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Probably had a pretty nice game built, until the publishers came along and said 'scrap 50% of what you've done and slap the FC2 name on it'.
I think the gameplay looks pretty cool actually, more interesting than some random call-of-duty copy anyways. Kinda feels like Tribes a bit, what with all the jetpacking around.
It isn't such a bad game in my opinion, great fun as a sandbox where you just mess around with the AI behavior. But yeah, it's nothing like Farcry.
I really didn't like FC2, really one bit at all. There seems to be some serious streaming issues with content, and I lag noticeably bad when sprinting or driving through the world (it occurs every few seconds.) Changing settings does not help at all, and my computer specs blow consoles out of the water.
As far as the story, it's pretty damn lame. You start off with Malaria, yeah! The sprint distance seems like less than five meters. The whole system on finding diamonds is so borked, I ran around for a few minutes when trying to find the first one. I didn't understand anything in the game. What's worse is the fact it is an open ended game with no quick saving. This wouldn't be as frustrating, if the game didn't crash after about an hour of playing it. 2/10 stars for FC2. Classic example of how game studios are at least eleven times better at making games than publishers. I didn't give it just one star because I bought it in a Steam pack for $3, so I had suspicion of the quality. Crysis 2, on the other hand, seems quite promising. I'm not a big fan of invisibility being totally ruined with the addition of thermal vision. Hopefully there will be some way to hide your heat signature, at least for the most part. I liked FC2 quite a bit for what it was - I didn't have streaming problems (even on my older PC) and I thought the combat was a lot of fun if not a bit frustrating at times when I couldn't make out the shapes in dark shadows.
My main complaints were that driving everywhere got stale pretty fast, and that the voice acting was bad (as someone pointed out, I can't remember who, it was probably for compression reasons.) The weapons felt great though, some of the best feeling weapons in any game I've ever played, from the sounds to the damage to reloading, even to them breaking in the middle of a god damn fire fight - they just felt great. The diamonds thing was basically a hot/cold game, I found a bunch of them but didn't have much incentive to find all of them. The story wasn't really all that bad, it didn't have the CoD kind of crazy conspiracy spin to it, it felt much more grounded. Basically - gun smugglers are bad, mercs are bad, and both help to destroy stability and innocent lives. Felt much more grounded than CoD games, despite being an action flick style game. I thought it was ok, was pretty fun for the random AI shenanigans, and the companions could be quite silly.
It'll still be Human Head developing the game, with just Zenimax taking over publishing rights. I'd imagine it mustn't be too far from gold... the first game took 4-5yrs once Human Head took over and Prey 2 has been under development for probably 4 yrs now. Human Head has nothing else in development, so one can only assume they've been working on it since 2006. I just hope they don't put off the release with all those other shooters coming in 2011 from Bethesda.
Prey began it's long development life in 1995, a decade before it's final release. Just as they did with Duke Nukem Forever, 3D Realms stumbled around changing development teams and the game but, ultimately, weren't able to build a game engine to support the portal technology.
