Here, players take control of an entirely new character in Killian Samuels - and rather than focus on wall-walking trickery, the game's developer intends to rely on open-world exploration, bounty hunting and sci-fi parkour. Project Lead Chris Rhinehart told me all about it.
Chris Rhinehart: No, you’re a different character actually. And what happened is we wanted to explore other parts of the Prey universe after Tommy’s story. We took a look at Prey 1 and found there were certain aspects that we wanted to carry over to the sequel. But one of the big things is we want let the player experience more of this universe, from different perspectives. That’s why you’re a brand new character.
You actually play a former marshall turned alien bounty hunter named Killian Samuels. Tommy is still very much a part of the game, you just don’t play as him. He is an important part of the narrative though. We’re also giving you new mechanics. For me personally, Prey 1 was about taking you to a place where shooter fans hadn’t been before, and giving you gameplay mechanics that nobody had experienced before. We’re trying to do a similar thing with the sequel. You haven’t really been in a world like this one before, and you’ll have all these unique new abilities as a kickass bounty hunter. I think when you see the demo, a lot of this will make sense.
Chris Rhinehart: We don’t have Wall Walk or the gravity stuff in the sequel. It’s really about being a bounty hunter, using your gadgets in different ways and finding ways to take guys down. But I was talking to someone earlier and he made an interesting point, where he said, ‘With Prey, when I entered an area I didn’t know what was going to happen. You had to work out what you had to do to get out of this situation.’ There were these unexpected twists, too. Those two elements are still prevalent in the sequel. There’s constantly new mechanics, new gadgets, new weapons, new situations that you find yourself in, to keep things fresh. There’s also the aspect of unexpected twists that happen - these missions don’t always go down cleanly. There’s something that will happen that will mix things up, be it something crazy-violent or darkly humorous.
Chris Rhinehart: There are some environmental elements to this game, but really it’s about... the way we’ve done it really differentiates ourselves from other First Person Shooters.
One of the things we didn’t want to do was make a shooter in a sea of shooters. It’s a very competitive market, and our big thing is that you’re this bounty hunter and that right away is something people can understand, latch onto and think ‘that sounds really awesome.’ Then there’s the agile combat system and climbing abilities - he can slide under objects and leap really high, and it just gives you this real freedom of movement. The world is very vertical, so there are lots of opportunities to use those abilities.
But we knew that we couldn’t just give you these cool climbing abilities without a decent world to explore. And with some of the missions you get to engage in pursuit scenes too. So combat, exploration and pursuit. Those are the three core pillars of the game. When designing the combat system, we knew we wanted to have cover-based combat, but it’s really fast and fluid, as well as really accessible. I can really easily slide into cover, pop out and vault from cover, and shoot while I’m doing all of that. We wanted the player to feel really powerful.
Chris Rhinehart: I think a lot of people are excited about us making a sequel. The thing that we had which was really interesting, was when we first announced it people didn’t quite get it. There were a lot of Prey fans out there who didn’t understand where we were going with this sequel. And there were people who maybe weren’t fans of Prey who were wondering why we were doing this at all! But once people saw what we were doing and got the direction that we were taking the game, the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Chris Rhinehart: Well, Prey 2 doesn’t have multiplayer at all. It’s a single-player focused game. That was a decision that we made pretty early on, to make the strongest solo campaign that we can and to partner with Bethesda who are the masters at single-player games. So it all worked out very well in that regard. We also wanted to make sure that the single-player had a lot of depth and longevity, and we didn’t want multiplayer to be something that felt tacked on. That would not be our intention, obviously, but we felt that our resources would be best served making a single-player game. And actually, that’s the best thing for us as a developer, it’s the best thing for the publisher and it’s the best thing for the gamer.