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My husband and I picked this game up recently, and I just finished it last night. We were not expecting that twist ending  For my first playthrough I printed infinite Neuromods and became an insane space wizard who solved absolutely every problem with telekinetic explosions (to the point that Regeneration 2 was my second most valuable ability, because sometimes problems happen at melee range and Morgan is not immune to explosions), but now I want to try winning as an unmodded human. Is it possible to complete Prey without using a single Neuromod? That sounds like an interesting challenge that would force me to avoid direct conflict and come up with clever strategies, but I'm a little concerned that my lacking damage output and limited ability to access alternate routes would turn it into a slog (assuming it's even possible at all).
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Dec 4, 2019 16:54
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Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Can't wait to be a lovely terrified squatter eating week-old eel jelly in the haunted ventilation system of an exploding space station.Jan posted:Now the thread needs to know, does the ending mean your playthrough has no meaning, making the game retroactively bad? I actually got the opposite feeling. Throughout most of the game I had a sense that I was basically being faced with a trolley problem - risk killing all of humanity, or kill everyone on the station just to be sure? It makes for good horror - there's a great element of existential doubt there - but it's more or less reducible down to a binary decision: you decide which choice is right, and then spend most of the game trying to pursue that choice (or sort of hedging your bets while you pursue both options, and then making a final decision at the last minute). But my instinct (and the style of play I enjoy) is to simply do what seems right on an individual basis, so I just sort of organically helped the survivors and tried to fix things as I went along, reasoning that I could simply blow everything up if the Typhon turned out to be an insurmountable threat. When I eventually got Dahl neurotomied so the survivors had an escape route, I felt that I had solved the central crisis, because simply saving myself and leaving everyone to die never interested me as an option; with a third path now open, I had successfully derailed the trolley and avoided any need to sacrifice others. All that was left was to decide which choice was better for humanity as a whole. I felt very satisfied with that outcome, and then felt extremely  when I realized I had essentially been in purgatory the entire time, and had just surprised Alex and his Operators by demonstrating a humanity that rivaled and almost certainly exceeded that possessed by any of the Yus; unaware that anyone was watching or that I was being judged, I had shown compassion for its own sake, and Alex was moved to do the same for me.It was a tremendous holy poo poo moment and it made me feel good about myself. I took his hand 
Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Dec 4, 2019 |
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Dec 4, 2019 17:27
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HenryEx posted:So what did you do about the shuttle with survivors who were already en route to earth when you woke up I fretted over the decision until less than a minute was left on the timer, and then decided to leave them alone. I already knew that I was going to try to get the survivors off-station if I could, and they had all been bumming around in a hellscape full of Typhon for a while; since I was willing to send them home (and possibly myself, despite the gallon or so of space-demon blood I had already mainlined into my eyeballs in pursuit of psionic power), it felt hypocritical to condemn a half-dozen people who, by all accounts, appeared to have safely departed without incident before all hell broke loose. If I had already decided to Kill Everyone Just To Be Sure, I would have blown them up, but it seems morally inconsistent to do so in any other case; if you'd kill the shuttle mooks, I feel like you're already following a line of reasoning that logically concludes in a moral imperative to kill Mikhaila, the Cargo Bay survivors, Alex, yourself, and every other poor fucker on Talos I as well.
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Dec 4, 2019 18:07
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Wait, does Psychoshock work on Operators? I thought machines were, like, the specific thing it didn't work on.Mike the TV posted:Now do Mooncrash and tell us all about it. Seriously considering it!
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Dec 4, 2019 18:16
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There is absolutely a point of no return, but it's pretty loving unmistakable and comes right after doing a fairly heavily plot-significant thing and right before the game ends. You'll know when you hit the final sequence. That's your cue to load your last quicksave if you still want to dick around with side quests  e: going into mooncrash totally blind, wish me luck folks e2: plugged the doodad into the thingy, started up a run, and immediately found the corpse of my real actual IRL mother. It has her name and even vaguely resembles her. What the gently caress
Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Dec 6, 2019 |
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Dec 6, 2019 02:45
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Aced the first run no problem. Immediately got loving obliterated by a moon shark in the second. Don't like that at all.