The idea was to have portals (ie teleporters) that can be opened and closed throughout the game. 3D Realms spent a number of years on the engine before it was finally put on hold, indefinitely, in 1999. Which was a great shame as the videos, screenshots and E3 presentations released in 1997/98 had many fans excited, including me. Prey was one of those games that I long awaited, just like Duke Nukem Forever. Unfortunately they both became vaporware. It wasn't until 2002 that the project was resumed, although not announced officially. However this time round 3D Realms retired the idea of using their own engine and started again using idTech 4, with the game actually being created by Human Head Studios, authors of the classic third-person Rune. And in 2006 Prey was finally released. Ironic that eventually outsourcing Duke Nukem Forever to Gearbox Software was the only way 3D Realms' other, more famous vaporware game would ever get released as well. Back to Prey, somehow through this mess of a development timeline, Prey turned out to be a great game. It didn't feature design that was new as both Doom 3 and Quake 4, the only two other games to have used idTech4 up to 2006, featured very similar sci-fi themes. Doom 3 was slightly darker, Quake 4 was slightly more military themed. Prey took the theme in more of an alien, surreal direction, but ultimately sci-fi is sci-fi. However it looks just as good as Doom 3 and Quake 4 ever did, so it's another great looking entry into the shooter market. The entire game takes place within a huge living sphere floating in space. But most of the level design is based around human-sized rooms and corridors. There are some much bigger open areas which you can fly around in using your little spacesuit. Unfortunately, just like every other shooter that forces the obligatory on-rails/vehicle levels, these flying levels are far too common. After the first couple of levels featuring flying I was hoping that would be the end of it. I was sadly wrong. They're not frustrating, in fact the flying mechanics were fairly solid. But I hated Descent, so I was always going to sigh when Prey takes me off my feet. Prey also features portals, as per the original idea of the game from the 1990's. However portals are nothing new come 2006. Sure they can open and close and it's a good way to insert more enemies into the action, but they're not a big selling point. What is a lot more unique is the change of gravity. Using special pathways you can literally walk vertically around the four walls of a room. You can reverse the gravity of a room just by shooting a trigger. On top of this you have spirit walk, where you can leave your body as a spirit and still interact with the environment. These are some intriguing, fresh features that form the basis for many puzzles throughout Prey. Do I like puzzles? No, not at all. So the constant gravity changes and puzzle solving didn't really have me jumping with excitement. In fact the brightly lit gravity pathways did get a little ugly and repetitive as the game wore on. The actual action in the game was all solid. The weapons are slightly different to your standard shooter stock, so it made for some interesting gameplay. The game should have been quite a difficult game, however a unique approach was made regarding dying. Instead of relying on quicksaves or checkpoints, you instead enter a short shooting game which after 20 seconds returns you to where you died with your health returned. This means you can't really die in Prey. Quicksaving is completely unnecessary and sometimes there's little point to avoid losing health. You might as well just die and get your health replenished. The boss battles in particular become a complete joke when you keep respawning and the boss still has the same health. I can understand the idea behind it; they wanted to remove replaying large sections and constant quicksaves/quickloads, but they made it far too easy to not try at all in the game. There's no incentive to not dying, other than your own ego. However with it being an easy game, it's also replayable as you can jump into any part of the game and have a blast (providing it's not a flying level!). There's no lengthy storytelling or slow parts to the gameplay. Prey is certainly not a perfect game; the flying and puzzles get old, the regenerating (no dying) system was a mistake, but the action is solid and design great throughout. Possibly the best shooter of 2006. I really enjoyed Prey but I played it through once or twice then became bored with it. It had LOADs of stuff in it which was awesome:
Portals Cool physics/gravity Shrink the player and put them on a mini-planet Boss fights!!! A plot (sortof) Spirit-walking Puzzles Reasonable (for the time) AI 'Cause it was IdTech4 it ran smooth! All of what Kona said really. good game.
There was a boredom factor for me as well though. Maybe it was just too linear. Not much choice for the player; you're pretty much led from A to B and that's it. If you replay it, you're again led from A to B in the same manner. I like the leech gun, that was a pretty cool concept. Would have liked a lot more of the Native American stuff and more character development. There was a series of spiritual tests announced, but they never came. The death game became boring fast; I prefer checkpoints with optional quickloading. A lot of cool scenes in the game like the school bus. It didn't always come together very well; it felt like cool bits strung together instead of a cohesive theme. Wtf were those little girls doing in there. Their backstory was totally lost on me. It was like "you're swarmed by creepy little girls now because the designer fancied it" and next level, the little girls were gone again. What the... It also suffered from darkness like Doom3 and Quake 4. Plus, I didn't like Jen. I'm supposed to save a girlfriend who just screams all the time? :-/ They should have given Jen a gun and allowed the player to play as her for a while, exploring a different area of the sphere. Weapons look very underwhelming, shotgun in particular. I hope that's only SOME of the weapons.
