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100% agreed with Phigs. The funny thing is, I'm the rare soul who will defend "meaningless" choices in RPGs because making the choice is usually more interesting than the outcome. But most of Prey's choices are boring and simplistic with the twist being they were like that on purpose.
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Jun 16, 2023 19:32
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What’s Cazavor? The only cut content I know of for Prey is the sentient weapon.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:19
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Your Uncle Dracula posted:What’s Cazavor? The only cut content I know of for Prey is the sentient weapon. That's the name of the sentient weapon, yep.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:23
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Arivia posted:That's the name of the sentient weapon, yep. It was going to form a neural link with Morgan and served as a foil. It talks about how Morgan's brain isn't human, mentions the phantom's neural connection breaking during the lucid episodes, and its entire character arc is basically it having an ethical crisis over its nature and says that the phantom is doing the same thing.
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Jun 16, 2023 20:59
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turn off the TV posted:It was going to form a neural link with Morgan and served as a foil. It talks about how Morgan's brain isn't human, mentions the phantom's neural connection breaking during the lucid episodes, and its entire character arc is basically it having an ethical crisis over its nature and says that the phantom is doing the same thing. I would...need to read about it more but I feel like it's better off that this wasn't included. "Simulation so advanced that, not only did it have you fooled 100% that it was reality, but it's also able to interface with your brain in such a way that it can determine your real world physiology and have reactions to it that would have been way outside of what happened during the events the simulation was based on" is such an ask for me to believe. I don't recall any other talk about simulation stuff in Prey in any real capacity (outside of simulation themed items like the looking glass and the neuromods), so the idea that that technology is that far along is a lot to me. Which isn't to say it's impossible this stuff exists (I mean obviously that's a huge part of Mooncrash but I'm not counting it since it came out over a year later, and even there the simulation breaks down radically as time passes), it's just a seed they really would have needed to plant to during the game to not make the ending even more out of left field. I love Prey but was pretty meh on the ending, it didn't really rub me the wrong way or any way, really. Just sort of an "oh, okay, well seems like a neat sequel hook?" kind of takeaway. My wishlist gripe I took away from the game instead is that I wish the game had played more into Morgan's brain getting fried as their neuromods were yanked and reinstalled on a daily basis, not knowing what was really happening and being distrustful of the people around them. I thought the sci-fi hook for memory loss and personality drift was solid and they did some neat things with it like the different operators and the comments other characters made about how long Alex had them in the "first day at Transtar" simulation, but outside of not knowing if you should follow December or not I feel like they didn't explore it nearly as much as they could have. There are some pretty dark implications that Alex might have purposefully trapped you in the simulation forever to get you out of the way and if they had explored stuff like that that more and introduced more clues to put together, even if they didn't actually answer anything, just more to go off of and let your brain run wild, I think it would have been a much more compelling story than the meta narrative angle they took, at least to me. Taken a different direction, it could have been a high concept sci-fi psychological horror about multiple personalities and paranoia, and that would have contextualized better as well a reason for using some of the freedoms the game gives you in how you interact with the other survivors rather than just being a detached gamer going for achievements (do I help them or...maybe it's better Elazar doesn't make it out of Cargo, she never liked me anyways, I heard her psych eval, how can I trust her, and all the other security guys would follow her without question...). I didn't see the ending coming as clearly as others, but I think it's mostly because I was hyper-focusing on the stuff they could have done that they didn't, and was trying to fit all the pieces (all the stuff with coral and the foreshadowing dialogue when you leave in the escape pod, as well as Alex's abrupt dismissal of Morgan's idea to try to add empathy to the Typhons) into that plotline. e: was foolish of me not to spoiler this wall of text like everyone's been doing from the get-go, hopefully anyone that might have been spoiled was spared Mr.Hotkeys fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 00:44
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the ending just reveals the game is an unreliable narrator. this doesn't invalidate what happened, the future stakes Alex reveals in the ending, or the meaning of the various subplots you come across while exploring Talos 1 (Calvino's dementia, Sho and Foy's relationship, Yu family drama etc.)
