T w e n t y S i d e d
Like I said last time, Walther Dahl showed up for some mustache-twirling villainy just as the main story was getting good. So then the plot of the game slams on the brakes and we spend the next hour or so fighting the same boring enemy robot over and over.
There are a couple of different ways that Morgan can deal with Walther Dahl. She can give him a good old-fashioned murdering, or she can knock him out. And knocking him out isn’t just for bleeding-heart hippies doing “no kill” novelty runs like in some games. Here, sparing Dahl’s life serves an immediate practical benefit: It gives us a way off the station.
Technically, we shouldn’t need additional transportation off the station. On Talos-1 there are three escape pod bays. Each bay holds six pods, and each pod holds 8 people. So what we have here is a Titanic-type situation where we only have a lifeboat capacity of 144 for our 260 personnel. If we want to be charitable,I don’t want to be charitable. we could assume that the original crew size was supposed to be less than 144, but the station has grown in the last few years and nobody’s gotten around to adding more escape pod bays.
Either that or everyone on the station is bad at math.
It doesn’t matter, since none of the pods work anyway. I found an audiolog where Alex Yu specifically directed a member of the maintenance staff to not repair or maintain the escape pods. But I never found a rationale behind the order, and the wiki doesn’t seem to have anything to say about it either.
The unfavorable explanation is that Alex is a much more cartoonish villain than I’ve been giving him credit for. He discontinued the maintenance because he wanted to save money, or because he thought nothing could possibly go wrong. If this is the reason, then Alex is actually kinda dumb.
The more favorable explanation is that Alex realized that the escape pods represented a huge threat to Earth. In the event of an emergency, the Typhon would most likely break containment. If they did, then having 18 different escape pods leave the station would represent 18 different ways for the Typhon to reach Earth. The odds are that at least one pod would end up with a mimic inside, and from there the Typhon can jump to Earth and it’s game over for humanity. So perhaps Alex effectively sabotaged the pods in order to protect the Earth.
It should be noted that Alex has his own private pod at the top of the Arboretum, and that one works just fine. Make of that what you will.
Fly Me From the Moon
According to the wiki, Talos-1 is parked at the L2 Lagrange Point of the Earth-Moon system. This would put the station on the far side of the moon. Actually, I guess it must orbit the L2 point, since otherwise the moon would block our view of Earth and communications with Earth would be a pain in the ass. This proposed position is consistent with what we see in the game, where the moon appears very close and the Earth is fairly small in the distance.
This means it’s a bit of hassle to get home. During the Apollo missions, it was a 3-day trip to reach the moon, and here we’re a little beyond the moon. No doubt the more advanced space program in Prey can do better than the Apollo program, but I doubt it’s that much better. This isn’t like being parked in low Earth orbit where you can reach the surface in twenty minutes as long as you’re not too picky about which ocean you end up in. That trip back from the moon ought to take a couple days.
Then again, the story makes it sound like Dahl got here from Earth in the space of a few hours. So… I dunno. In any case, even with their improved tech you still need something with rockets on it if you want to go anywhere. This setting doesn’t have Star Trek style magical propulsion.
I guess we need to assume that the escape pods – had they worked – were intended to float around near Talos-1 until other craft arrived to rescue the survivors? There’s no way those tiny pods had the delta-v to get back to Earth.
Getting Home
Dahl arrived in a craft that looks a lot like those from the Space Shuttle Program. If Morgan were to do him a murder, then there would be nobody to pilot the ship. If we leave him alive then we have a pilot, and our only problem is that he’s a bloodthirsty badass with orders to kill us all.
But as Morgan has demonstrated again and again over the last few months, you’re never more than a simple uninstall away from a fresh point of view. If we knock him out and remove some of his mods, then he’ll lose access to his recent memories and we’ll be free to tell him whatever we like. For example, we can tell him he’s here to rescue us.
There are several different ways to handle the ending, but I always knock Dhal out because I love making this murderous joke of a character act as our taxi driver back to Earth. Also, I imagine it’s pretty funny when he meets his employer William Yu. He was told to save all the tech and kill the people, and instead he appears in front of his boss with a shuttle full of people and no tech, chest puffed out with pride.
Thanks for the ride, dipshit!
Anyway, by murder or trickery, you eventually get Dahl out of your way.
