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Prey: Arkane’s Susan Kath on what sets it apart from Dishonored

There are more differences between Prey and Dishonored then one would originally think, Arkane’s Susan Kath recently told Stevivor.

“We’ve not done a game that involved zero-g before,” Kath began. “That was definitely a challenge to tackle. The setting definitely informed some different choices that we made with this game and weren’t necessarily made with Dishonored, zero-g being the one right in your face.”

Protagonist Morgan Yu will be able to travel anywhere she (or he) likes on the Talos 1 space station — even outside of it. A lack of gravity certainly impacts the way Yu’s powers function. That’s again true in life or death situations with the Typhon, the mysterious alien race that’s running rampant inside and outside its hull.

“The aliens themselves were something new and different to tackle,” Kath continued. “With the Dishonored series, you were interacting with humans; bringing aliens into the mix added a new set of challenges for us to tackle and figure out how we wanted them to look and move.

“We had animation challenges that faced us doing something like the Mimic, for example. An alien that has no head and 360 degree motion. It jumps off walls and it jumps and attacks you and it also turns into things randomly. Those were definitely some interesting challenges and twists that faced us as we tackled this game.”

In the end, Arkane’s core flourishes remain, all in place to provide a player with an open sandbox in which to wreak havoc.

“There are so many things that we try and make things as systemic as possible,” Kath continued. “We try not to hand-script those things; the Mimics, for example. There is just a big pool of what Mimics can mimic and most of the time, they’re doing that of their own free will. We have certain sets of behaviours assigned to them. If they feel threatened, they’re gonna be more likely to mimic something to try and get away from you, but what they mimic, that’s generally just chosen by the Mimics themselves.

“That’s great because it means that even after three years of developing this, I still see people in the studio who are playing and they’re like, ‘Okay, hang on. I need to get that medkit. Ah! That was not a medkit!’ Even though we’ve looked at it a billion times and we know where every object is, we still fall for it.”

Prey heads to Windows PC, Xbox One and PS4 in early May.


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Steve Wright

Steve's the owner of this very site and an active games journalist nearing twenty (TWENTY!?!) years. He's a Canadian-Australian gay gaming geek, ice hockey player and fan. Husband to Matt and cat dad to Wally and Quinn.