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Is Prey Too Much Like Dishonored?

Is Prey Too Much Like Dishonored?

In a Gamescom interview, Pete Hines from Bethesda talked about the upcoming game from Arkane Studios, Prey . He even showed very exciting new footage from the game, displaying one of the many cool abilities you can have. As he further discussed the game, I couldn’t help but notice an extreme similarity to Dishonored . The particle effects of the aliens, for example, are a carbon copy of the Shadow Walk in Dishonored 2 . The interviewer noticed it too and asked after it, to my delight. However, Hines did go on to explain that the differences are beyond that too. He mentioned briefly that the pacing in combat, crafting, and psychological horror of the game are wildly different from Dishonored .

In fact, upon studying the new footage further, I realized the similarities are only in the visual details, not in the actual details of gameplay. Sure, Morgan has supernatural powers, but the ability “Mimic” is not something that would make sense in the Dishonored world, the Gloo Cannon (as much as I adore the pun) is far too silly to be a tool at Corvo’s hand, and the multi-path levelling is something quite a few games possess. Nor are any of these abilities limited to Dishonored . If you strip them down to their basic components, all the games in the world will start to look similar.

Mimic, for example (the only special ability Bethesda revealed) allows the player to turn themselves into any inanimate object. In the gameplay video they showed how the player found themselves unable to get into what looked like a ticket office of some kind. There was a gap in the window, however, and a fairly innocuous mug sitting there too. So, the player used Mimic to turn themselves into the mug and roll through the gap in the window. Perfectly ingenious, really.

But this ability could never exist in the universe of Dishonored , as the powers there reflect the game’s dark world and the characters within it. Devouring Swarm, for example, has everything to do with the plague and Corvo’s hunt for the cure . Or Emily’s Mesmerize skill in Dishonored 2 – the ability to dazzle your enemies is a key skill in any political environment, and Emily is an empress. Mimic is a skill captured from the aliens Morgan battles in the game. It has nothing to do with his character. In addition, supernatural powers within a stealth or FPS game are not new: BioShock, System Shock, Dead Space, Prey (2006), and Darkness II are but a few. Just because Arkane Studios made Dishonored doesn’t mean they’re going to make the same game over and over just with a different setting.

The Gloo Cannon, another new mechanic revealed at Quakecon, spews some kind of white goopy substance. This glue hardens almost immediately and the player can dispense enemies quite quickly with it. Frankly, it’s another version of freezing your enemies and then shooting them: like BioShock ‘s Winter Blast plasmid, or Mass Effect ‘s Lift biotic talent. This is not an ability isolated to Dishonored in any way, even with Bend Time and Mesmerize. Thus, that the new Prey has it is a matter of making something old look new and not anything to do with re-skinning Dishonored .

Is Prey Too Much Like Dishonored?

That said, when asked if Prey was an open world game, Hines stated directly that it was like Dishonored in its multi-path levels. I won’t say that this kind of “dare to break the game” ability to go anywhere you like however you please is unique to Dishonored , but I will say that Dishonored helped popularize it for this generation of games. Arkane Studios did it well and in a way that made a lot of gamers thrilled to take the challenge. Thus, this point I will concede as it was quoted from Hines himself. However, there are games with a similar tactic. Most FPS games have various methods in which you can take down your enemies. Like a camp in Far Cry : you can choose multiple sniping points, sneak through the camp itself, or run in guns ablaze.

Essentially, Prey is vastly unlike Dishonored , even in some areas where it might at first seem that they’re similar. Abilities like Mimic and the Gloo Cannon would never fit into Dishonored ‘s world and the multi-path levels are not unique to Dishonored . Sometimes, if you don’t look closely enough (or even too closely) all games can start to look alike. Thus, we should b e careful when we critique one game for being too much like another, and remember that art is about making the old look new.

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