Next it’s time to meet with Alex, who still owes us his arming key. But I don’t want to jump to that topic just yet. So instead let’s talk about…
Novelty Guns
To be clear, when I say “novelty gun”, I don’t just mean weird weapons like the BFG from DOOM or the Shrink Ray from Duke Nukem 3D. I’m talking about weapons that act more like tools, being useful both in and out of combat.
I’m not sure how far back the tradition of novelty gameplay weapons goes. The earliest one I’m aware of is the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. Yes, it’s a gun for fighting bad guys, but it also has non-combat utility. When you’re not using it to murder combine soldiers with flying radiators and toilets, you can use it to open doors and solve puzzles.Did I say “puzzles”? I meant “puzzle”, singular. You use it to solve a see-saw puzzle every three or four levels. In gameplay terms, it is both a weapon and a can opener. Physics engines were something new at the time, and giving the player a tool to arbitrarily manipulate physics objects was a brilliant way to show off the new system. You could use it to stack items to reach high places, punt vehicles out of the way, or to pull goodies towards you that were otherwise unreachable.
A much less appealing novelty gun is the one from the recent Wolfenstein games. Consider the Laser Kraft Werk gun from Wolfenstein: The New Order. It will vaporize specific squares of sheet metal, allowing you access to ducts and such. But unlike the gravity gun, this isn’t some generalized system. It’s not like the devs implemented a system that allowed the player to arbitrarily cut through walls to re-shape the level. Which… fine. That would be super hard and create tons of design problems. The problem is that the LKW ends up being a…
Unitasker
I am not a fan of unitaskers. Mechanically, it’s like the game hands you a red keycard. Then once per level you run into a red door, so you pull out your red keycard, open the door to collect your goodies, and then continue on your way.
The game isn’t creating a new system for you to explore, it’s just giving you a very specific can opener, and once in a while you’ll encounter a can to use it on. It’s dumb and shallow.
The LKW is also really good at melting through enemy armor. It’s too good actually. It’s so good that if the game allowed it, you’d use the LKW all the time and one-shot your way through Wolfenstein’s endless armies of bullet sponge enemies. So the devs limit your ability to use it with ammo. The LKW gets its own special refuel station.
So what ends up happening is you’ll see a LKW refueling gizmo and realize that the devs intend for you to use it in this area. So you look around and sure enough, in that dark corner is a square of sheet metal that the LKW can remove.
Imagine if the HL2 gravity gun only worked in certain rooms, and those rooms were always filled with radiators. It’s like the developer put a sign over the door: DESIGNATED FUN ZONE. PLEASE LIMIT FUN ACTIVITIES TO THIS AREA. THANK YOU – MGMT
You can see how much less interesting it would be.
The GLOO Gun
Prey gives us the Gelifoam Lattice Organism Obstructor cannon, and I’m happy to say it turns out to be the good kind of novelty weapon, and not a dumb unitasker like Wolfenstein’s LaserKraftWank. Like the gravity gun, the GLOO gun has utility both in and out of combat.
In combat, you can use it to slow down enemies. This is super-useful with the fast-moving mimic and the invisible poltergeist. You don’t want to spend your real ammo shooting air while these tricksters dance around and gnaw your legs off, so you spam GLOO gun pellets all over the place. GLOO charges are wide (so you can hit the foe easily) and cheap (so you can hold that fire button down without too much guilt) which makes them ideal for small tricky foes. (Although you can totally use them on larger foes if you like.)
On the other hand, GLOO charges don’t directly deal damage. As the name implies, they just slow the enemy down. Slowed foes take more damage, so GLOOing them to the floor is a good way to make your real bullets last longer.
This is a really smart way of handling things in a game about resource management. As the player gets low on bullets, they’ll use the cheap GLOO charges more and more to save bullets. If the player manages to get a nice stockpile of bullets, they’ll naturally skip the GLOO gun stage and jump directly to shotgunning enemies in the face.
Resource management games have two dire failure modes:
- I don’t have any bullets left and I don’t have a way to get more. I am screwed.
- I have too many bullets and I no longer need to worry about efficiency. I am bored.
A tool like the GLOO gun ends up acting as a cushion to help keep the player away from these two states. GLOO naturally allows your bullets to last longer when you’re low, and if you’ve got a lot then you’ll probably burn through them a little faster, eventually returning you to a situation where you need to worry about conservation.
If the player gets really low (which is arguably where you are at the very start of the game) they can even use GLOO to lock down enemies and then finish them off with the wrench.
