; just in a radically different way than you'd first suspect. Mod edit: use spoiler tags for poo poo like this. Somebody fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Aug 31, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 05:05
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Neurosis posted:A lot of people hated the ending. I thought it was great and elevated all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding. I thought it destroyed all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding.
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Aug 27, 2017 06:15
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Digirat posted:I thought it destroyed all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding. I strongly disagree.
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Aug 27, 2017 06:51
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Digirat posted:I thought it destroyed all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding. the choices are important to the ending, just not in the way such choices ordinarily are. the worldbuilding hammers home how these things gently caress with memory and how the typhon are incapable of communication. the plot point regarding morgan's shifting personality and how others perceive morgan's actions reflects what an untested moral agent the hybrid silent alien protagonist is. taking all of these things without the ending would have just left it at a ho-hum story, with the only noteworthy part about the writing being how they accounted for all kinds of weird choices and how they put a lot of care into setting up all the station characters and their relationships. the ending made the relationships and how morgan related to everything more interesting.
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Aug 27, 2017 07:03
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Digirat posted:I thought it destroyed all the other plot, choices and worldbuilding. I can see why anyone could arrive here, but I interpret the game as like the story of MGS 2. The game we play is an exact replica of what happened the day Talos 1 crashed into Earth, and we're just experiencing what Morgan did as our "Morgan". The story, plot and world that we experience in the game are all real, it all happened just not when we experience it if that makes sense. I think this way the ending creates a greater narrative that has room to grow, instead of just ending when everything explodes or whatever.
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Aug 27, 2017 07:31
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The ending tells you that all the consequences of your choices weren't what you actually experienced, and that they actually only mattered for reasons that you will not get to see yourself. Any part of a story that can be phrased as "and it was all a dream" flips you off proportionally to how invested you were in that part of the story. In prey, that's the entire story. It ends by telling you that none of the poo poo you did mattered, except in extremely indirect ways that you won't see because now the game's over.
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Aug 27, 2017 07:44
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Digirat posted:The ending tells you that all the consequences of your choices weren't what you actually experienced, and that they actually only mattered for reasons that you will not get to see yourself. The same could be said of all videogames.
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Aug 27, 2017 08:06
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Lt. Danger posted:The same could be said of all videogames. What's your opinion of the game, Lt.?
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Aug 27, 2017 08:17
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Digirat posted:The ending tells you that all the consequences of your choices weren't what you actually experienced, and that they actually only mattered for reasons that you will not get to see yourself. Any part of a story that can be phrased as "and it was all a dream" flips you off proportionally to how invested you were in that part of the story. In prey, that's the entire story. It ends by telling you that none of the poo poo you did mattered, except in extremely indirect ways that you won't see because now the game's over. The point of the ending was that your choices matter even if you're only being given the illusion of a choice. That the things you do in a simulation can still impact the real world through developing your own world view and personality. I thought it was really clever.
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Aug 27, 2017 08:49
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Rinkles posted:What's your opinion of the game, Lt.? I liked it a lot, thanks. System Shock 3 is a pretty apt way of describing it, and I appreciate how much clunkiness has been ironed out of the SS2 formula. I think other people have covered most points - great level design, great incidental writing, GLOO gun is fantastic, could do with a few more weapon/enemy types, main plot a bit overlong, Nightmare needs to learn how to duck. Ending is fine if abrupt and it's kinda funny how "dream" endings are usually deployed to get out of Superdickery-style cheap shock stories, an easy reset to the status quo - all the thrills with none of the spills - but in Prey, the opposite is true, and the "dream" ending is used to up the stakes and make things worse.
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Aug 27, 2017 09:25
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Lt. Danger posted:I liked it a lot, thanks. System Shock 3 is a pretty apt way of describing it, and I appreciate how much clunkiness has been ironed out of the SS2 formula. Cool. I was curious because your opinions are often completely divergent from my own. But sometimes they're spot on.
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Aug 27, 2017 09:29
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agreed with the second-to-last post on pretty much everything. as far as the last part of the game and the problem with how much backtracking there is and consequently how little time you spend doing the fun exploration stuff then, i think they could've taken a cue from SS2: have dahl turn up in something much larger than a shuttle, and you have to go over to that for whatever plot reason; maybe put the station further out in the solar system to justify why a full-blown spaceship is necessary. i am wondering what system shock 3 is going to take from this game and how they'll distinguish that game.
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Aug 27, 2017 09:49
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Neurosis posted:i am wondering what system shock 3 is going to take from this game A melancholy envy of Arkane's production values.