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Jun 17, 2023 01:23
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i liked how in the intro helicopter ride you see some birds and they just don't look right. later you find an email talking about how the sim birds are glitching out. really good music track there too.
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Jun 17, 2023 01:29
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uber_stoat posted:i liked how in the intro helicopter ride you see some birds and they just don't look right. later you find an email talking about how the sim birds are glitching out. Everything is going to be okay. Or not. A neat little detail is how your character is tapping their foot to the song.
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Jun 17, 2023 01:43
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Mr.Hotkeys posted:My wishlist gripe I took away from the game instead is that I wish the game had played more into [spoilers...] This is a good point and plays into why I didn't like the ending. The ending leaves a lot of the existentialism and psychological horror angles behind and basically turns them into background lore for the setting rather than a central part of the story. In the end, Prey's story is much more about aliens than it is about memory and psychology and the self despite all the very interesting setup for the latter, which I think is a pretty big downgrade. The soundtrack really does kick rear end in general. I actually have Mind Game in my regular music playlist and I'm not normally a game music kind of person. Phigs fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 07:00
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I really really expected Phantoms, if not all the monsters, to be the ghost or energy or reflection or whatever the gently caress version of the missing/dead people aboard. I actually avoided killing any of them for a long time thinking it would be like, later, -- aha! you killed the "monsters" but they were your friends all along, maybe you're the monster! I think that idea was mostly videogameitis and grasping for straws with some of the weird stuff Phantoms mumble "what does it look like? the shape in the glass" making me thinknig someone losing their mind not understanding their hosed up reflection. Other quotes sounded like ghost impressions of people caught looping last thoughts before whatever incident. oh wow, just saw this. all the phantom quotes are repeats of NPCs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QldGhLBYSw haha i forgot how much robo gravitas the suit voice has https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgErJKrlYlI Khanstant fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 07:10
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Khanstant posted:I really really expected Phantoms, if not all the monsters, to be the ghost or energy or reflection or whatever the gently caress version of the missing/dead people aboard. I actually avoided killing any of them for a long time thinking it would be like, later, -- aha! you killed the "monsters" but they were your friends all along, maybe you're the monster! I think that idea was mostly videogameitis and grasping for straws with some of the weird stuff Phantoms mumble "what does it look like? the shape in the glass" making me thinknig someone losing their mind not understanding their hosed up reflection. Other quotes sounded like ghost impressions of people caught looping last thoughts before whatever incident. I think that's kinda what happened? There is an ability that allows you to create phantoms out of corpses, and the phantom object gets the name of the corpse object. So they aren't "actually" people, but those bipedal phantoms are just more advanced mimics that are trying to mimic humanity without actually knowing that's what they are doing. They're just mimicing a system, but that system happened to be a self-aware one, and that's alien to them. Edit: Ending spoilers That's what the experiment was for, iirc, deliberately giving a phantom self awareness (modeled after a specific person), and hoping that will make it sympathetic to humanity's plight. The player can decide if it worked or not. Works either way. Yeah, it's self aware now, and it loving hates humanity. Or, yeah, it's a simulacrum of M. Yu, and it hates its brother. Or... M. Yu was actually a good person, and the experiment worked, so now it's willing to bridge the gap between humanity and the mimics. Or in a meta way the player is now itry fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jun 17, 2023 |
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Jun 17, 2023 07:22
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Phigs posted:I found the ending very unsatisfying, it drained all the enthusiasm I had left after the slog of the endgame and lessened my overall opinion of the game. Phigs posted:I think games should be a lot more conservative with their endings in general. If I'm finishing your game I probably like it and all you have to do is not mess that up.
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Jun 19, 2023 06:03
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I'll chuck my 2c in and agree with Phigs's comment about conservative endings being good. Prey had a lot of space to talk about the nature of reality and simulations, and did so great. The ending's twist could have been moved forwards and explored upon or just left as an exercise to the reader via subtle hints or something. A comparison can be made to The Talos Priciple, which was *very* heavy with philosophy of self/perceptions/etc and the freedom of the player's choice, but even if you took a 'bad' ending it didn't pop any 11th hour twists.
