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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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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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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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I hate all these fake videogames we get nowadays. I much prefer the real ones.
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Aug 28, 2017 20:42
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Goddamn I love Mooncrash. I would love a full game like this.ToxicFrog posted:Security unlock: Wait, in Moonworks? Why there? You find his body in Pytheas Labs Typhon Containment. Hah, I found him in the Janitor's office in Crew Annex. Is he randomly placed? BBQ Dave posted:What are the choice things to hack when you have the custodian? Besides the mimic portal and the crates in moonworks? Anyone have any must stop places that always need hacking? Safes in mass driver harvester control, Joan's office in the refinery, Alex Yu's office in Crew Annex, Bhatia's barracks - plus hacking gets you sim points, so doors/computers/security operator dispensers too. Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jun 20, 2018 |
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Jun 20, 2018 18:29
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Yeah, don't go mano y mano with the moon shark - that's more a late-game thing. I always ran straight for the central tower as well. Use 2x control modules on the killtower consoles in the central tower to kill everything around that tower. You can use the modules from the sublevel below if you know you won't be visiting a certain area. The Engineer can repair modules and Typhon respawn at every Corruption transition, so you can grind up loads of Sim points by reusing the kill towers at each Corruption level, then repairing the modules. You'll eventually get a schematic for control modules so you can start a run pre-packed. You can short-circuit the forcefields with electricity, e.g. stun gun (once again the MVP) if you just want to book it. By the end of the game you should be floating 50k+ Sim points easily - that's when you can start worrying about harvesting Corruption timers and which order of characters to run through first.
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Jun 11, 2019 15:10
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synthbuttrage
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Nov 9, 2019 14:40
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just gonna repost thisLt. Danger posted: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! dreams are solipsistic. the whole point of the simulation is an attempt to induce the opposite I think Prey also realises that the narrative appeal of it and its *Shock predecessor/sister/cousin games is rarely the main plot thread and more often the wider narrative built into the gamespace as a whole. with a few notable exceptions, the majority of plot beats in these games are simple traversal stuff: elevator's blocked, engines are offline, district's in lockdown. possibly why these games tend to limp across the finish line - the main plot was always more about mastering a hostile space than anything else. Prey tries to sidestep that with its ending revelation: it was never about Talos 1, it was always about, uh, Yu
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Nov 10, 2019 02:02
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do you mean BioShock??
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Nov 11, 2019 02:12
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*huff, puff* came here as quick as I could from 1995 to say: do NOT go see The Usual Suspects
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Nov 12, 2019 02:06
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to be fair to Dead Space 3 the original game features a DS3's tone is generally straightforward sci-fi horror, arguably closer to 1 than 2
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Mar 28, 2020 05:22
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DS3's biggest problem is EA forced in co-op and micro-transactions which had a knock-on effect on everything else - gotta have more monsters, universal ammo to shoot the monsters, copy-paste side-dungeons, stat inflation, crafting, number-grinding etc. etc. so, yeah, you gotta keep up-to-date on your recycling and your scavenger bots so you can keep your guns upgraded. the rocket launcher's pretty good but it needs the blast guard - don't think you'll get that for a while though the game's actually pretty long and the cast dynamic is fun in a genre kinda way. my favourite bit is when Red Isaac just steps in from out-of-shot whenever there's a cutscene
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Mar 29, 2020 02:43
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Prey with its shadow monsters is not viscerally, aha, a horror game like SS2's worms. the horror is existential, as noted above: space is full of predators, consciousness is an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and (perhaps more broadly) even the amicable end of the Cold War and the shared dream of space exploration won't save us from the worst excesses of authoritarianism and capitalism which is also besides the point that both games mechanically are very similar if not outright identical - "nothing alike" indeed
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Feb 17, 2021 13:39
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achievements are probably more to blame for players limiting their neuromods than in-game narrative it's worth noting that the original kills vs KOs mechanic was from Thief where it was a difficulty modifier. the fans approached it the same way, with self-imposed challenges to ghost levels entirely with no kills, KOs or alerts at all. this required more skill, more system knowledge than challenges that just flat out restrict certain actions or approaches
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Jan 2, 2022 21:43
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I mean nobody is requiring developers to put humans are perverse
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Jan 7, 2022 19:40
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if you're gonna indulge in nudge theory then maybe you should do it well, and not badly. just my two gamer pennies
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Jan 7, 2022 21:14
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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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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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but it's not a story performed badly. it's just a story that, at the end, reminds you that it is a story. per your own words, this was enough to make you dislike the whole thing
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Jun 19, 2023 20:27
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okay. bluntly, I have a very different approach where "suspension of disbelief" is an obstacle to engagement rather than something to aspire to. I engage with a work because its form and/or content interests me - that's my connection. being reminded it is just a story doesn't threaten that connection, though I suppose becoming dull, false or trite does if someone fails to connect to a story then honestly I would say that's half on the person at least. more than half, possibly, because a text is a dumb unthinking thing, while people can change the way they think I would disagree with the idea that Prey shifts ground at all. all the ending does is provide context. everything you did still happened, and keeps the same meaning, intact. all that happens is you get more information about what's going on
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Jun 19, 2023 20:52
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I feel like we're being a bit harsh on SS1. Remember SS2's chapel in the ventilation ducts? Deus Ex's bustling Hong Kong market? most immersive-style games come undone at some point it's very inconsistent, the art and tech are too primitive and ultimately it was not its main design goal but SS1 does make a good effort at designing specific rooms and areas to feel functional - the shuttle bays, the reactor, the maintenance-level ducts, the halls and corridors that loop around rooms rather than simply fractalising into mazes. plus there's something to be said for its plot objectives being a step above red-key-red-door
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Jul 10, 2023 19:37
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this guy really didn't like the would you kindly twist
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Jul 11, 2023 21:42
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