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Aug 27, 2017 10:04
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Finished this just now for my first play-though. Did it human upgrades only, and really enjoyed how good it felt dropping into combat focus, sprinting silently behind advanced Phantoms, and one-shotting them with the shotgun once I'd made it to mid-game. I figured out that in some way I was actually a Typhon, purely from reading a text entry talking about how we had tried putting typhon into us but never the other way around, although I figured that I was one in the reality of the game rather than the game itself being a simulation. I'm not sure whether I like it better than System Shock 2, and will have to give it another try using a different build in a few months, but honestly can't remember when I took to playing a game as enthusiastically as this one. It had good combat, great Deus-Ex-like multiple ways of completing every task, and looked spectacular. I really liked how many neat touches there were in the game. Even little things like how in the opening sequence the flocks of birds outside your window look real lovely, and then you read an email about how they're having rendering issues with them. Also, the Gloo Gun is my favourite utility weapon in a video game, moreso even than the gravgun from half-life. Breetai fucked around with this message at 11:42 on Aug 27, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 11:40
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Lt. Danger posted:I liked it a lot, thanks. System Shock 3 is a pretty apt way of describing it, and I appreciate how much clunkiness has been ironed out of the SS2 formula. this is a great way to look at it and was my take on why the trope at the end was actually handled really well. It's basically saying that this previously thought feral lifeform has greater sentience than originally thought. Alex asking "can you understand us" and the option to shake his hand spoke volumes to me, and was kind of hosed up that after you went through this Inception-level event of people telling you who you "were" and who you "are," the Typhon Morgan still could rationalize and choose to go against a destiny or a history of its "self." As far as "you're a clone/it's all a dream" poo poo goes, Prey definitely did it well even if those themes have been utilized a lot in fiction lately, especially from MGSV. I'd absolutely say that everything you did mattered because it confirms so many things on the capability of your character and how willing you were to go against what you thought was or wasn't true and offered to you throughout the game.
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Aug 27, 2017 15:53
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I seem to have missed what happened to the real Morgan. Blowing throw the game without reading many of the messages probably contributed to that deficiency. Really enjoyed the game though, ran super smooth on my pc too.
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Aug 27, 2017 17:44
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plape tickler posted:I seem to have missed what happened to the real Morgan. Blowing throw the game without reading many of the messages probably contributed to that deficiency. Really enjoyed the game though, ran super smooth on my pc too. I don't think that is ever touched upon but I assume real Morgan failed in doing whichever solution he was doing, or got hosed beyond repair by Neuromod therapy . I don't ever recall anything in the game touching upon that fate.
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Aug 27, 2017 18:00
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Lt. Danger posted:The same could be said of all videogames. No, most stories don't end by explicitly going out of their way to tell you that the entire rest of the story meant fuckall within the setting. It tells you that it potentially might mean something later, except you won't experience any of that because *sequel bait* so why should you care?
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Aug 27, 2017 23:01
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Digirat posted:No, most stories don't end by explicitly going out of their way to tell you that the entire rest of the story meant fuckall within the setting. It tells you that it potentially might mean something later, except you won't experience any of that because *sequel bait* so why should you care? That's not what the ending says. The overall story actually happened; the simulation is based on the real Morgan Yu's memories. This means that there was a canonical set of choices that the real Morgan Yu made, but it does not mean that your choices didn't matter. So the story had meaning, and your choices within the story had meaning in that they prove that the Typhon can made to empathize with humans. There's also nothing sequel-baity about the ending; I don't know where you would even begin making a sequel, given that ending. It would've been far easier to develop a sequel by not having it be a simulation and not definitively stating that the Earth has gotten hosed up by the Typhon
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Aug 27, 2017 23:12
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Digirat posted:No, most stories don't end by explicitly going out of their way to tell you that the entire rest of the story meant fuckall within the setting. Didn't it? The simulation is a framing device that makes Alex, Morgan and the game itself into an unreliable narrator. Alex is a historian reconstructing the events of the past to create a useful narrative - like all histories, it is imperfect, selective, biased and more symbolic than it is comprehensive, but the past still happened and still has meaning. In fact, it is only through the telling of these flawed stories that the past can have meaning! There is no functional difference between the ending as-is and a theoretical ending where the real Alex wakes the real Morgan up from a coma after they both escape Talos 1 and explains containment didn't work, Earth has been invaded anyway - except that you don't get the commentary about empathy and narrative mimesis/diegesis in videogames, which was important enough to Arkane that they made the opening level an actual 4D simulation inside the game. quote:why should you care? We failed. This isn't the one.
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Aug 27, 2017 23:49
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Arguably, since your experience is also a recreation of Morgan Yu's real memories, you're retroactively shaping what actually did happen on Talos. We don't know to what extent the simulation lines up (obviously Alex doesn't get shot, e.g.) but presumably there's enough overlap that the way you play could reflect a different reality than someone else's.
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Aug 27, 2017 23:53
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Are the Typhon a hive mind, which typhon creatures are intelligent?