This is brilliant game design.
But Wait, There’s More!
On top of this, the GLOO gun is also our key to this entire set of mechanics for getting around. You can use GLOO to put out fires, stop arcing electrical boxes, and even use the stuff to build climbable structures to allow you access to high places.
It’s true that the GLOO gun is a bit janky. In the early days of Prey speedrunning, a lot of skips involved using GLOO to break the game in various ways, allowing the player to go out of bounds and skip huge parts of the game.
But who cares? The GLOO gun is a masterwork of game design, and if that means the speedrunners can clip through walls and turn the game into a farce?
Well, that’s fun to watch too.
Footnotes:
[1] I don’t want to be charitable.
[2] Did I say “puzzles”? I meant “puzzle”, singular. You use it to solve a see-saw puzzle every three or four levels.
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And here’s where the game’s balance issues rear their ugly head again. I really liked the Gloo Gun and, on paper, it should work exactly like you say. But then at some point on the game you get so powerful and ammo is so plentiful (seeing how you can craft it and all) that the Gloo Gun becomes practically pointless for combat purposes (almost, since it’s a good and easy way to get rid of nests and cystoids). And it’d be fine if that point was near the end of the game, but it happened to me halfway through. I suppose if you don’t spend as much time as I do exploring every nook and cranny you won’t end up with such an excess of resources. I know I shouldn’t be blaming the game for rewarding exploration so much, but it does go a bit overboard with it.
That being said, the GG never stopped being a fascinatingly useful tool. If you unlock the movement neuromods and make good use of the gun there is no place in the game that’s unreachable. I’m sure I reached a bunch of areas long before the game expected me to (I most certainly got access to neuromod crafting much earlier than the game intended). I’m not interested in speedrunning, though, so skipping parts of the game is something I never even considered.
I’m so glad to hear I’m not the only one that ran into balancing issues with the game. In the initial third or so of the game, I found Medium to be perfectly challenging, with some great tension resulting from enemy toughness and resource scarcity combined with my hacking- and mechanic-oriented upgrade path. But from about the halfway point, I started periodically switching to, and eventually settling on, Hard — and I was still only breaking a very comfortable sweat. The game’s economy plays a big role in this, to the point where I had to arbitrarily limit my ammunition capacity to one inventory slot’s worth per gun to maintain some semblance of balance. When I get around to replaying the game, I’m definitely starting at Hard and moving up to Ultra-Violence, or whatever it’s called, as the game progresses.
If you’ve already beaten the game it’s worth considering just starting on Nightmare. The only real difference is damage taken and dealt and you probably already know a lot of tricks for avoiding combat/damage anyway.
That’s why I like to play Prey with balance mods that fix this issue without changing the overall difficulty too much (unless you want that). I recommend this: https://rosodudemods.wordpress.com/prey/
By changing the game difficulty mid game you’re creating a lot of the balance issue. The game is balanced around people playing at constant difficulty, by starting on an easier difficulty you get a surplus of resource which makes later level easier. So when you switch to hard later in the game you’re playing hard but with the resource of medium.
That being said the game is pretty easy, I did a run at highest difficulty with all the survival option on and it’s really not that hard. Actually I’d say the gloo gun is one of the main reason for that. Gloo+wrench is a perfectly good way to kill everything except for floating enemy and nightmare and gloo ammo is plentiful and easy to craft. So I always played with a massive surplus of ammo for real gun.
That’s fair. Maybe it would have been different if I’d started on Hard or Nightmare from the get-go. However, I still think the developers fundamentally stuffed up the difficulty curve, which should ideally pose a greater challenge as the stakes ramp up and the player’s skills and resources increase — not the other way around. Even in the first 50% or so of the game that I stuck with Medium without any difficulty changes, the game only became progressively easier. It just seems a little incongruous that the Typhon are at their most threatening at the start of the game. Admittedly, difficulty is a notoriously tricky thing to get right.
I’ve always played on Nightmare (I like to bump the difficulty up on immersive sims to try to force me to be more creative with all the tools) and every single resource and difficulty curve problem you experienced on normal or hard absolutely still happens, it even still happens roughly at the same TIME as lower difficulties too strangely enough. Usually the first entrance into the Arboretum, from my first ever playthrough to my recent ones, is when the medkit/neuromod/ammo crunch starts to alleviate itself in a major way. It might be because that is the first time you -really- have some non-linearity to the exploration. You’ve got the Arboretum, the elevator back down to the Lobby (where new places are now accessible with your powers and equipment obtained since the last visit), Crew Quarters and Bridge all stuffed with loot but the enemies are still Phantoms and Mimics, with larger Typhon being non-respawning setpieces. It’s a massive influx of resources with not much drain.
