<\/div>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.<\/span> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Either that or everyone on the station is bad at math.<\/p>\n 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<\/b> repair or maintain the escape pods. But I never found a rationale behind the order, and the wiki<\/a> doesn’t seem to have anything to say about it either.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n According to the wiki<\/a>, 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/i> style magical propulsion.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> to get back to Earth.<\/p>\n Dahl arrived in a craft that looks a lot like those from the Space Shuttle Program<\/a>. If Morgan were to do him a murder, then there would be nobody to pilot the ship.\u00a0If 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Thanks for the ride, dipshit!<\/i><\/p>\n Anyway, by murder or trickery, you eventually get Dahl out of your way.<\/p>\n 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…<\/p>\n To be clear, when I say “novelty gun”, I don’t just mean weird weapons like the BFG from DOOM<\/em> or the Shrink Ray from Duke Nukem 3D<\/em>. I’m talking about weapons that act more like tools, being useful both in and out of combat. <\/p>\n 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<\/i>. 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.<\/span> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n A much less appealing novelty gun is the one from the recent Wolfenstein games. Consider the Laser Kraft Werk gun<\/a> from Wolfenstein: The New Order<\/i>. 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<\/i>. That would be super hard and create tons of design problems.\u00a0The problem is that the LKW ends up being a… <\/p>\nFly Me From the Moon<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Getting Home<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Novelty Guns<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Unitasker<\/h3>\n
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