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Aug 27, 2017 23:57
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Digirat, since you, obviously figured out the twist and manipulated the system so you could KILL THEM ALL, why does it matter whether the rest of it mattered beyond giving you that opportunity? It was a test, and you passed, and the things you did in the simulation were real enough to alter the course of outside sim reality. Seems real enough impact wise to me GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 23:57
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GlyphGryph posted:Digirat, since you, obviously figured out the twist and manipulated the system so you could KILL THEM ALL, why does it matter whether the rest of it mattered beyond giving you that opportunity? It was a test, and you passed, and the things you did in the simulation were real enough to alter the course of outside sim reality. Again, saying that the simulation twist makes the story meaningless also implies that the story would be meaningless regardless of said twist; because as a computer game it is literally just a simulation entirely. The entirety of the value that we derive from fiction is how it affects us, the reader.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:00
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We've been told to think of "it was just a simulation" as bad storytelling, so most people reacted that way to its usage in Prey without giving it any more thought. But the reason that such a mechanism is usually bad is because it's used to bypass the consequences of a story in order to make future stories easier to write. This is not how Prey uses that mechanism. First, it says that the events of the simulation really happened to the real Morgan Yu, just not necessarily in the exact way portrayed. And that's fine; this is no different than having a canonical set of decisions in any other game with choices, yet we don't think of the choices in those games as being meaningless. Second, it nails down a specific outcome that's not any easier to write around than any of the hypothetical outcomes that the player may have seen: the Typhon made it to Earth, and seemingly another outbreak also occurs on the station, as you can hear the rattling of a disguised Mimic coming from the room next to Alex's in the ending. Rather than being used in any of the normally bad, hacky ways that a simulation would normally be used in a story, the simulation in Prey avoid those missteps and instead illustrates a specific plot point: the Typhon may be able to be taught empathy. Your choices in the simulation determine whether or not Alex + his crew determine will deem the empathy-teaching experiment as a success, and if they do deem it a success then you are given the additional choice of whether their interpretation of your actions was correct.
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Aug 28, 2017 00:44
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unwantedplatypus posted:Are the Typhon a hive mind, which typhon creatures are intelligent? From what I took away, there is no "hive mind" as we understand it - there's no guiding intelligence behind any of the Typhon we encounter except possibly the Apex. Instead, the mimics are what may best be called invasive neurons - they are designed to be shot out into space and if they find anything worth eating they will reproduce; their reproduction will hit a stage at which point they instinctively create a weaver, which then starts the life cycle proper building phantoms to act as antibodies and coral that acts as synapses between the various lifeforms to build the neural network that then calls the Apex in to finish off what is left. The neural network itself is probably conscious, and that's possibly what trips the Apex, but most of what they're doing is just emerging from the simple interactions each member is programmed with. I took the experiment to not simply be 'injecting' intelligence or consciousness into the Typhon, but forcing a specifically human set of experiences into it such that its internal behaviour becomes complex enough to emerge as individual consciousness at the end rather simply serving as a dim relay for the higher and unknowable consciousness that the coral forms.
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Aug 28, 2017 01:42
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The straightforward ending in which you deal with the outbreak and live/die depending on your choice isn't particularly interesting since it doesn't add anything to the themes or interesting philosophical questions the game wants you to think about. In fact the moment to moment objectives aren't particularly interesting themselves and mostly involve messing with systems on the station so you can get to your final objective. The simulation ending definitely elevates an otherwise fairly generic plot about dealing with an alien outbreak on a station to something far more interesting.
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Aug 28, 2017 02:12
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Cnidaria posted:The straightforward ending in which you deal with the outbreak and live/die depending on your choice isn't particularly interesting since it doesn't add anything to the themes or interesting philosophical questions the game wants you to think about. In fact the moment to moment objectives aren't particularly interesting themselves and mostly involve messing with systems on the station so you can get to your final objective. The simulation ending definitely elevates an otherwise fairly generic plot about dealing with an alien outbreak on a station to something far more interesting. This is very well put.
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Aug 28, 2017 02:18
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GlyphGryph posted:Digirat, since you, obviously figured out the twist and manipulated the system so you could KILL THEM ALL, why does it matter whether the rest of it mattered beyond giving you that opportunity? It was a test, and you passed, and the things you did in the simulation were real enough to alter the course of outside sim reality. I'm not sure what you're saying because I took alex's hand, except I did not care about that choice because it was the last moment in the game and I knew I wasn't going to see any of the consequences of it at that point. You go through the entire game to get told that none of the poo poo you did actually happened (the fact that similar events happened to a real morgan does not change this or make your actions have any meaning), humanity got hosed in the end one way or another, but things might be able to be salvaged now? Maybe? You don't know whether or not even that one last decision matters or not, because the game's over as soon as you make it. And every single thing you do over the course of the game is meaningless except to very indirectly decide whether or not you even get that one choice. The ending itself is presented extremely well with the same writing quality as the rest of the game, but it comes as close as it can to invalidating the entire rest of the game.
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Aug 28, 2017 05:30
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