Wild. This describes my exact experience and gets down to the crux of the issue. I remember wondering why the Typhon encounters were so few and far between (and even then, mostly only comprising two or three enemies), while continuously accruing resources. It’s strange, because other than making sure I visited every room per level, I wasn’t actively trying to min-max the game.
Disagree. If changing the difficulty setting midgame won’t change the difficulty, it shouldn’t be an option.
The issue with higher difficulties in Prey is that while it tweaks the lethality of enemies, a solution that works on Easy basically works exactly the same as on a Nightmare run. Careless players will certainly be punished, but a competent player who’s already figured out how to deal with the different Typhon and navigate the environment has pretty much already figured out the “puzzle”.
At least that’s the conclusion I came to going from Normal to Hard, even including all the Survival options. I have yet to do a Nightmare run, and I probably will settle on that being my default difficulty for various Achievement runs. I can only assume it’s tweaking other variables for resources, but have yet to confirm. But, of course, a clever player can already figure out ways to game that system, and this is a game that allows you to max out all of your skill tree in a single run if you care to do so.
AFAIK Nightmare only changes health/damage.stealth variables and doesn’t at all impact loot tables. However you’re absolutely correct that once you’ve ‘solved’ an enemy, it’s equally as easy across all difficulties. Throwing Nullwave grenades at telepaths or sticking a Mimic with GLOO is always a dominant strategy. All that changes on Nightmare is (in the early-midgame at least) you really -can’t- just throw yourself at a Typhon while emptying your shotgun, you need to do at least -some- prep work through gadgets, environment or stealth.
Yep I also had too much ammo. But this just happens to everybody who plays these games diligently, as they are not balanced for the peak optimizing player, but the average guy.
I never used the gloo gun for direct combat much at all, due to the fact that your first couple hits on a glood enemy chip the gloo off, so you’re right back to fighting them as normal immediately anyway. Not worth the extra complexity.
In fact I’m not sure how people are killing things with gloo wrench, as with a lot of enemies that would take multiple rounds of repeated glooing, hitting, then glooing again. Even with ones that can be killed in one round of that, the ol’ vanilla circle strafe is still faster and more efficient.
I found it useful for incapacitating operators so I could approach and hack them, and for crowd control (glooing down multiple enemies so they can’t dogpile you while you fight them one at a time), and for “painting” poltergeists so they couldn’t hide. But using it to stun-lock opponents so I could kill them easily wasn’t a viable thing.
As a traversal/exploration tool, it’s great in theory, but in practice it’s hampered by collision errors, and an inability to attach one gloo blob to another. This doesn’t prevent it from being useful, but it does make it needlessly fiddly or tedious sometimes. Like, all it needed was the ability for gloo blobs to overlap slightly (particularly on/in corners) and to stack even just 1.5 blobs deep (not expecting to Minecraft structures out of it, just would’ve been good if what I can build wasn’t forced to be so extremely “first person platforming sucks” half the time).
Worst illustration of the gloo gun’s shortcomings was the broken service elevator in the main reactor room. There’s a passageway at the very top with some datalogs and stuff in it, but the only way to get there is to use the gloo gun to construct a 3-story spiral staircase around the walls of the shaft with the gloo gun. And instead of being challenging in an interesting way, it’s just the very distilled essence of bad 1st person platforming due to the gloo gun’s inability to put blobs in/on corners or fill gaps.
And I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t hate 1st person platforming, and enjoys it when it’s done right. So I feel like this is saying something if I’m citing “1st person platforming sucks”.
If you shoot multiple gloo bullet at an enemy they eventually become paralyze. Walk up to then and hit with max charge wrench hit and you’ll take out 2/3 their health (1 shoot mimic) and push them back/down, gloo again and another wrench hit and they die.
Yah. And it’s still significantly slower and fiddlier than just ordinary circle strafing.
I’m not questioning that it can be done in a binary sense (bad phrasing on my part, now that I look at my OP), I’m just not sure what if any benefit there is. Seems like more of something you’d do for the novelty than for practical reasons.
