"It's easy to predict that we'll grow more, simply because there is a new generation of hardware already." "Historically, it's been taking more and more people to make games, just to catch up with the technology and the level of fidelity that the technology allows us to do," Colantonio added. As the technology behind games improves, the industry continues to become more and more specialized. The work Bare did as a designer on 2000's Deus Ex, he said, is now done by at least three people. The hard part is that it costs a lot of extra work." "The cool part is the player feels like now this is his new environment," said Colantonio. ![]() Like in many role-playing games, players can drop items in an area, go on with the story, return, and find the items exactly where they've left them. Arkane didn't provide an exact number of employees, but it's now about half the size of the flagship Lyon office, according to Colantonio.īeyond that, it requires manpower to maintain the open-world nature of the spaceship. Architects, level designers, environment artists, and others work in the studio's new facility in North Austin. What was three years ago a team of less than 10 ballooned to handle all the work associated with putting out a game of Prey's magnitude. It takes a lot of manpower to engineer that level of detail. Prey, in contrast, is "just one huge interconnected world, instead of mission, mission, mission, mission," said Bare. "There are still a lot of video games that emulate movies in many ways, as far as how the narratives go, and I think our future as immersive sims is to branch out as much as possible from movies instead, and doing everything dynamic," Colantonio said. More than ever, the goal is not to shepherd the player through a linear storyline by solving puzzles in the specific way a level designer envisioned. That's another thing that distinguishes Prey from its namesake, and even some of Arkane's other work ( Dishonored featured a relatively linear storyline, for example), and it's also a good measure of how far the industry has come in the last decade. "For me, it's the sum of systems that allow me to feel a real tension and make decisions to how I'm going to survive," he said. That aspect is what sets the game apart for Colantonio. "Here's a challenge, give the player a bunch of cool mechanics, and you figure out how to solve the problem yourself," explained lead designer Ricardo Bare. Navigating Talos I will take every gadget and instinct you have. Arkane equips the player with a selection of gadgets, like the GLOO Cannon, for instance, which shoots quickly hardening goop that can be used to fight enemies or create makeshift platforms. This Prey follows Morgan Yu on a lonely path to figuring out why he's woken up on an expansive space station filled with a ruthless alien presence. "You see that in the movie industry all the time." "The game was old enough – at this point 10 years – that our version of it, our full reboot of it, kind of makes sense," said Raphaël Colantonio, Arkane president and co-creative director. The idea of the haunting Talos I space station and the terrifying aliens that overtake it were already in place when Bethesda offered up the Prey title. Around the same time, Arkane began working on what would eventually become an entire reboot – not a sequel at all – of Prey. The Doom-like 2006 first-person shooter, in which a Native American man and his family are abducted by aliens, took nearly a decade to produce, and efforts on the part of another studio to develop Prey 2 fell apart in 2014.īut like the amorphous alien menace that stars in this year's Prey, the concept wouldn't be so easy to annihilate.īethesda and Arkane already had a relationship because of Dishonored. ![]() Since 2011, Bethesda Softworks, which published the Dishonored series, had worked to commission another title in its Prey intellectual property. The Lyon team moved on to Dishonored 2, while the Austin team began working on a concept for a new title – another action-adventure, but this time one with an even more sinister bent. When Arkane Studios wrapped Dishonored in 2012, the Austin office that co-developed the game alongside the flagship branch in Lyon, France, was a team of seven or eight. After more than three years, the studio invited journalists to a preview event at Alamo Drafthouse on South Lamar, prepared to unleash this sci-fi thriller into the world. The brains behind the trauma awaiting audiences in Prey are based right here in Austin. Is that really a health kit you're reaching for? You can't really be sure until you reach out to grab it. Kath said even the developers are sometimes caught off-guard by the ambushes. The enemy uses camouflage to conceal itself, creating an underlying tension that will be with you the entire game.
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