Prey’s upcoming DLC, Typhon Hunter, is about as experimental as DLC will get.
First off, it will likely be accessible to anybody who already owns Mooncrash, one other piece of Prey DLC that messes with the immersive sim by mixing in roguelike elements – if you die, you die, and the sources you gathered are gone for the following run.
Secondly, Typhon Hunter is definitely two modes. In one, you’re immersed in VR inside memorable places from Talos 1, trying to unravel puzzles. It’s a VR escape room, primarily, and it’s a good time, judging by the section I performed at QuakeCon, with out audio and with somebody readily available to cease me smashing my face right into a wall.
In Typhon Hunter’s different mode, 5 gamers tackle the position of Mimics – shapeshifting aliens who can flip into varied props, comparable to mugs and lamps – whereas one participant takes the position of Morgan Yu. It’s disguise and search on a timer, the place Morgan should monitor down and kill all Mimics earlier than the clock counts down.
“As a Mimic, you can either play defensively and try to stay out of sight, or you can play aggressively and try to get close to Morgan,” Arkane lead designer Ricardo Bare tells me. “If you get close to Morgan, you have this little meter that charges up, and once it fills up you can do a jump attack.”
It’s a multiplayer immersive sim – perhaps foreshadowing Arkane’s upcoming projects – in bitesize format. As properly as retaining the freeform gameplay of Prey – Mimics can mess with props to make them look unnatural earlier than taking their place as a very regular, completely not-alien catching mitt – it additionally retains maintain of the jumpscares.
“If you do that, you knock him out for ten seconds or so – it’s penalty that runs down the clock – but it’s a risk because he could bust you and smash you with the wrench first,” Bare explains. “When you’re [a prop], you can roll around to different locations. You’re not stuck being the second mug next to this other mug.”
So, how precisely did this experimental DLC come to be?
“It’s kind of funny because when we were working on Prey, the Mimics became one of the more signature elements of the game,” Bare says. “They became super popular, and people love streaming getting scared by them. But when people started seeing how the Mimics worked, a bunch of them were like, ‘Oh, this is like Prop Hunt’. I was like, ‘What the hell is prop hunt?’.”
Prop Hunt is a well-liked Garry’s Mod recreation mode the place gamers disguise themselves as furnishings whereas one other participant hunts them down.
“We looked into it and were like, ‘This is a great idea, the Mimics are well suited for that kind of gameplay idea’,” Bare remembers. “So as soon as we completed Prey, we have been like, ‘Remember that thing everyone kept saying? Let’s strive it’.
“One of the issues I like about DLC is that you may flip issues round actually rapidly and you’ll take extra dangers. I assume one of many causes [it’s more experimental] is, after we shipped Prey, the workforce was damaged up into various things. But first we did just a little recreation jam. We have been impressed by the Bethesda Game Studios factor – they do that factor sometimes the place the workforce will get time to work on no matter they need to work on.”
Most just lately, the BGS recreation jam gave beginning to a photograph mode for Fallout 76, permitting gamers to take goofy selfies over the corpse of a defeated participant.
“So we took two weeks to work on whatever we wanted,” Bare continues, “as long as it has something to do with what we actually work on here. So everybody went off and came up with cool ideas, and some of the ideas are things that ended up in Mooncrash and Typhon Hunter.”
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