About the time to go to the moon, New Horizon made the journey in 8H and 35 minutes, although it didn’t slow down to land there. Still, seems plausible to go there in a few hours
Also, space elevator. Suicide burns (full acceleration halfway, then flip and full decelerate for the second half) are far more reasonable when you can start in orbit with a full tank and a free gravity assist; having something to push off of in space is easy mode. Even if you can’t refuel from the station before blowing it up, you could take a longer more fuel-efficient path home once the time-critical part of the mission is over.
I haven’t done the math on this, but it passes my intuition. A lot of launch delta-v is spent fighting the atmosphere.
Of course, the more you bring up this explanation, the more you raise the question of why no Typhon have walked to Earth from the bit floating outside the atmosphere. I suppose they are still rare enough that regular deliveries haven’t tripped this same apocalypse switch, and even the containment breach is from inside the station, not a new entry from outside.
The cargo pod system could be taken to suggest that supply runs just lob or drop off containers on an intercept orbit with the station, and the only time shuttles dock or leave is for personnel transfer. ‘Course they’d have to return cargo pods eventually as well. Given the recycler tech, though, they might legit not have to send any trash down, so physical stuff might just be important things that can wait for the security of a personnel shuttle, and they’re just tossing empty containers into a safe retrieval orbit (or even recycling some of them for materials). Mimics need stuff to mimic, and an empty container offers only the container itself.
It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that there wouldn’t be need for crew to cycle on and off the station that often… but we don’t know how often the supply of “volunteers” needs refreshing.
And as we saw, there is smuggling going on on the station, and there’s also the whisleblower who was planning on riding one of those cargo containers down “Moon is a Harsh Mistress” style. Despite all the focus on saving survivors, I got the strong impression pretty early on that this was ramping up to a tragic reveal: that the barn door had been open for a long time and the horse had already left well before Morgan woke up.
Definite misunderstanding from at least one of us. I read this as ‘since Earth’s orbital space is full of Typhon (remember the first man to orbit was boarded and eaten by the buggers), why haven’t they boarded the space elevator and shimmied down it since that gets them on the planet full of food without burning through the atmosphere.’
Of course, since the elevator was designed and built long after certain people were aware of the Typhon, one would assume some sort of (apparently effective) countermeasure is in place.
I seem to have it in my head that Dahl has some private station hidden away and that’s where he came from at the beginning of the game. But then I realized that I only came to that conclusion by implication and we all know by now that with things being dropped out of order and secondhand it’s actually easy to accidentally connect dots that aren’t there, so maybe that was just my personal headcanon.
I do think Mooncrash explicitly implies that the escape pods can make it to earth, but I’m not sure I fully consider Mooncrash canon (as I can’t even entirely make sense of the timeline)
I’m pretty sure there’s logs somewhere that point out there’s something well (but apparently not perfectly) hidden that someone couldn’t identify lurking nearby- first reaction would be some sort of hidden spy base, but then later you realize it could just be Dahl’s ship.
The Gloo Gun has something in common with the gun from Portal – it can take a bit of time to fully realise just how versatile it is. Many’s the time in Prey that I was staring at a locked door, hunting for a keycard, looking for another route – only to suddenly slap my head and say ‘Wait, what am I doing? I can just use Gloo to get over that / in there!’.
It’s not quite as mind-bending, but stil it’s a similar feeling to when you in Portal you first realised something like ‘Wait, I can relocate the second portal while in midair, and then that’ll mean that I – holy shit!”
It might be partly my fault, with my ingrained gaming instincts: I see a locked door, I immediately assume that I’m going to need the keycard, and that keycard’s probably from the other side of the area. Guarded by a dragon.
I don’t expect to be able to just climb up the wall and avoid the dragon altogether.
Also: Anyone else find themselves being very conscientious with the Gloo Gun? Everywhere I went I was patching up leaky pipes, blocking off holes, marking areas etc.
Yes, the thing is very versatile. It also allows you to set traps that actually stay in place if you leave, unlike the towers. Not to mention hide you from view of the enemies if you use it properly. Also, they’re a good way to undo some destruction that you cause that might make things otherwise harder for you. Say, you shoot some pipes and now there’s fire everywhere, impeding your advance. Well, just plug those leaks and put some gloo on the spread fire and you’re golden. Maybe you destroyed some furniture with a recycler charge. Well, you can use the GG to make your own surfaces to climb.