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Jun 19, 2023 08:37
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I consider The Talos Principle to be a fairly high bar, at least as far as video game writing goes. I don't hold it against Prey for failing to clear that one, even if perhaps I should. I do have to agree that while I think there are good arguments to be made for what Prey wanted to do, and I even find some of those arguments compelling, when I first finished my gut reaction was dissatisfaction.
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Jun 19, 2023 10:19
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Whilst I don't remember if I had guessed the twist or had an inkling too it, I was pretty okay with the ending. I'm kinda surprised to learn so many folks were dissatisfied/disliked it tbh.
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Jun 19, 2023 13:58
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I always fell into the “enjoyed it, can see entirely why people might not like it” bucket.
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Jun 19, 2023 14:10
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About the end and the nature of the typhoid. I dont recall really getting it. I understood you played the enemy alien, but as a separate entity from the rest of the typhoid sentient being, but what was the plan? to use you as a diplomat as a list ditch attempt to undo earth losing to the other aliens?
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Jun 19, 2023 14:16
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i kind of liked it a bit because one thing that's clear in the game is Morgan is a loving psycho and it would have been weird for him to actually be the real protagonist
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Jun 19, 2023 14:18
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kneelbeforezog posted:About the end and the nature of the typhoid. I dont recall really getting it. I understood you played the enemy alien, but as a separate entity from the rest of the typhoid sentient being, but what was the plan? to use you as a diplomat as a list ditch attempt to undo earth losing to the other aliens? Off the top of my head, since all of the other typhon are connected to each other via the coral, maybe the plan is to release modified material from the 'good' post-simulation Morgan Typhon into the general mass and leave it to spread?
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Jun 19, 2023 14:24
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kneelbeforezog posted:About the end and the nature of the typhoid. I dont recall really getting it. I understood you played the enemy alien, but as a separate entity from the rest of the typhoid sentient being, but what was the plan? to use you as a diplomat as a list ditch attempt to undo earth losing to the other aliens? The core problem was that Typhon entities all lacked mirror neurons, making them physically incapable of any sense of empathy. As such, they just attacked and consumed anything that wasn’t part of the Typhon ecosystem. Alex’s idea was to inject mirror neurons and human memories into a Typhon subject as a “not like we have any better ideas” plan. Ideally speaking, Typhon Morgan would properly integrate those neurons, be able to actually integrate empathic behaviors into itself, and then serve as a way to affect the Typhon horde in a way where they would stop just viewing humans as nothing more than a source for materials to propagate themselves further. So “make a Typhon diplomat” isn’t incorrect, but he was approaching it from a more scientific “fix the core biological blocker” angle.
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Jun 19, 2023 14:26
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Feels Villeneuve posted:i kind of liked it a bit because one thing that's clear in the game is Morgan is a loving psycho and it would have been weird for him to actually be the real protagonist Morgan sort of is the real protagonist, though. The experiment they're doing is injecting a phantom with a biological neuromod based on Morgan's brain. Neuromods are typically using a specific slice of a person's brain that contains a specific skill or bit of knowledge, but using more of the brain's contents is what they do to make "emulated entities" in the setting.
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Jun 19, 2023 15:02
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One aspect of the story that remained underdeveloped was that both Morgan and Alex were mass murders. You have that shunted off into the optional Mikhaila sub-plot, along with the various whistleblowers that got murked on the station. You never get to confront anyone about this because you're cursed to be a silent protagonist. You can tie that back into the ending by killing Alex not because he failed in making phantom-Morgan empathetic, but because he succeeded, but that's in the player's head-canon, the game leaves it entirely open-ended.