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Dec 6, 2019 04:18
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Alright the bloody footprints when you're haemorrhaging are a great touch. Also I just found the fuckin typhon lightsabre and this thing absolutely whips rear end. I never want to look at a wrench again.
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Dec 6, 2019 05:14
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Just finished Joan's personal mission  e: just brutally beat a Telepath to death with a loving wrench in a tiny kitchenette while concussed and on 1 health, and went on to win as the security guy. This DLC loving kicks rear end Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Dec 7, 2019 |
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Dec 7, 2019 20:52
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It is also worth noting that the Cargo Bay folks freak the gently caress out if they see you use Morph. So, uh, don't do that. e: like, "most of the air abruptly becomes bullets" level freak-out. They don't take it very well, is what I'm saying
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Dec 9, 2019 04:29
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Finished Mooncrash last night. Goddamn, that ending. I adored the bit in the final sequence where you're going "uhh... okay it probably won't work, but let's try this? ...No, of course I don't have that much fuel. What if... this? No. No, obviously they wouldn't let me go there. Well, gently caress my life, I guess." It's a masterpiece of horror writing - you know where this is going, you know how this has to end, but you resist the whole way anyway. Fantastic balance of urgent panic and slow dread. Also, because I am a dad, I teared up at the guy going straight for his kid's doll and holding it close while he looked out the window. The Volunteer's story mission had my husband and I pretty  as well. It even qualifies as a death rather than an escape lmaoAnyway, Prey owns, Mooncrash owns, and I love that (lore spoilers) the deepest, most gut-churning horror in both of them lies not in the Typhon, but in the world-building - debt-slavery, giving people free Neuromods so as to trick them into giving their employer the legal right to erase swathes of their mind with an apto-regressive neurotomy, casually sacrificing human beings on the altar of science in order to research more valuable products, individual greed and corporate espionage being ultimately responsible for the downfall of Earth. Unchecked capitalism was the true monster all along.
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Dec 9, 2019 15:23
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Oh, I forgot to mention this earlier, but I might have noticed something cool in the Volunteer's story mission: I passed through a Typhon gate that registered 7 threats nearby, but I was only aware of 6 - my Neuromodded to gently caress Volunteer, the Moon Shark, a Technopath, and its three corrupted Operators. It's possible there was a Mimic or something nearby, and I just missed it - but my husband and I were already suspicious of the toy, for obvious reasons, so seeing the readout on the gate console made me go I loving KNEW IT
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Dec 10, 2019 02:41
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Basic Chunnel posted:There's no sequence in which you escape with the shuttle, I... did that exact thing at the end of my first run. Are you not supposed to be able to? 
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Jan 11, 2020 01:02
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Serephina posted:A good example of this is (uh, what's the name of that merc with the bots?) and how many times you interact with him and what goes on. Everyone keeps talking about a hostage situation, but I had no such thing as even on my first run I putzed about in Atmospherics and flicked all the switches. That's Dahl. I just finished a run in which I killed absolutely everyone (and didn't get the achievement for some reason  ), and the way things played out with him was kind of interesting. Was not expecting him to offer an unholy alliance, even if I did spot the inevitable betrayal coming from a mile away. Kinda showed your rear end with that ambush in the Trauma Centre, Dahl old buddy.
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Jan 11, 2020 11:04
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Kibayasu posted:I managed to escape with a human only run and with January being a dick so you don’t need the full time or Typhon mods Yeah it's doable, just difficult. As long as you know where you're going and run like hell, it's achievable (although I did pull it off with literally 1 second on the timer )
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Jan 13, 2020 00:40
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Guillermus posted:Putting enough points in security makes you move around like the Doom Slayer and the improved wrench damage owns for quickly moving and smashing typhon to death. It's even better if you get the chipset that increases the chance of causing knockdown with the wrench. It's pretty funny when Phantoms zoom up to you only to get immediately smacked to the ground and slowly, anticlimactically bludgeoned to death while they stand up and fall down again over and over and over.
