Arkane PREY - Arkane's immersive coffee cup transformation sim - now with Mooncrash roguelike mode DLC

[agentorange]

Sorry Ash but I don't give a fuck about your long winded, autistic diatribes concerning how the game isn't a perfect copy of (the inferior game) System Shock 2, and neither should anyone else.

 

[vortex]

 

[Ash]

(the inferior game) System Shock 2

You have shit-stained taste buds from licking too much Arkane ass.

I rated you cuck because you said he should just play the demo and form his own opinion, no more no less.
Here's the thing: that takes time and temporary hard drive space, and he is better off asking someone of relative taste to his own as a Shock 2 fan. Especially when 95% or more of modern games are garbage. I can't even be bothered with demos anymore and would rather just ask people with generally agreeable tastes...i.e not you.

Also you snarky little faggot, perhaps he did consider taking the plunge and playing the demo/pirating/buying the game, but thought wiser against the idea?

 

[agentorange]

Is IGN now pretending that they ever gave a shit about the original Prey? Also stop making posts that consist solely of a fucking youtube video.

 

[Average Manatee]

Is this game good? Sort of in the mood for a System Shock 2 clone.

Someone kindly direct me to the impressions of a prestigious Codex personality who properly appreciates SS2.

The game even has a demo so why not try playing that and making up your own fucking mind.

Didn't realize it had a demo. It's a somewhat odd fact nowadays. In any case a really short intro and tutorial doesn't exactly tell you much. I was fairly interested before posting and was probably going to get the game, just wanted to make sure it wasn't completely awful garbage that sneaked into looking decent.

RoSoDude is a poster, if he says it's a somewhat casualized and worse SS2 then that's fine, basically what I expected.

 

[DeepOcean]

Is this game good? Sort of in the mood for a System Shock 2 clone.

Someone kindly direct me to the impressions of a prestigious Codex personality who properly appreciates SS2.

The game even has a demo so why not try playing that and making up your own fucking mind.

Didn't realize it had a demo. It's a somewhat odd fact nowadays. In any case a really short intro and tutorial doesn't exactly tell you much. I was fairly interested before posting and was probably going to get the game, just wanted to make sure it wasn't completely awful garbage that sneaked into looking decent.

RoSoDude is a poster, if he says it's a somewhat casualized and worse SS2 then that's fine, basically what I expected.

Nope, it isn't complete garbage but still has massive flaws.

On a scale of:
Bioshock 1(garbage) to SS 2 (good)
It is on the middle, an average game, much better than the average popamole games but I still couldn't get into it.

I didn't like the enemy design that seemed really lackluster, the story is a snoozefest with the typical Arkane NPCs (AKA, robots pretending to be human and trying to emulate human emotion while failing hard at it), the second half of the game is just a mess where the game breaks down and force you to backtrack through the same areas you explored for hours shooting floating PCs with LASORS. The game is segmented with long loading screens (could be better on a SSD) and had really long uneventful zero G sections that really kill the pacing of the game making that boredom feeling overwhelming on the second half (where they evidently ran out of budget).

Lets say I was snoring on my chair half way through the main campaign.

Plenty of stuff I didn't like depend on personal taste though, so you should check it out anyway.

The Mooncrash DLC though, it is pretty incline and should had been how the main campaign played, it is a pitty that it is short.

Buy it, play the main campaign until you reach the Crew Quarters section of the station then just jump straight to Mooncrash, this will minimize the boredom greatly.

 

[karoliner]

I enjoyed the original Prey much more. You are a Cherokee fighting aliens to get you girl back.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

RoSoDude is spot on about Prey. Anyone curious about it should just read his posts.

Vanilla Prey is quite good for what it is. Mooncrash is great -not perfect, but still great (see my mini-review earlier ITT)- and if it turns out to be Arkane's swansong well then at least they went out on a note of .

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I always get my arse kicked in Mooncrash, but I agree, it's very cool for a session of Live Die Repeat and Repeat.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

is this game spooky

 

[Jenkem]

at first it is, sure, but then you become accustomed to your state of affairs and carry on.

 

[Average Manatee]

Finished this this week. Alright game. Could be way better.