I did plug any pipes that were leaking even if they didn’t direcly bother me, but it never occur to me to use the gun to mark areas.
Particularly when all the energized typhon attack you with explosions, so if you’re within a mile of a pipe and they get an attack in there *will* be leaking pipes.
I’d be interested to see what a current-patch run of Prey would look like, with the Gloo Gun and Recycler (presumably) being fixed
Would the joke crossbow classify as a ‘novelty gun’? It’s technically not much of a gun (I think you can only really use it on Crystoids and Nests), but it has its uses on exploration (opening doors) and regular combat by providing distractions, I guess
It somehow actually took me a long time to realize I could just hold the fire button on the Gloo Gun. Mimics were giving me a lot more trouble because I kept missing them trying to fire at them deliberately
I don’t think so. I never found the toy crossbow to be really useful in any way. At least, I found that anything it could do, something else I already had could do better, without taking up more inventory space.
Need a distraction? Throw some random debris, or set up a gun turret.
Cystoids? Again, random debris (if you’re in zero-g) or the good old Gloo Gun.
Hard-to-reach places? If Gloo, Recycler Charges and the Typhon ability to become a small object and roll throught tiny gaps can’t get you there, a foam dart isn’t going to do it either.
I’d be interested if anyone DID find a situation where the dart gun was genuinely useful…
(Not that it wasn’t good for worldbuilding. Secret emails with the blueprints, followed by sterner emails from senior staff complaining about people wasting resources and time. A secret cache in the rafters where one of the engineers was playing an assassin game.
And the DM of the gaming group has one by her DM screen, which was great.)
The crossbow gets much more useful in challenge runs with some or all neuromod abilities disallowed. In particular the ability to shoot doors open can get around a lack of Hacking or Mimic Matter in a lot of places.
I got a bit of use out of the crossbow.
I used it to open several doors remotely, as it works both on door open buttons and computer screens. I used it on cystoids, as they suicide on it then you can pick it back up after!
It does have the most narrow use of all the stuff in the game though.
I’ll note I didn’t take any typhon powers in that playthrough, so if I had I could probably have morphed to get into the spaces I used the crossbow for.
You make a good point about unitaskers. At their worst, Metroidvanias suffer a lot from this, giving you abilities and tools that are supposed to be exciting, but are really just thinly disguised keycards (for which you encountered the doors several hours and dozens of screens ago, I hope you’ve been taking notes!)
(At their slightly better, the unitasker isn’t truly a unitasker, expanding your combat or mobility options in a way that is either fun or multivariately useful.)
The earliest point where physics engines and unitaskers meet is probably the original Red Faction, which was hyped to hell on its terrain destruction/deformation during development, only to wind up restricted to Designated Fun Bedrock due to what I assume were a combination of technical and game design constraints. Red Faction: Guerilla would later make good on the promise of the original (kind of).
And then having come 90% of the way to a great game, they promptly abandoned the idea and wasted the technology.
I think Metroid shoots itself in the foot quite a bit with its later upgrades: the basic missile/beam doors conceit works fine- it’s really, really weird that the doors are literally designed so that a series of weapon systems are in fact the actual keys, but it does save thought-space, making it very easy to remember what “keys” you have.
The problem is the power bomb. It *looks* like it’s supposed to be some sort of uber rare/low ammo screen clearing nuke. But by the time you get it, you’ve been passing doors for hours and hours that want this uber weapon as their key. As a low-ammo (3 base) screen clear it’s a weapon of rare use, and you need to save the ammo to bust through doors anyway. So you’re going to use it a dozen times to open doors and for fighting bosses that explicitly require it, and that’s it. Maybe in the original games it appeared in it was more of a weapon (I’ve only seriously played the Prime games), but it’s never felt to me like anything more than an obnoxious key flaunting the problem in the system. A ridiculous flashy mega-bomb that you have to switch to tunnely-explory mode to activate in order to destroy tiny little grate covers while leaving the entirely mundane steel and stone in the rest of the room untouched. The power bomb is dumb.