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Jan 13, 2020 15:28
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ToxicFrog posted:I wonder which is faster: bridge to arboretum airlock, EVA to shuttle bay, then take the gravshafts up to the shuttle, or bridge to elevator via arboretum and enter the bay via the lobby? Can't use the airlocks at that point in the game.
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Jan 13, 2020 19:00
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The appropriate way to play Deus Ex is to be a psychotic nano-augmented chaos god who literally cannot stop committing crimes. Jesus Christ, Denton.
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Jan 14, 2020 04:36
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If I remember right, you can straight up murder several of the major storyline antagonists in Dishonored 1 and still get the low-chaos ending, as long as you're making an effort to be sneaky and not kill anyone you don't particularly need to. The chaos system isn't meant to be some "killing is bad, always" thing, it's just reflective of the fact that killing a shitload of people - in the middle of a devastating plague, no less - is obviously going to have a less than optimal effect on the stability and well-being of your weird steampunk kingdom. That, and Corvo rampantly assassinating public figures unsurprisingly makes the populace extremely wary of any new regime that retains him as an advisor. What I'm saying here is that having three set-in-stone endings based on chaos was a little disappointing; I would have preferred to see a series of little vignettes describing the consequences of each major choice (some of them in the context of other choices), like the ending of Fallout: New Vegas. e: wait a minute this is the Prey thread, how did we get onto this tangent
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Jan 15, 2020 19:25
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Take every mod, kill everything, craft everything, go everywhere, become a lunatic demigod. After you finish the game, start over and do a no neuromods run.
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Jan 29, 2020 22:44
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Kibayasu posted:I think it’s usually because they don’t take combat focus. Yeah I neglected Combat Focus in favour of cool explodey mind powers for my first run, and when I finally unlocked it, I was floored by how powerful it is.
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Jan 30, 2020 02:03
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From what I recall, one of the ways Dishonored (and/or D2) subtly shoots itself in the foot is in the Heart's little flavour lines. You go around using it to look at guards and get all these horrible little secrets: this guy's a chronic wife abuser, that dude kills poor people for fun, the motherfucker around the corner is a similarly horrible person. So, of course, you cleanly and stealthily assassinate all of these horrible people, because you have just been given an excellent reason to do that (and also, that's what the game's about). Surely the city will be better off without these petty fascists terrorizing its innocent folk. But, no, the game silently increments its Protagonist Bloodthirst counter and brings you closer to the bad ending. It's just kinda counterintuitive to someone who isn't wise to the chaos system's foibles, almost to the point of feeling like a gotcha.
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Jan 30, 2020 18:57
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I still maintain that the simplest and best solution would be to just do a couple of different brief ending vignettes for each important character (and any major population centers the player visits), and have the chaos system exist relatively independently of those. That way sneaky players get to feel clever for ghosting their way to a low-chaos final level with relatively low security, and high-chaos murderblenders get to enjoy a violent clusterfuck instead. Base the vignettes off important decisions (lethal/nonlethal, in the case of targets) or off of level stats; if you killed like 90% of the guards in Nor'east Grabass in the middle of a massive plague outbreak, then yeah, obviously Nor'east Grabass descends into loving anarchy and half its population dies of rat flu - that feels like a logical, foreseeable outcome to the decisions the player made in that area. It would maybe be a bit more involved than the "3 static endings" thing, but I think it would have mollified a lot of common complaints. edit: you could even do sort of an Undertale thing and have a "wow this place is a ghost town, it's almost like some complete loving psychopath systematically murdered literally every human being in the whole place" easter egg vignette for a 100% kill rate, with a little extra ending for wiping out every single person in the game (the ending is that absolutely everyone is loving terrified of you, and you are ultimately deposed and executed in a breathtakingly widespread popular rebellion. The Outsider is like "wow dude that was hosed up, anyway you live in the Void now") Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 30, 2020 21:19
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Yeah don't worry about reaching, and clearing, that area early. You can't really "sequence break" Prey, afaik.Eugene V. Dubstep posted:FYI, at least in D2, they aren't just flavor lines. Certain guards' deaths cause less chaos than others. Holy poo poo, really? That's a nice touch!