Game starts out pretty strong. Things are tense, enemies are tough and its fun to get advantage on them with a wrench. Game definitely becomes weaker by the midgame though.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who realized "Slow time by 50% for 15 seconds while you act at full speed and deal 25% more damage" is an insanely overpowered skill. 15 neuromods and you've basically got god mode. It's only 20 psi too. You can spam this forever. It absolutely trivializes everything. The Nightmare boss that is supposed to be scary dies to 8 shots from a fully modded shotgun and he'll never have a chance of reacting in time. It's so broken. I never even unlocked the alien psi powers since I felt no need and the game warned me against them.

Aside from that, the game is just too generous with supplies. Everything is dropping ammo. Phantoms ALWAYS drop huge amounts of stuff. You always get a weapon mod pack or a psi hypo or something that basically pays off the cost of killing them and then some. There's a very important reason why System Shock 2 give enemies a massive chance of not dropping anything on higher difficulty levels, it's because enemies are supposed to be scary because they drain your supplies, not something you farm for upgrades. If you gave them an 80% chance to drop nothing the game would be far more balanced. As it is its almost impossible not to be running around with 1000s and 100s of ammo for the various guns. I recycled something like 100 psi hypos, only needed probably a dozen or so.

There's a big lack of late game enemies. The pyro-phantom shows up before you even reach your office and that's essentially the hardest enemies get. The electrical phantom is basically the same as far as I can tell. It's like if SS2 stopped at shotgun hybrids or something.

The end game was alright, didn't really have a problem with the powerful operators. The bigger issue was load times. Game really gets awful with 30s load times when you are crossing multiple areas in around 15 seconds. Should have had one main elevator that accessed everything like SS2 did.

I liked the overall weapon balance. It's a good thing when games don't have an ever-present assault rifle to handle everything. Having the shotgun as the central weapon to play around, basically the DOOM formula, is refreshing. Q-gun and pistol are kind of snipers but it's mostly about getting up close and personal. The stun gun is really overpowered vs. everything it works against though. Like enemies, it feels like there should have been more weapons. You find fabrication licenses for crap like the glue gun near the end of the game, what's with that? Needed to be something really cool there.

Some things that weren't balanced well: The wrench (why would I invest all those modules into something that I can't even use against the guys with an AoE around them, and which kills mimics fine anyway?) and Turrets (literally died in one hit to anything, wtf?)

I liked the movement systems and lots of the area design. Figuring out a way to climb onto the rooftops of a bunch of areas to find random supplies was always fun.

The whole "survival" additions were kind of bunk. Weapon degradation? Yeah I have 90 spare parts by the time I needed to repair my shotgun for the first time. Trauma? The only one I even cared about was the one that caused sprinting and jumping to hurt, everything else I just ignored till I ran across another operator. I don't remember what the third modifier was supposed to be and don't feel like booting the game to find out.

Overall, 5/10. Mostly because there's a real, startling lack of replay value. You just drown in neuromods to the point where there's no real build beyond intentionally limiting yourself to human mods. Doing it again spamming psi to obliterate everything instead doesn't sound that interesting since there's so much psi packs available to trivialize it, and the huge amount of time wasted and general slog of everything past the early game is a major downer. I think it could very easily be improved with some minor rebalancing. Remove all enemy drops other than the exotic material stuff, limit operator healing/repairing, nerf combat focus (at least). You could get a pretty good survival game that way.

In the middle of Mooncrash right now. It's... ehh. Like the base game it has huge balancing problems and oversights that really hurt the good, core gameplay (of survival, managing resources, exploration, etc) that should be going on. Gonna go for the 5-in-1 thing tomorrow, will see if its as simple as I think.

 

[Whisper]

If you want to feel pressure at every fight, try Dungeon rats. Its different genre of game, but there you need conserve supplies in every point of game.

 

[Tweed]

Overall, 5/10. Mostly because there's a real, startling lack of replay value. You just drown in neuromods to the point where there's no real build beyond intentionally limiting yourself to human mods. Doing it again spamming psi to obliterate everything instead doesn't sound that interesting since there's so much psi packs available to trivialize it, and the huge amount of time wasted and general slog of everything past the early game is a major downer. I think it could very easily be improved with some minor rebalancing. Remove all enemy drops other than the exotic material stuff, limit operator healing/repairing, nerf combat focus (at least). You could get a pretty good survival game that way.

You should try a no needles run, I found that the game became a lot more fun when there was no superhero powers to fall back on. You end up depending a lot more on stealth and grenades, the degrade mechanic from Mooncrash almost kinda sorta matters then too because you can't repair stuff. Otherwise yeah, it's pretty easy.

