So, Prey is quite short. Moreover, it has zero replayability.

There’s a long debate taking place in different forums, but those two points seem well recognized and accepted.

The problem about the replayability is due to the design of the game. Prey relies heavily on interesting level design and puzzle-solving. Thanks to the new tricks, that’s the very best part of the game:

sluggo: I think the death walk partially saves Prey, because the combat is so bland and filled with “gotcha!” deaths that having to reload over and over would have made it an annoying, unenjoyable mess. The death walk is basically a license to zoom through the uninspired combat so you can spend more time soaking in the crazy level design.

But after you have completed the game in those eight hours or so, all the fun coming from the puzzles and crazy level design is spoiled. So what’s left for the replayability? The combat. But the combat isn’t so challenging.

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I have now something to criticize/suggest about the “death walk”, since I believe it would lead to a better game and also to a more fun nightmare/cherokee mode.

The reasoning behind my proposed changes is that the death walk, as it is designed and implemented in the game, removes completely the challenge since it’s exactly like a god mode. You don’t win a combat by fighting well, you win it exclusively through persistence.

The reason why death walk was introduced wasn’t to trivialize the game, though. But to avoid to break the action through reload/saves. And avoid to encourage the player to repeating a fight because it wasn’t done in an optimal way (instead of keep going). In two words: no downtime.

Proposed “death walk” changes

– (Normal difficulty) Instead of just respawning the player, all the monsters spawned and still alive would have their hit points completely restored.
– (Nightmare difficulty) Add stacking power-ups to the monsters (hitpoints or resistence) after each consequent death of the player in a short time span (a minute should be good).

The first change doesn’t break the original mechanic. It just restores the health of the monsters so that you have to actually kill something when you respawn if you want to progress.

The second one instead isn’t as harsh as you may imagine. Not only you would have to kill monsters between each death as in the normal difficulty mode (and that I believe is the BARE MINIMUM for a death mechanic). But you also have to pay attention and try to survive at least one minute after each death so that the monsters don’t get a slight power-up on their hit points (a 10% would be too much?). Maybe with a countdown displayed on screen so that you know exactly how long you have to resist and with the monsters hitpoint buff capping at 70-80% of their orginial hitpoint value.

Showing the countdown and even the hitpoint percent buff of the monsters on screen (Guild Wars-style, like the morale/death modifier appearing in the upper left corner of the screen in that game) would be definitely an immersion breaking element. But it would be limited to the “nightmare” mode, which is only accessible after the first run through the game, so with a definite more “arcade-ish” connotation.

The next possible step would about allowing the player to customize the three values of the nightmare difficulty before starting a game: the duration of the countdown, the mobs hitpoint buff and the hitpoint buff cap. So, for example, I could set the countdown at 1.30 minutes (the time I need to survive after each death to not trigger the mobs hitpoint buff), the hitpoint buff at 15% and the maximum value of the buff at 150% (of the original hitpoint value for that monster type).

I don’t think it’s unreasonable. It just ups the difficulty slightly as a nightmare mode is supposed to. Or not?

It’s something I believe could significantly improve the game, but I fear it wouldn’t be trivial enough to implement to hope in a patch from the developers, nor I think it could be achievable through a mod.

But you cannot stop me from wishing, can you? ;p

P.S.
This idea would also lead to two significant problems. The first is about having to attack regenerated monsters with less and less ammunition, the second is about making boss encounters un-winnable if they regenerate health completely after each player’s death.

Both of these could be easily addressed, though. The first by regenerating some ammo after each death (and also respawning healing sources on a timer), the second by regenerating only a portion of health of a boss.

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Think about WoW.

It was praised because of the mild death penalty. No xp loss. But the way Prey works it would be like respawning on the place with the hitpoints restored.

Come on, how’s that different from flipping the god mode on? If you like that sort of thing why don’t you just pull down the console and type GOD in every other FPS. You can have a “death walk” in every game.

It’s kind of obvious that “challenge” isn’t a flaw to remove from a game. What was to remove was the *downtime*, not the challenge. Prey’s implementation of the “death walk” removes BOTH.

My idea instead removes the downtime without completely removing the challenge.

A mob spawns and starts to shoot at you? Who cares? You can just sit there and make a face at it. It doesn’t really matter. If you want you can even go around with the pipe wrench and finish the game with just that.

In these kind if games you used to be cautious when you entered a room. You are on your toes. And that IS fun.

At the end a fight is something you need to overcome. If I intend you to prevail on a 1 vs 1 encounter than you have to figure out a way.

For God’s sake, if you remove that, you have NO GAME. It’s just an interactive movie that requires you to press a “NEXT” button.

The current implementation of the “death walk” in Prey doesn’t make a fight *possible*. It makes it trivial. You don’t have to be good at anything at all because the mobs will eventually die.

A game is about a given situation that you need to figure out. Something you learn and then re-apply till you master it. This from Tetris to Pac-man, World of Warcraft or Prey. All games are like that.

The death walk in Prey trivializes too much the combat difficulty because it doesn’t require you to actually learn anything. While the puzzles and environments are fun exactly because they are elements that you cannot skip. If a door is closed you have to figure out how to open it. You HAVE TO do it. You cannot just say, “okay, I pass anyway”. That’s a game. Something that requires from you an active brain usage.

