Game Informer's December coverage is focused on Arkane's Prey, scheduled for release in Spring 2017 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC.
The first video interview with Lead Designer Ricardo Bare sheds some interesting details on the team's design inspirations and choices.
Initially, the first few spaces you traverse are more constrained but then once you emerge into the space station proper, you pretty much have free reign. But there are some natural gameplay barriers.
For instance, there's an elevator that takes you to all the major decks of the space station, but it's broken. If you figure out how to fix it, then you open up much more of the space station.
[On Prey being a mesh of System Shock and Super Metroid] There's a fair analogy there, people have said "Metroidvania", that style of game because of the fact that it is one giant interconnected mission with a lot of retraversal and a lot of gating.
There's a fair comparison there and that's one of the ways Prey is different than Dishonored, which is a mission based game whereas this one is more like another game that Arkane made, Arx Fatalis. This was one big underground interconnected dungeon and in fact, early on we called Prey our space dungeon game.
I guess it's definitely a difficult game. Especially as the game goes on, I expect players will have to change their strategies and experiment a lot when they encounter some of the Typhon creatures. If there's a spectrum, you could probably describe a game like Dark Souls as pretty hardcore and some of us are big fans of that game. There's a little bit of splash of that in there, there's some survival elements and some really hard challenges to overcome.
The interviewer then pressed to learn more about these survival elements.
For instance, we have the trauma system. If you fall from great height, your bones can break. If you run into an engineering operator, which is kind of a robot in our game, it's malfunctioning and it might give you third-degree burns. When that happens there are some penalties and you need to go find a medical operator to remove them.
While Arkane's Prey might not be the sequel Human Head was developing, it seems to be an interesting game in its own right. Stay tuned on Wccftech for more information as we get closer to the Spring 2017 launch.
In the meantime, you can check out the latest gameplay video showcased at The Game Awards 2016.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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