 

[RoSoDude]

This is probably as good a time as any to say that I figured out how to unpack and decrypt Prey's game files for modding (I'll post a guide somewhere). Many of the big problems are all within reach: loot tables (so many issues here), weapon degradation rate, trauma acquisition rate, base oxygen decay, Neuromod skill costs, ability stats (I can straight up remove the bonus damage on Combat Focus and alter the slowdown for the world and player independently), and more. I think I even figured out why Mimic Matter is so crappy in stealth. You're supposed to hide by standing still, as enemies will see through your disguise like you can see through a Mimic's if you start wobbling and bouncing around, but Arkane made the max visibility score as high as when you're running at 100%, compared to 40% when you're sneaking, explaining why a tiny coffee cup rolling on the floor across the room in an enemy's peripheral vision would put them on alert faster than crouchwalking as a full-size Morgan in the same spot.

Sadly, I'm not finding a way to limit Operator uses (very disappointed about this), nor to tie material yield to difficulty modifiers. There are a bunch of other rates that can be altered by difficulty, but they clearly went the lazy route with it overall (I was just bemoaning yesterday that the "30% chance to get nothing whatsoever" from enemy loot tables in SS2 on Impossible isn't an option here). Maybe there are a few hacks I can pull off, but at the end of the day all I'm doing is taking their config files (which happily are quite data-driven) and doing some black box number tweaking. The real pain is that any changes to the default player config, which is where a lot of the important stats are set, don't take effect unless you start a new playthrough and go through the tutorial again. So I'm probably not going to experiment too much out of a desire to stay sane. Wish me luck, and don't be shy about the game's balance shortcomings -- a hell of a lot of them are purely in the numbers. I did glance over a lot of posts in the thread to remind myself of issues.

(Oh, and I can probably give Mooncrash the same treatment, though I've heard modding is tougher with it somehow)

 

[Average Manatee]

Alright, so about Mooncrash: It's a good idea, implemented in the worst possible manner.

The 1st problem is Simpoints. You get Simpoints for doing stuff. Especially killing things. The things you buy with Simpoints are too cheap. Like, just start with 180 pistol bullets every time. It's 200 for a pistol and 100 for 30 bullets. Every kill is worth 200-500 Simpoints. This means that there's really not much need to search for anything, you just load up with ammo, spam bullets at whatever you see, when you get out the investment has more than paid off. I don't get the point of this. We already have the fabricator system, just let players escape with what they have on them and then use that in a fabricator between missions. As it is there's no point to conserving stuff in missions when it's all lost when you exist, instead the only objective is getting kills.

The 2nd problem is Corruption. Corruption increases over time and when it hits a new level, more enemies spawn, enemies get harder (HP/damage bloat), and the environment breaks down. This basically breaks gameplay in half. Simpoints already meant you didn't need to search for things, Corruption means that searching for things literally harms you. I really don't understand the point either. Do the devs understand their own game? There is already a soft timer for this game, it's called just respawn enemies normally and provide limited ammo. The base game (in theory) basically does this, so why implement this hard timer?

The 3rd problem is Fabrication plans and Nanomods. They are unlocked forever, persisting across resets. Due to this you can just farm for the perfect equipment and character until you are ready to do your real run. I didn't really do this, due to some probably awful luck the only weapon I unlocked besides the pistol was a wrench and the Q-gun, but that was more than enough since the Q-gun kills robots and the pistol kills biologicals (when you have infinite ammo and can shoot as fast as you click, it's actually pretty good). Also didn't fill out the nanomod trees much at all because there's basically no point.

Thanks to these issues the game effectively just degenerates into a speedrun simulator. Buy the thruster pack and spam the forward dash to move everywhere quickly. Get some control modules to ensure everything has power and trams are working. Speed run your way to the objective markers and leave. My first try I got 3/5 characters done before level 2 corruption and got the next two done before level 3 (technically I was in the room faceplanting my head into the glass because I didn't know I had to press a button when it turned 3). Sure I got a little lucky finding two of the -corruption usables, but it's still a joke. There's no reason to do anything but head straight for the objective. Sitting around doing anything with fabricators takes more time than its worth, so why bother? You don't even get to keep inventory at the end, so there's no point in hauling trash around unless you want to drop it right before leaving (which means other characters have to waste time getting to your exit point to pick it up). You can plan a bit ahead and dump shit next to trams, but it still wastes time sorting through crap when most characters can get from a tram to their exit point in 20s.