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Jun 19, 2023 15:04
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Hannibal Rex posted:One aspect of the story that remained underdeveloped was that both Morgan and Alex were mass murders. You have that shunted off into the optional Mikhaila sub-plot, along with the various whistleblowers that got murked on the station. You never get to confront anyone about this because you're cursed to be a silent protagonist. The game tried to handwave that away by making their parents literal psychopaths who would kill their own children to protect their power. If you take it at face value, Morgan and Alex weren't really in charge and were "just following orders" 
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Jun 19, 2023 15:33
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Then you play Mooncrash, see another Yu's storyline play out the same themes except now it's a Yu being sacrificed for the family's gain, and realize that they're an entire family of absolute monsters
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Jun 19, 2023 16:11
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Doesn't even need to be handwaved away, it's just a question of how much you think January was tweaked for this particular simulation, versus whatever they were during the real-world events. January reacts with shock if you (the player/Typhon) help the survivors in the cargo bay by setting up turrets and then clearing out the area. January pretty clearly thinks that's way off base from whatever old Morgan would do in that situation, and comments on how unexpected your kindness toward other humans is. Now, is that because the simulation is specifically made for a Typhon? Or is it because Morgan is a wretched murderer, and by showing any level of empathy at all, Typhon-Morgan comes across as a more decent person? Considering that Morgan was heavily and personally involved in the murder of prisoners for neuromod material, I wouldn't expect human Morgan to have made any effort to save other lives during their escape attempt beyond immediate self-interest. And yes, that absolutely comes down to interpretation by the player. I love it. There's no way to know with absolute certainty, all you can do is make your best guess based on what you've seen throughout the game. Much like the Shuttle Advent trolley problem.
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Jun 19, 2023 16:16
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Another point occurs to me about the morality we see in the central characters - We never see a version of Morgan that is pre-neuromod - all the emails/videos/audiologs are from a Morgan that has had neromods installed and removed many times, and it is commented on that Morgan's character is not reverting back to its original state after each removal. So was Morgan always a heartless psychopath, or did the neuromods make him/her more Typhon-like over time?
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Jun 19, 2023 16:20
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Morgan was brought into the neuromod program after it was well underway. But he got very involved with it before they started the memory reset experiments for the first time. Alex, however, set it up in the first place. It's also interesting that Alex set up the sim, so he got to white-wash his own role and motivation to an unknown extent.
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Jun 19, 2023 16:42
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Still, the biggest crime of the game is that when I finally had the time, money, and parts, nobody was making PC cases that look like operators
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Jun 19, 2023 16:52
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Did they ever consider making the aliens and robots look a little more distinct and cooler?
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Jun 19, 2023 17:09
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Feels Villeneuve posted:i kind of liked it a bit because one thing that's clear in the game is Morgan is a loving psycho and it would have been weird for him to actually be the real protagonist
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Jun 19, 2023 17:10
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UP AND ADAM posted:Did they ever consider making the aliens and robots look a little more distinct and cooler? No! You will fight vague whirling fog and you will like it.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:13
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It is sort of interesting that they changed the design in MOONCRASH such that they became more like Abyssal enemies in Dark Souls. Basically lustrous, striated muscle.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:25
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Hannibal Rex posted:One aspect of the story that remained underdeveloped was that both Morgan and Alex were mass murders. You have that shunted off into the optional Mikhaila sub-plot, along with the various whistleblowers that got murked on the station. You never get to confront anyone about this because you're cursed to be a silent protagonist. Well yes and no? There's at least one email from Morgan expressing outrage at the inhumanities, so not all memory-wipe'd Morgan's are acting the same, which causes discussion with the scientists and Alex.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:38
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Serephina posted:Well yes and no? There's at least one email from Morgan expressing outrage at the inhumanities, so not all memory-wipe'd Morgan's are acting the same, which causes discussion with the scientists and Alex. This was clever on the part of the designers because it made any playstyle fit in-universe, even before the twist ending. A lot of games have the problem where the way your character's morality is portrayed in the story is totally divorced from the player's actions, like they just got whacked on the head one day and became a murder-hobo out of nowhere.
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Jun 19, 2023 17:44
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itry posted:I think that's kinda what happened? There is an ability that allows you to create phantoms out of corpses, and the phantom object gets the name of the corpse object. So they aren't "actually" people, but those bipedal phantoms are just more advanced mimics that are trying to mimic humanity without actually knowing that's what they are doing. They're just mimicing a system, but that system happened to be a self-aware one, and that's alien to them. Well I mean I was assuming a different cliche where the phantoms were real people and you're hosed up in some way not knowing it kinda deal. Which thankfully ended up not being the case as the mimics emulating people as systems is more interesting. As for the ending, I choose to believe the mimic and doctor ended up becoming friends and then fall in love and the sequel will be about them using unethical science and business to help bridge the gap between their two warring families
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Jun 19, 2023 17:49
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The most underdeveloped part of Prey is definitely all of the stuff about humans having quantum psychic powers or whatever, with paraplexis being a symptom of it. I'm not sure if the noetic field or whatever is supposed to be the reason why Typhon are attracted to the earth, but the psionic aptitude neuromods are the only human ones that increase the frequency of Nightmare spawns.