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Jan 31, 2020 14:11
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I mean, it seems like kind of a similar "quandary" to the one you see in zombie media. The majority of people would probably not be very happy at the prospect of continuing to exist as weird spooky alien murder ghosts who kill all their friends; it seems fair to assume that killing one of them is, at worst, a morally neutral prospect due to the fact that it's both self-defence and arguably an act of mercy. As for the other types of Typhon, they are all assholes who do different kinds of extremely rude violence to you. If they didn't want to be smashed with a wrench and harvested for their Typhon juice, they shouldn't have smashed a bunch of humans and harvested them for their... uh... human juice 
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Jan 31, 2020 20:41
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To be fair, I think the whole silent inner crisis over the ethics of killing Phantoms is deliberately in keeping with one of Prey's primary narrative themes. Sure, they're unthinkably alien - but you arent, and you're very much capable of instinctively trying to identify with them using those fancy mirror neurons of yours. I think that, more than anything, is why they whisper - because it's a horror game, and Phantom chatter forces you to deal with the unfolding horror on multiple levels at once (i.e. by hitting it with a wrench, but also feeling anxious about it afterwards).
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Feb 3, 2020 03:26
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I meticulously picked up every single note because I was mildly drunk and for some reason thought I could recycle them for organic material. My husband ugly-laughed when a Mimic later followed me in there and scared the poo poo out of me by revealing itself right when I turned around.
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Feb 16, 2020 19:13
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QuietLion posted:The easiest way to find his corpse I found is to fly to the Power Plant Airlock, float directly up until you are on the same horizontal plane as the giant TRANSTAR board the orbits the station, and fly straight out to the radiation boundary. The object he has is so insanely useful that I beeline for it the first time I’m allowed outside in every run. Which object is that? I'm not sure if I've ever found his body, now that I think about it.
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Mar 19, 2020 13:46
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What the gently caress does that even mean? It's been driving me insane.
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Mar 22, 2020 14:39
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Of all the games I've played, Bioshock Infinite is the only one with such a staggeringly lovely storyline that I flatly tell others not to play it before even discussing the gameplay itself. To this very day, I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that a full-blown mainstream gamedev company piled a whole bunch of insanely racist rhetoric and caricatures into their game to make it obvious that the bad guys were bad, only to turn around and unironically try to present the anti-slavery rebels as being "just as bad" or "bad in a different way" or some poo poo. Together with the already somewhat uncomfortably, er, old-fashioned storyline about a poor innocent pure virginal white girl suffering the depredations of evil men, it effectively presented the only black central character as an uncontrollably violent "angry black woman." I had been kind of uneasily giving Infinite the benefit of the doubt right up until that whole plotline's climactic scene, but as soon as that played out my husband and I just kinda looked at each other like, "ah, hmm, well, this is it: this is the bridge too far." Can't even imagine how loving awful it must have been for black folks to play through that poo poo. Infinite could be the most fun shooter ever and it would still be an irredeemably lovely, inexcusably racist game. Luckily it is also a really lovely shooter, so there's no need for any confusion on that point!
