The quest is called “Shipping and Receiving”? Oye. Arkane loves their Looking Glass references a bit much sometimes.
I don’t about sweeping changes like turning Prey into a “fast paced FPS” but quality of life, item additions, and even difficulty adjustments are very common content for post-launch updates.
Yes, that is pretty common, of course. However, I don’t consider “quality of life” changes as “material” changes, but YMMV.
Yeah, the sorts of games I generally play often get big post-release updates to systems and/or UI (eg The Witcher 3, Deus Ex:HR, EUIV, DotA 2). Prey is systems-heavy enough, and there seem to be enough complaints about some of the systems, that it would be a possibility (had it not been thrown out the door by Bethesda, of course).
Oh, I absolutely do. An overhauled interface can make a massive difference to my enjoyment of a game.
Hopefully they fix the resource multiplier exploit, because that one is goddamn tempting!
I stopped myself after cheating enough neuromods to max out the gun damage traits (because I felt super weak) and enough shotgun shells so I wouldn’t have to hoard them. But the impulse to go hog-wild is strong.
So no one went for the necropsy skill with their first 10-15, or up to 20 neuromods? The problem with these games is you have no idea how valuable some of these skill choices are going to be. I hate seeing stuff left behind.
In my game right now I am unable to kill a phantom. I have to run like a chicken past them whenever I see them. Is there some kind of device you’re supposed to find in the game that lets you scan them? I saw hints of that in text but can’t find anything.
Necropsy was one of the first I got. Everything that seems to be good longterm investment gets used first.
You can scan once you get the binocular thingy, comes with progress in the main missions.
I found phantoms fairly dispatchable with a shotgun, if I took them by surprise and unloaded quickly.
Right now I am at a stage where I slow down time and kill 5 phantoms without breaking a sweat or taking much damage. It is awesome. Playing on hard.
Yes, like many more traditional RPGs, Prey makes the mistake of making the player feel insanely weak in the beginning, then once you pass an inflection point halfway through you are an unstoppable golden god-king waving your gilded fist to tear down nations only to be trampled beneath your sandaled feet.
Also, they take way too long to give you the magic powers.
I still haven’t decided if putting points into turrets (lifting/repair, I believe) is worth it yet. They’re quite fragile, but they got me out of a jam a couple times when I was low on ammo. I’ll continue to roll with it.
The only alien power I unlocked is the basic mimic ability, nothing else…saving full alien style for a future playthrough.
Repair is quite useful, not just turrets, but also for fixing various broken systems that can kill with electricity very quickly. And fortified turret is quite resilient.
I cheated with a dupe exploit and bought all the skills. I am a walking god. Phantoms to me are like puppies.
Theres a lot of nice things in the skill trees. Fat upgrades.
I like to sneak up on phantoms and wrench 'em to death. Remember you can hold the attack button for a heavy attack, and usually after the first or second wack they fall down prone where they’re easy pickin’s. You need at least the stamina upgrade on the wrench to kill them before they get up and start attacking you, because without it you’ll run out of stamina before it’s dead. Another strat is place the fuel tanks in their patrol path and shoot the tanks when they get next to them. The sparking electrical panels would work well also.
Unfortunately there are upgraded phantoms later where you can’t really get into melee range to wrench them to death.
So IGN gave the game 4/10 because they had some bad bugs when playing. Bugs that most people do not encounter, and that have been already fixed few hours after the review by a patch (you can download it now by opting into beta patch).
They gave Fallout 4 score 9.5 at launch.
Gaming Journalism.
I mean, you can only review the game you play. Especially if you don’t get early review code.
Right, so games should live and die by blind chance. You get a bug nobody else gets - fuck this game. You don’t get bugs while ton of other people do - greatest game ever. Glad I don’t work in game industry.
All I am saying is, maybe they could do away with review scores. Or at least update it to reflect the actual state of the game (but fucking away with them would be better).
I think it’s safe to say that IGN’s review score has almost nothing to do with whether a game lives or dies these days. And it was the publisher’s choice to put the game out the way it did (no pre-release access, serious bugs only patched after release). Sucks for the developer, but it always sucks for the developer. Unless you’re Jonathan Blow, I guess.
I was making broader point, of course it is not necessarily just about IGN specifically. Although IGN is one of the biggest sites on the net, with most influence.
Publisher did fuck up a ton, no argument there.
No argument from me on review scores. But I don’t know what you expect a reviewer (certainly one at a mainstream site like IGN that lives and dies by pageviews) to do when they’re given a game post-release and told to review it ASAP. You can’t just wait for a patch which may or may not fix the bug. You can’t assume it’s going to to be fixed. You review what you’ve got and if the score accurately reflects the reviewer’s experience of the game, then fair enough.