How to fix:

- Remove sim points entirely.
- Remove corruption entirely. Make the corruption-linked difficulty increases linked to each character (i.e. 1st character plays on diff 1, 2nd on diff 2, etc).
- Have enemies fully respawn with every new character. Have some slow respawning over time in areas you aren't in (what the base game does).
- Have the inventory of the character leaving the simulation saved so you can use that stuff in a fabricator before starting again. Makes it so escaping with stuff is valuable.
- Remove all persistence of fab plans and skill unlocks between resets. Arguably this could be some sort of "hardcore" option though.

It'd still be really hampered by the fact that there's just not much to actually do. Exiting is too easy and simple for most characters. It'd have been better if the character quest was required to be done before exiting, doing all 5 of those in one run would be really hard. Unfortunately the game actively prevents attempting this, if you finish a quest once you literally can't do it again. Should remove that limitation.

Also the loading time issue is even worse here. Now we have quests and objectives that FORCE you to switch areas often. It's no quicker than the base game and the player is incentivized to spend as little time as possible in each area, so get ready for a 15s playtime interrupted by 30s loading screens. Possible the worst playtime:loading ratio I've seen in a game.

Score: 4/10. I just can't consider this even as good as the main game when the core gameplay is so fundamentally broken. Speedrunning is lame. The game isn't meant to be played with the player simply running past everything, completely ignoring all resource gathering and expenditure since they can start with as much ammo as they need. I have to wonder what you guys who think Mooncrash is better than the base game see in it.

 

[Zakhad]

You don't even get to keep inventory at the end, so there's no point in hauling trash around unless you want to drop it right before leaving

Uhhh the shared pack-mule operator? you get it after just a few objectives. If you unlocked five characters then you unlocked this as well.

I think we all agree sim-points are a bit broken, though.

 

[Average Manatee]

You don't even get to keep inventory at the end, so there's no point in hauling trash around unless you want to drop it right before leaving

Uhhh the shared pack-mule operator? you get it after just a few objectives. If you unlocked five characters then you unlocked this as well.

I didn't get the point of that thing. A bot running around that is slower than you and can die seems useless. The game should just give you a bigger inventory. In any case as I said, stockpiling stuff and taking it to fabricators is a waste of time when you can just buy what you need with sim points.

 

[RoSoDude]

Yes, the sim point economy is a complete joke. Like all modern games of this type, it requires that you self-impose restrictions and design your own experience. I pretended that the sim point costs were far higher and only purchased a few essentials in each run, easily ending the DLC with on the order of 150,000 points. It's a major problem. Not the only one (somehow they still didn't notice that your suit barely ever takes a scratch and yet you find Suit Repair Kits around every corner), but arguably the biggest.

However, if you can control your spending, the game structure actually becomes pretty interesting. Resource gathering with the timer may be pointless when you're prestocked with ammo, grenades, and hypos, but in the absence of such things you have to start scrounging and making immediate decisions about what to loot, recycle, and craft. There's a tension between your goals here -- you want to complete objectives and escape before the timer wears out, but there are obstacles in your way which require resources, and so you have to explore, fight, and gather first. The player is encouraged by the timer to play in a way that the base game actively fought against, as abusing Operators (or worse, drinking fountains) and hoarding crafting material and specialized grenades that you'll never use "just in case" is a big waste of time, and you stand to lose more from death than you gain by holding onto loot. Early on, Mooncrash held some of the best moments I've had with Prey, where my path was blocked by dangerous groups of enemies that my character didn't have a natural solution for, prompting me to adapt and introducing some genuine tension and risk. I probably threw a maximum of 5 Typhon lures over the course of two playthroughs of the base game, while the presence of lethal Weavers, Voltaic Mimics, and Thermal Phantoms made me use 2-3 just on my first real run in Mooncrash (not counting the tutorial). Some other design choices that were smart in my opinion were the introduction of Typhon gates that require you to eliminate all nearby enemies before you can pass, and the time delay loop items dropping from powerful enemies, encouraging you to engage in combat as much as possible because time is in short supply (these help greatly against the "just sprint past everything" problem of the base game that would be even worse in the DLC otherwise). Many of the enemy designs are also greatly improved, I adore the Psychostatic Cutter (seriously, that and another tech weapon would have solved the base game's weapon variety problem), the low-G moon environment is a lot more fun than any zero-G section in the base game, and the new jetpack boost is so stupidly fun to use, balance be damned.