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Mar 23, 2020 14:56
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It's very funny to me when people defend Infinite because, again, even if you don't care about its violently tone-deaf (at best) writing, it's... still not a very good game Vorenus posted:The most shocking part of this post is the fact that you're married. I agree, idk why the dude puts up with me. I hardly ever hurl coins or medkits at him and I've never once summoned a racist gatling gun robot to destroy his enemies
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Mar 24, 2020 02:52
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SCheeseman posted:Deus Ex is easy as hell, but that's mostly because it's simple to cheese the AI once you understand how it works. I can't tell whether people are talking about OG Deus Ex or the new one, which I haven't played. I know the original could be vastly easier or harder depending on which augs you pick (always, always, always choose the fast running aug). Which skills you invested in made a pretty big difference, too - not just in combat effectiveness but in ease of progression as well. Hacking was a pretty handy one for ATM shenanigans, and any one of lockpicking, demolitions, and - with the melee damage aug - melee was good for opening locked doors. God, all-out melee builds are loving hilarious in that game. I should go back and play it again. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Mar 25, 2020 |
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Mar 25, 2020 16:43
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SCheeseman posted:I've gotten through the game without any augs or skills at all (a little save scumming needed now and then though) and it wasn't difficult. I guess my perspective is a little skewed, I've played the game for hundreds of hours at this point. I know where every item and enemy is it's all burned into my brain. Yeah, if you know where everything is and aren't afraid to use the consumables you find, Deus Ex isn't very difficult at all. There are a couple of hairy spots depending on how you want to progress the story (the ambush at the subway exit is a real motherfucker, holy poo poo that's a lot of crossfire), but it's certainly doable.
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Mar 25, 2020 16:50
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Samopsa posted:It helps that I can instantly delete all enemies with my current loadout. Except the weaver in the GUTS who put a fear status on me and flew away? Pay attention to what happens the next time you attack a Weaver, and watch its visual cues. You'll work out what's going on fairly quickly.
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May 25, 2020 13:54
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I think the narrative is that the USA and USSR almost immediately struck an agreement to jointly study the Typhon while keeping their existence a secret from the general public. They maintained careful secrecy and used a small joint research staff at first, before the Information Age really got into full swing; when the feasibility of the Neuromod was proposed, they went OH poo poo and started courting a big loving tech company (Transtar) to pursue the project. As soon as retroaptic neurotomies or whatever were perfected, secrecy became an almost complete non-issue, since everyone involved is on an inescapable space station, has limited (and monitored) access to communication with Earth, and is required to get their memories rebooted before they leave.
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Oct 2, 2020 21:39
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SR: Hong Kong is excellent. SR: Dragonfall is a loving masterpiece and has the most memorable, beautifully written, occasionally haunting companion characters of any game I've ever played. Except Blitz, who is simply a fuckboy
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Feb 15, 2021 13:24
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God yeah. My husband was napping on the couch when I first played through that bit, and that line made me laugh so loudly that I woke him up.
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Feb 15, 2021 15:44
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What on earth are you people talking about? Prey is designed from the ground up to be a survival horror game. It's loving named to evoke the inversion of humanity's presumed position as apex predators, which is a staple of the genre. It revolves almost entirely around the stressful concept that everything and anything could secretly be a scary bogey monster that wants to turn you into a tortured corpse in order to make more scary bogey monsters. Prey is 100% a horror game and these assertions to the contrary are incredibly weird takes What do you think it's supposed to be, a comedy? 
Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 13:30
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Yeah, doing a low- or no-neuromods run really changes the dynamic. Suddenly all resources are precious, stealth is incredibly important, and the majority of enemies are legitimately intimidating threats. Even a gimmick run with lots of neuromods can achieve this - I tried doing a Donkey Kong run where I took only the speed, strength, and area access (hacking, repair, etc) mods and could only fight with the wrench and thrown objects. The microgravity segments were loving terrible, but the foot combat varied between "hilarious" and "jaw-clenchingly stressful" depending on what I was fighting and what projectiles were close at hand. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 17:04 on Feb 17, 2021 |
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Feb 17, 2021 17:01
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Kibayasu posted:The best role in Prey is “person who throws reployers at everything”  swoleness is the most important neuromod tree.
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Feb 25, 2021 05:55
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Grenades are your friend. The wrench knockdown chip for the scanner is really good - you often knock a phantom or mimic silly when it rushes you, and that makes a big difference. Sneak everywhere. Recycle everything you don't need and carry around a fuckton of consumables. Oh, and set up a turret or two in high-traffic areas that you'll be passing through often. Turrets are really good time- and life-savers early on.
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Mar 27, 2021 04:21
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