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Jun 19, 2023 18:11
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KillHour posted:This was clever on the part of the designers because it made any playstyle fit in-universe, even before the twist ending. That's actually part of what bugs me. Game has too many escape hatches to explain away inconsistencies so that it can avoid saying almost anything truly definitive. With the ending taken into account literally nothing has to be taken at face value outside of maybe some very basic facts. It comes off as one big Rorschach test. (And yes, I know, there's one of those in the intro as well.) Problem is that it results in the game being a collection of interesting ideas and questions that can't actually lead anywhere because doing so would collapse the wave function. I don't need the game to exhaustively spell things out or only be about one specific thing, but it feels like the narrative demands you not only connect the dots but place the dots yourself. Even the ending is ambiguous enough such that it can be twisted and spun into basically whatever you want it to be. And that's why it's ultimately unsatisfying. Compare to say, a Whodunit, where the bulk of the work will involve lies, manipulation, misdirection, and seemingly disconnected threads. Then at the end the detective calls everyone to the parlor so they can lay everything out and point to the murderer. There's a sort of catharsis there, chaos brought into order. Prey...does not offer that sort of catharsis. In fact, it employs one of the most contentious, reviled forms of anti-catharsis an ending can pull. When talking about Prey casually with friends, I very much invoked a particular Simpsons clip... If I was feeling particularly catty, I could say it dovetails with my interpretation of the game as a meta-commentary on immersive sims and say the game as a whole is a Mimic in that it mechanically imitates its forebears but fundamentally lacks the human element that made those stories resonate more. A story about empathy that failed to engender empathy, whoops! At the very least, Morgan's conveniently ambiguous personality by way of neuromod resets/brain damage/typhon blending reads like an in-universe example of an immsersive sim protagonist loading a save game and/or trying different playthroughs.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:06
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I guess I should also say I would respect it more if Prey was an experimental outlier that was tying to be aggressively amorphous, but frankly I've never associated Arkane with strong writing and all of their games tend to have undercooked elements, so it just comes off as business as usual for me to walk away from one of their games feeling unsatisfied.
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Jun 19, 2023 19:12
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does this mean any game with any kind of narration or framing is ultimately meaningless because the conceit of the game being told as a story makes anything presented fundamentally untrustworthy? things in stories matter not because we (can pretend to) believe they really happened, but because we can relate them to our own experiences. Calvino's fear and anguish over losing his memory and his mind is meaningful regardless of whether it happened to a real person, or happened to a fake person in a made-up story, or happened to a fake person that was really made up by a different fake person in a made-up story I don't think it's fair to Prey to reduce the entire experience to an audience gotcha, but that's the stumbling block, isn't it? if you can play through the whole game and witness everything that happened and still say "it doesn't count, emotions invalidated", then you're the Typhon, yeah? like, where the hell are your mirror neurons?
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Jun 19, 2023 19:32
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Imagine a poignant play performed really badly, so badly you cannot get past the performance and suspend your disbelief. In that case it wouldn't matter what the play was about or how good the writing was; you're not going to connect to the characters, you're not going to connect to the story, and it's all going to fall completely flat. It doesn't mean you lack empathy, but that the performance failed to connect with you such that it could engage your empathy. It's not entirely on the audience to empathize with a piece, the piece has to also meet the audience where they're at. In Prey I was relating to everything going on. I very carefully saved all the people I could including those enslaved by the mind control Typhons. I shared the information you can hide because I thought the person should know. And so on. It wasn't that I couldn't relate. If I couldn't relate I wouldn't have given a poo poo about the ending. The problem is that I was relating until the ending broke things for me. Phigs fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jun 19, 2023 |
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Jun 19, 2023 19:51
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