Just like the base game, though, most tension and challenge in gameplay starts to wear down to nothing as the DLC goes on. I don't think it's all an abject failure -- there's a decent attempt to scale the difficulty with harder enemies, more hazards, and faster corruption timer as you complete objectives and have to start optimizing to get more people out in each reset of the simulation. But it's not enough, and the permanent character progression eventually messes everything up even without the sim points. I originally thought that Neuromod progression would be reset every time you restarted the simulation, but it's carried over, even when you get killed in a run. This indeed means you could just grind all of your characters out and then cheese through a perfect 5-character escape run (hell, this is close enough to what happened to me without any grinding). Much of the tactical decisionmaking of the early parts of Mooncrash vanishes, and you can eventually sprint to your escapes with stacks of resources transferring from one character to the next as you truncate enemy respawning with crafted time loop delays and zap the Typhon gates with electrical/EMP damage to zip past all encounters. I wasn't feeling Crew Quarters/Deep Storage levels of boredom by the end, but I was pretty disappointed especially from how glowingly positive I was on Mooncrash at first.

Consider the alternative design, where everything costs a hell of a lot more sim points and all progression other than fabrication/chipset plans is reset between simulations. You also wouldn't retain any scanned Typhon powers, the piloting connectomes for the shuttle escape, nor the Phantom Genesis experiment data for the consciousness upload escape (I was frankly shocked when I discovered the latter were one-time requirements). Maybe the difficulty would scale a bit more aggressively too as you complete more objectives, but I'm not sure that would be necessary in this paradigm. Every run would require some thought about which character to use, in which order, and with which escapes. This in turn requires decisions to be made about how to spend Neuromods between and within each character's skill tree. Someone's got to learn piloting to escape in the shuttle, but you're also going to have to learn repair with Joan AND hack with Claire to use the Mimic portal. You need someone with a psychoscope to access some of the more powerful Typhon abilities (knowledge of these would still be shared among all characters in each simulation), so Riley's probably a good choice early on, and she has her own dedicated escape path so you're still flexible with the others. And that flexibility would be important, because of the randomized elements in each simulation. You won't know in advance which escape pod is going to be operational and which is going to be broken with the spare navigation module, nor the location of Angela Wagner's and volunteer V-014551-P04's bodies for the piloting connectomes and the phantom experiment respectively, nor which hazards and enemies will be present, nor which parts of the moonbase will be unpowered. In each run you have to decide how much of your time should be spent scouting out and gathering to help the next run, and how much should be spent working on critical objectives. There are some natural features that emerge in this paradigm -- Typhon gates remain impactful and psi-oriented characters have a choice to make about how many alien powers to obtain depending on their ability to produce electrical interference. Time delay loops remain a finite and valuable commodity that keep the player under a time pressure while encouraging optimally combative/explorative play, especially if the fabrication plan proper is removed and the only way to fabricate it is to invest in Joan's Reverse Engineer skill (also, it should cost 3 synthetic, mineral, and exotic, not 2). You might even give a single shit about the Kasma bounties (muh WolfenDOOM kewl bonus challenges) to rack up more sim points as you're gearing up for your runs. Most importantly, all of this would keep the tension, challenge, and adaptive thinking at which Mooncrash initially excels intact as you learn the ins and outs of the moonbase, by multiplying the complexity of the tasks the player must accomplish alongside the standard difficulty increases.

These elements are the potential I initially saw in Mooncrash, which at first blush appeared to me as a genius culmination of innovative and coherent systems that really broke new ground for Immersive Sims -- we haven't seen this kind of successful genre hybridization since the classics. But as usual with Arkane, this had to come with massive caveats, and I remain ultimately confused what their design priorities are. For a long time I figured they were just continually splitting the difference between their hardcore and casual audiences and struggling to find a balance between the two. But the Survival Mode options were a real headscratcher when viewed in this light, because they're clearly geared for a more hardcore audience and yet their balancing is so impotent that I wonder who the hell they're even targeting. It's similar, but not quite as glaring, with Mooncrash, which has some major balancing issues of its own but can be enjoyed with a simpler algorithm of self-restriction (don't spend sim points) than the base game, which requires a lot more moment-to-moment self-control about how often to save, how many Neuromods to craft, which skills to avoid, and how often to use Operators to keep things challenging and fun. I'd love to fix all of this with mods but... it might not be possible.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, I initially thought it was set up well to become a great experience. I bet it was imagined that way by whoever came up with the idea, maybe initially planned and built to be great. But then surely somewhere along the line someone said: "Now, make sure that players can't fail. Make sure even when they die, they'll get points to come back stronger. Make sure anyone can eventually do all 5 in one run". Then the difficulty was screwed.

