Like I said above, there are 250 regular crew members stationed on Talos-1. Morgan has similar space, PLUS the whole simulation wing was dedicated to housing her for the past N months. On top of this, he has an 'office', which is basically a house at the top of the arboretum. So let’s talk about the sleeping arrangements on Talos-1. This extra care and attention spoils me, so that when Prey falls back into standard videogame level design it can feel sort of childish. Most games don’t bother to realize their worlds with so much attention to detail. A lot of thought went into the history, construction, layout, and usage of Talos-1. This is common in videogames and the only reason I’m making a big deal about it is because Prey is otherwise meticulously constructed. They know how big stuff ought to be, but they also know that holding down the W key for an hour is a dull and cramp-inducing way to spend your time. We’re used to this sort of thing and we recognize it as a compromise in the name of fun. Games with a visible day / night cycle often run at some absurdly accelerated speed, so that a minute of playing is worth an hour or two of in-game daylight. When the game designer is done bending space to make their tiny world feel big, they turn around and bend time as well. We make cities feel big by using construction styles and materials that are typically only used in densely populated areas, regardless of the actual size and density of the place. We leave lots of open spaces between buildings to make spaces easier to render, even though most cities are pretty dense. We compress wilderness distances so the world feels full and different activities are only thirty seconds apart. We exaggerate the number of bad guys so we have lots of dudes to fight. Everyone in town lives off of the same three-acre farm, which is within shouting distance of a bandit cave so populous that it rivals the civilian population of Whiterun. Half the population is comprised of town guards who have no names or families or places to live. The city of Whiterun is supposedly this ultra-important location, but the total population would fit on a typical city bus without anyone needing to stand. You can jog across the entire continent of Skyrim in under 15 minutes. We’re used to games that play fast-and-loose with size and distance. Imagine the effort that went into coming up with all of those people and their stories, making sure everyone is accounted for, that all of the bodies look like who they’re supposed to, and that there aren’t any duplicates. This guy did a half-assed job of repairing something with improvised parts and then was kinda flippant when his boss called him on it.Ī lot of work went into this! According to this achievement guide, there are 250 crew members stationed on Talos-1. This guy was blackmailing this woman over smuggled goods. These five people are playing the D&D-esque Fatal Fortress. On top of all of this, you can learn about all of the countless little interpersonal dramas that were interrupted by the Typhon containment breach. We’ll talk about the survivors later in this series.) (Or in exceptionally rare cases, you might find them alive. You can then pick someone at random, have the computer locate them for you, and follow the waypoint marker to their swiftly cooling cadaver. You can walk up to any security computer and see a huge list of the crew. If they left any audiologs, then in addition to a dead body they’ll also have a portrait and a voice. If they have a desk job, then somewhere in the world you’ll be able to find their workstation with their email history. Although the entire crew has an unusual affinity for carrying around fresh fruit in the pockets of their jumpsuits. They’ll even have inventory items that make sense based on their job. These people have stories and you can work out which people got ambushed while sneaking around in the dark and which people died in groups behind makeshift barricades. The bodies aren’t scattered around at random like office clutter. Every corpse is a named character with a defined appearance, an assigned job, and a uniform that matches their duty station. But here in Prey, everyone is accounted for. In the days of System Shock and BioShock, the level designer just scattered corpses around and called it a day.
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