Seconded
I’ve played Super Metroid half a dozen times, and seldom use it for anything other than opening doors. There’s just not a lot of need to clear the screen of trash enemies. You can use it in several of the secret combos, but they’re all superfluous too, mostly “that’s neat”, as opposed to being that helpful.
it’s fun to use and you’re overthinking it
In Metroid Dread, the stuff that is not the Power Bomb fits Shamus’ positive description of Not-An-Unitasker (even the Grapple Beam can help in combat against certain foes). Every weapon you pick up ALSO opens a door type and/or helps you explore. The non-weapon upgrades are even better in this regard – the Flash Step, the Cloak, and the Varia Suit all have multiple uses.
I remember being annoyed about Wolfenstein’s LaserKraftWerk because recharging it meant staring at a recharge station for 10 seconds while holding down a button. Way to ruin flow. At one point you have to repeatedly do this I. The middle of a boss fight. Grr.
Typo:
As to the return DV from the Earth-Moon L2 point, you have been betrayed by your KSP experience! Once you are at a Lagrange point, it takes very little energy to go pretty much anywhere in the solar system (assuming you don’t particularly mind how long it takes). This may explain how the Typhon get around despite not having apparent propulsion technology. Because KSP uses a Sphere of Influence system to circumvent the Three Body Problem, it doesn’t exhibit this orbital corner case.
The Interplanetary Transport Network is sloooow, though, which means that while it might work for the Typhon, it’s terrible for an escape pod, since the crew will be adrift for so long that you may as well stay put and wait for rescue. More likely it has just enough delta-V for a transfer orbit from the Moon to Earth orbit, where it can be picked up by the space elevator easily.
According to a table I found online, L2 to GEO is 1,470 m/s of delta-V, which is not that much – the Apollo lunar lander carried 2,220 m/s in its ascent stage, and 2,500 in its descent stage, and it’s sort of escape-pod-sized.
Fun fact: you can skip Dahl more or less entirely. Even by accident.
That more or less what I though of the gravity gun, mostly because I wasn’t finding enough projectiles that could kill enemies, so I was using my firearms instead. And I honestly disliked the big “DESIGNATED FUN ZONE” of Ravenholm, it felt like a chore, with the same mechanic repeated across a long level with piles upon piles of boring enemies to fight.
Yeah, I also never got the worry about “oh no the speedrunners can glitch through walls”. That’s fine. 99% of your players *aren’t* speedrunners, and if you’re really worried about the fun of speedrunners, this isn’t the part to look at, because they’ll self-regulate if a certain exploit makes the runs boring by making a “no-[exploit]” category.
And the GLOO gun was so incredibly fun. The amount of time I spent just trying to get places I wasn’t supposed to go! Still kinda disappointed that the top of the lobby isn’t an interesting secret, I really expected it to be.
I suspect a bigger worry for game developers is that some players will accidentally glitch through walls and get stuck.
From the viewpoint of a programmer, this is a bug that ought to be fixed, but is almost impossible to fix, or even to reproduce consistently.
Yeah, if Talos-1 was directly at the L2 point of the Earth-Moon system you wouldn’t be able to see the Earth at all (because it’d be behind the Moon), so orbiting near/around it makes sense. The L1, L2, and L3 points aren’t long term stable, so you’d have to expend some thrust to stay at them anyway. For communication with Earth there’s a good chance they’re using Moon-orbiting satellites as a relay, though, even if they can see the Earth.
Also, regarding escape pod numbers: how many beds were we missing from earlier, again? Maybe the majority of the crew just bunks in the escape pods normally.
I hate wasting ammo and making messes, so I rarely used the Gloo Gun in combat. You’ve gotta gotta spray continuous for it to work, which means that ammo counter goes down super fast compared to what little you need for exploration- and then all the missed shots splatter on the floor and walls where they get in your way after the fight (which you then have to remove with your wrench, which has a stamina meter, making the cleanup worse than the fight itself). And for all of that you can mildly inconvenience an enemy, causing a small increase in damage which never seemed to make the difference to me (oh look instead of half health they’re at 1/4, I wasted how much gloo to save one bullet?). I found it more effective to just get close and use a better gun. But of course, past the beginning I was never worrying about ammo either.
At least on Normal difficulty, a gloo’d Mimic is instantly killed by a (unupgraded)) wrench hit, making it pretty efficient for killing them. It may use up a bit of gloo ammo, but it avoids you taking any damage, and I used much more pistol ammo trying to hit the blessed things because I’m such a bad shot.