Unfotunately there isn't really even an option to play it in a more hardcore fashion. As you mention, stuff like finding the Shuttle-enabling Neuromod are one-time deals. The only escape option that doesn't devolve into "go to the exit point and immediately win" after you accomplish them once is the Mimic Portal escape, which merely requires 2 characters with their basic skills to accomplish. If you want to have a 5-in-1 run that does everything "proper", you need to constantly restart the whole save file since merely restarting the sim still leaves all those escape options effectively half-completed. You can try to cut back on Simpoint spending, but every character needs to get past the Crater area which usually means some kind of killing (I never really had luck with the Typhon lures myself). Once that's done everyone has easy access to the Trams, which makes handing off excess weapons and ammo to the next character trivial.

I didn't even realize there was a fab plan for the time loop items. That sounds insanely abusable, though it would make spending time looting fairly worthwhile. Really hard to balance properly. Probably the biggest balance issue is that it's guaranteed that enemies won't respawn ever so long as corruption doesn't increase to the next level. Which most importantly means that all those typhon gates you cleared stay open forever. If you can get a few successive runs without increasing corruption levels its a massive, massively easier time. I'd still argue that corruption is better off scrapped and the overall difficulty should just go up a notch as objectives are completed and/or escapes are accomplished.

If you were going to reset things, the one thing I wouldn't reset would be the Psychoscope analyses. It's just too random finding the right things to scan, along with remembering exactly what you'd need to scan for other characters to get certain unlocks. Resetting fab plans is a way better idea since everyone can sort of use them equally well, therefore living off what you find is more possible vs. scanning a bunch of enemies that only unlock powers for characters you already finished.

 

[Jaedar]

You don't even get to keep inventory at the end, so there's no point in hauling trash around unless you want to drop it right before leaving

Uhhh the shared pack-mule operator? you get it after just a few objectives. If you unlocked five characters then you unlocked this as well.

I didn't get the point of that thing. A bot running around that is slower than you and can die seems useless. The game should just give you a bigger inventory. In any case as I said, stockpiling stuff and taking it to fabricators is a waste of time when you can just buy what you need with sim points.

You didn't understand how to use it.
Summon, dump/take items, Unsummon. Effectively a second larger inventory, that takes a bit more time to access (can't do it while everything is paused).

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

- Remove corruption entirely.

Keep corruption levels in but remove the sim crash. I hate artifical time limits and the highest corruption level is already sufficiently punishing enough, still motivating the player not to linger around.

 

[Average Manatee]

You didn't understand how to use it.
Summon, dump/take items, Unsummon. Effectively a second larger inventory, that takes a bit more time to access (can't do it while everything is paused).

Ahh, I see now.

Thank you for reminding me of a good point I forgot to make: More things in Prey should be real time. It's kind of absurd how you can pause game in mid air after taking a hit to go to the inventory and chomp down several health packs.

 

[RoSoDude]

Ahh, I see now.

Thank you for reminding me of a good point I forgot to make: More things in Prey should be real time. It's kind of absurd how you can pause game in mid air after taking a hit to go to the inventory and chomp down several health packs.

I believe this is actually tweakable (along with the slow in and speed out time). I typically hate combat pausing/slowing wheel menus, but I think I should leave it with reduced speed rather than making it fully real-time just because of how many weapons, grenades, and psi powers you have to juggle in combat (more than can be bound to the number keys). And it keeps a compromise between real-time action and the "strategic" attack switching that the combat system is built around.

I'll also leave in the Superhot-style dynamic slowdown for psi powers, as targeting those AoE blasts in 3D space can be really finnicky otherwise.

 

[Durandal]

Do the current modding capabilities of Prey only extend themselves to tweaking numbers in configs? One thing I always wanted to implement is inventory upgrades through finding them throughout the station rather than upgrading them via a skill tree. It makes no sense that something like inventory space which is so essential to the unavoidable space hoarder playstyle enforced by the game is presented as a 'choice' in the skill trees. Like there really is one in this case.