Yeah Jen has got to be the ugliest princess that needs saving in any game ever. Her head was far too wide for the face. Even Princess Toadstool is hotter. I'd rather have screwed the mutant mother bitch at the end, at least she had her tits out already.
elastomania for sailors: http://bloboats.blobtrox.net/
quite enjoyable so far.
movement is about on par with modern shooters, fairly slow. it's the unreal engine so movement and direction changes are crisp and responsive. for some reason, you can jump about 3 meters in the air. alien planet so low gravity? i dunno, it's weird but actually necessary because most places where you are required to jump are quite far. this also means that there's a LOT of clipping going on to stop you from leaving the map. fov is very small, but you can change it back to 90. visual are gorgeous. it's not crysis 2, but it's not trying to be. it's like madmax with world of warcraft art style. if the character models had solid coloured textures, you might mistake them for team fortress 2. pretty repetitive with enemies though. there's bandits and animals somewhat like fiends and birds. there are many variations of bandits though, and each type is quite distinctive and much more than just a reskin. you rarely have to look at the name of the mob to tell what kind it is. append: i just remembered there were these worms that you had to shoot in the eye to kill and the second area i just entered had these slug things that remind me of the film "Tremors". so maybe things are looking up for monster variety. as far as i can tell, the core gameplay is identical for all 4 player characters. you can use any gun you want, contrary to what the instruction booklet and character descriptions imply. the only thing is some of the talents you pick up later via talent points (1 per level after level 5) only boost certain weapon types, but it's not like you can't use any weapon if you wanted to. as for the 'role playing' aspect, it's really just 'stat buiding' ala diablo. it's even less than that, really. you get the aforementioned talent points to spend but there are no traditional rpg stats like str, dex and con. there's a simple 'learn by doing' system for the weapons. the more kills you get with a certain weapon, the more you go up in weapon skill levels and you start to accrue tiny bonuses like +2% damage or +5% reduced reload time or somesuch. finally, each character only gets a single special ability. hunter gets a pet bird that you can send out to beat on guys. it's effective, but goofy. i'm not a huge fan of 'pets'. i like to kill my own stuff. soldier gets a turret you can plop down that also can give you ammo and does a decent job of killing stuff. this guy feels like he was built specifically for coop and so feels somewhat... i dunno, out of sorts in solo. 'siren' (talk about unhelpful class name) spawns an explosion then turns invisible and then spawns another explosion when reappearing. this is more useful than it sounds. you can use the explosions to knock out groups of enemies more accurately than grenades and also very helpful for running away if stumble on some mob 10 levels higher than you. berserker is... well, you punch stuff insanely hard and you heal and become invulnerable. i didn't use this guy very long. i hate meleeing in a shooter and this kind of thing is boring to me. so yeah, the differentiation between the classes is a lot more subtle than their visual differentiation. anyway, will see how it goes in the second area... Certain classes did better with different guns. Soldiers did good with automatics, sirens did good with snipers (? maybe), etc. I may be talking out of my rear, though. Check the wiki.
Also, i wouldn't say the art style is like WoW, at all really, their both cartoony, but it pretty much ends there. I forget what the name of the art style used in borderlands is, i know warsow uses the same style, though. you need to look at the textures and the way they are made. you'll see the similarities with wow's texture art.
the game could have worked just as well without the comic book black outline effect. the textures are that strong. and yeah, like i said, you can use any gun, but some classes' talents only boost one damage type (for example, soldier has one that boosts only shotguns). siren's talents are more generalized as many boost her actual ability, and others boost elemental procs (+fire, +acid, +electricity) which are present on all types of weapons. I bought the zombie island and mad moxxie dlc and haven't even played them yet. :(
If we can get some coop going on I might join in. I didn't like the sp at all but maybe coop is better.
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