Restoring the health of the mobs who have survived is really a small change, but one would keep the difficulty at least more consistent. Without taking away ANYTHING from the original idea.

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This is what George Broussard (3DRealms) said about the death walk and its purpose:

George Broussard: Nobody likes dying a lot and losing progress. It’s the thing that makes you stop playing a game and take a break.

People like to say “prey is short” or that they finish it in one sitting. Something to think about is the fact that it did not frustrate them enough to stop playing, and that maybe doing things like adding DeathWalk, while possibly making the game shorter by removing re-playing areas, made the game more enjoyable overall.

His other comments aren’t as smart, though:

You can achieve the same results with lots of quick saves, even during a boss fight. If you quick save every 10 seconds, you will never lose progress in a game.

There is a massive audience of gamers out there that haven’t played FPS games for 10 years. It’s about time we started thinking about them.

All DeathWalk does is keep you from losing progress. It does make the bosses a little easier, but then again, most people are frustrated by really hard or complex bosses.

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DeathWalk is not God mode at all. It’s simply a persistant quick save. You don’t lose progress. You still have some time penalty for dying (10 seconds or so – more if you try to shoot Wraiths to get full spirit or health).

This is false. If you reload a saved game you do lose progression, but in particular you are bound to your current state. Reloading doesn’t restore your health as the death walk does. At the end you can save and reload all you want, but you still need to fight well if you want to win an encounter.

This is not the case in Prey, and is the only reason why I proposed those changes.

Well, Prey was designed to be approachable to more than just core FPS players. That’s why it has dynamic difficulty and DeathWalk. In hindsight, we should have allowed a slider to core players could make the dynamic difficulty system harder. That was an oversight.

But still, the goal was to have everyone be able to finish the game. The worst thing you can do is make a game and people stop 50% through it. I’d rather more people finish, than not, and error on being too easy, than too hard.

Most people play games to see and do cool things, and not be challenged at a very high level, by combat.

I wonder if it’s possible for me to play a game without having gripes about its design and/or getting ideas that I think would made it much more fun (and consequently runing my fun in the actual game since I keep thinking at the better version that I will be never able to play).

This is something that has always been in my wishlist. Try to design the mobs in a game as creatures, with a background, specific behaviour and so on.

What I don’t like is having one pattern only. Where aggressive mobs pretty much react only to the player’s level and range. I always though that in a game the mobs shouldn’t be just generic entities with different statistics. Differentiated not only by a model, a texture and different attacks, but also by different behaviours.

Here you can see how this way of thinking (because it’s really about an overall approach to a genre) is linked to all the critics I made against the linear content progression typical of level based games. Instead of “killing the bigger foozle” as you progress, you wouldn’t just deal with stronger mobs, but you would have to learn and recognize their different behavious. Something that, even in this case, is much more “systemic” than the linear progression. Less forced in a obligatory sequence and MUCH more appropriate to a “world”, where different creatures have their own individuality and aren’t exclusively functional to a power progression.

A few games tried to go in that direction, but without much success. Ryzom has creatures that come to watch you and even migrate in packs from zone to zone. SWG also had creatures that approached you. But what really misses is the variation. The possibility of reaction to a number of different variables, both coming from the player and the environment. So that the concrete gameplay will be then much less predictable. And also much more interesting to discover and learn.

It’s also again not a wish for complex, reactive AI systems. I repeated in the past that advanced AI isn’t something that these type of games should waste lots of resources on. Both Dave Rickey and Raph Koster are strongly against me on this front. But I continue to think that we only need some more complexity, but not necessarily reactive AI, with the hope that it would help to auto-generate content. I have a desire for identity and specificity, but not automation. I would just like to see worlds that are more interesting to explore, more immersive, interactive. Rich.

Less predictable. Feeling not all coming from the exact same mold. But in THIS genre. Not in another. A fantasy world, still, but seen from a new point of view that would make it feel as a totally new experience. Standing out between the rest.

It’s an approach that, despite applied to a similar genre and world, would be the exact opposite of WoW and all the other similar games. Instead of simplifying and reducing everything to the essential, the goal would be about delving, adding details. Rediscovering aspects of this genre that have been purged. Similarly to how Diablo “boxed” the RPG genre, making it lose a lot of unique qualities.

We are used to mosters that simply aggro at a range. It’s even incredibly annoying if you are traveling and start aggroing all sort of critters that in a few cases can even stun and snare you. What if instead the creature would start growling if you walked too close? What if some creatures could be attracted by a light, or scared by it? Or attacking only to defend their lair? What if some wolves would attack you only if you were alone, while runinng away if you moved with a party? What if they would attack you only when they feel the smell of your food? What if the game could simulate the mechanics of a real hunt?

With zones designed to be more organic. Mobs with realistic loot.

That’s the approach I’d like to see. Richer, immersive worlds. Without the need to move away from the fantasy genre to do something different.

(Then if you tell me that is already daunting enough for the servers to check aggro ranges and pathing without adding more variables, okay. Let’s make treadmills all life long… *sigh*)