What I'd like to see.
Better combat. The combat in Prey was mind-numbingly easy, predictable and overall very weak. No encounter felt challenging, and no gun felt visceral. FEAR is a great example of combat done right. It's just done right. Dust blooms, blood sprays, you can hear the brass hit the floor, the ragdolls look painful, the sounds are perfect, the enemies act and react fairly realistically. In Prey? Enemies refuse to shoot at you unless you stand still for quite a while, their movements are predictable, you never fight more than 3 or 4 guys, no gun feels real, the environment doesn't show any signs that you were there. It's just plain lackluster.
Difficulty levels. I know 3DR has a huge hardon for dynamic difficulty (
http://dukenukem.typepad.com/game_ma...justing_g.html ), but it really doesn't work. Prey was never challenging. It was more of a chore going through each battle rather than an experience. I like being challenged from the first encounter. In FEAR, playing on Extreme was quite a shocker in my first encounter. After that encounter, each successive encounter was even more adrenaline inducing. Quake4's General setting is also a fair bit of a challenge as well. Prey never once challenged me, even when I wasn't abusing deathwalk. There are no encounters in which you are seriously challenged. It's like the game was consolified badly. Enemies stand still or move very slightly left to right. They have terrible aim and you never encounter more than 3 or 4 guys at a time. Dynamic Difficulty either is broken in Prey, or is completely unnoticiable in a bad way. I usually killed most enemies before they even got a shot off. And whatever shots they did fire were horribly off the mark.
Better sounds. Most of the sounds in Prey were terribly generic. HL2 is a great example of a game that got the sounds right. Everything in that game just sounds right. Prey just has generic, forgetable sounds. You can't really recall what any of the enemies/guns sound like in Prey, but in HL2 and even HL1, you can easily recall what they sound like. Likewise, the ambient sound suffered in Prey. It was just not noticiable, in a bad way. HL2's ambient sounds were great for adding atmosphere and overall polish. Prey just didn't have that level of polish that all triple A titles should strive for.
No Deathwalk option. Deathwalk is absurdly stupid. Make it an option for players like me. I found it easier to take a header off a cliff than backtrack for that health spore I saved. Once I realized there was zero penalty for deathwalk, all the incentive to play "normal" vanished. The last few levels were a chore.
Improvements to story telling. There were like 5 or 6 levels in which the player had zero goals. It was right after you gain the spiritwalk abilities. You simply wander around the sphere randomly, without a real set goal. Your goal becomes apparent only after Enisi tells you to seek out the Hidden. Overall, I thought the story telling was weak and contrived. You could see Jen's transformation a mile away. The plot was not told in a very satisfying manner. The invasion of the Ancients appeared out of no where, with zero explanation and the player is left wondering WTF, where'd that come from.
More Enisis. Best Voice Actor Ever.
Longer game. I beat Prey in under 6 hours (5:47). That's simply unacceptable for a full price game. HL2:Ep1 was around 4.5 hours, Sin:E was about 4 hours. But those games were less than half the price of Prey. If Prey 2 is the same length, it definitely needs to be priced at a lower premium. A full price shooter needs to be at least 8-12 hours in length. 12 hours is probably the sweet spot in terms of content and getting bang for your buck. 3DR lamblasts the episode model, then puts out a game that is scarely longer than it. What's the logic in that?
Digital Distribution with Steam or not at all. It's simply not possible to do digital distribution outside of Steam. Many people, including me, won't even consider it now, especially with the demise of Triton.