Obviously if you’re skilled I’m sure you can kill Mimics with nothing but the wrench, but I’m not skilled :-)
I love the gloo gun. And it’s embarrassing how many times I forgot I could create “stairs” wherever I wanted to!
Avoids you taking any damage, assuming you manage to gloo the mimic without taking any damage. Which if you can’t hit with another gun, well I didn’t find the glood really any better for hitting. When I say get up close with a better gun that’s code for “point blank shotgun when they stop moving”. I don’t know if I started on Hard but I probably went there pretty quick.
I want to like the gloo gun, I just don’t find it nearly as good in combat as a lot of people do. It may beat pistol, but they practically lead you by the nose to the shotgun. And if you’re doing human upgrades and use the psychoscope you can usually one-shot mimics before they even attack even with the pistol.
Ah well to each their own. I felt like the shotgun was overkill for Mimics and always saved that ammo for Phantoms, and the gloo gun worked pretty well for me.
As you say, it does have the annoying side effect of leaving lots of gloo that you then have to break or jump over.
Side note, trying to get back into Prey, but I got it through GOG, and now I’m having a hell of a time trying to get it to run in Windows 11 ARM on an M1 iMac. CryEngine is not my friend today.
Finally got it running, turns out it was the GOG overlay that was crashing. CryEngine still complains… but it does run, so virtualization works!
The LaserKraftWerk was such a missed opportunity. The ability to cut dick shapes out of Nazi banners and monuments would have been welcome.
IIRC to get back to Earth from the Lagrange point you only need enough delta-V to scoot toward the Moon enough to use it for a gravity assist by entering its gravity well and just BARELY miss hitting it. You can orbit the Moon once and use it as a slingshot to catapult you to earth.
Granted, this would require some fairly detailed ballistic calculations, but the amount of FUEL you’d need would be very small. And considering that these kinds of ballistic calculations were done in the 60’s on computers less powerful than a modern smartphone, even the math wouldn’t be too hard to accomplish.
Isn’t that what the Apollo 13 crew had to do when everything went tits up and they couldn’t actually land on the Moon?
There is also that sidequest about departed shuttle in Bridge that shows he indeed realized that threat and offers you the same choice. Kinda.
This quest, I believe, suffers from Bridge being an optional area right until the endgame run when you don’t have time to think it over.
The thing with delta-v is that it is often very unintuitive. For example, reaching orbit Earth orbit from the ground is so insanely expensive that once you have done that, you are already halfway to any other place in the solar system in terms of delta-v budget (with the exception of the sun, which ironically enough is more expensive to plunge something into that to send it on an interstellar journey).
So I wouldn’t be surprised if someone at Arcane did the math and it turned out that you acually can reach a viable return trajectory from L2 with very small amounts of fuel.
Fun fact: the early moon missions utilized what is called a free return trajectory – essentially a trajectory that sends the craft to the moon, all the way around it, and back to Earth without further expending any fuel. It needs to accelerate near the moon to leave that trajectory and enter a moon orbit or land on it. If something goes wrong (for example with the engine) then it could just coast to the moon and back.
Speaking of Gloo:
The Arkham games were published in the order Asylum, City, Origins, and Knight. The chronological order is Origins, Asylum, City, Knight. In City, you get useful Freeze grenades based off of Mr. Freeze’s tech.
In Origins, you get Glue Grenades that do…[i]exactly[/i] the same things. They make platforms in water for traversal and block steam vents, which are not noted properties of glue.
How did they fix the continuity issue? According to a line in one of the DLCs, the chemical compound turned out to be unstable and turned to dust the day after the end of the main game, which made them impractical unless Batman wanted to make a batch every single night.
I keep thinking of Prey’s GLOO Gun as, thematically, an ice gun. Slows enemies, effectively makes “crystals” to stand on. Of course, some of the other functions don’t apply, like fixing electrical shorts.
The first Novelity Gun I encountered are the bombs in Zelda: Links Awaikening on Game Boy. They could be used as a weapon, a can opener and had to be used for some puzzles in the game. Like activate this switch in 4 seconds while rush towards the other one.
The first Novelity Gun I thought of is the bow in Thief. Sniping or distract guards, blow out torches, put moss on noisy ground, traverse with rope arrows. It had different ammunition for different tasks, but the bow was all the rage back then.
Can I just say how pleased I am that the “unitasker” link was EXACTLY what I hoped it would be?
My patience was indeed rewarded.
I am so glad someone got it. :)