Deathwalk fans

[Telee]

I still quicksaved/quickloaded out of habit. The only times I used deathwalk were in bosses.

I really liked deathwalk though, I hope they keep it in Prey 2/Prey Expansion

[Zegraphoob]

Originally Posted by FireFly

Why? Length isn't a direct factor in difficulty.

I was pointing out that players who are looking for a challenging and satisfying game, both in difficulty and length, don't like how developers make the game overly fair and easy for all audiences even on the hard difficulty level. If they exaggerate even more with their "games are made to be beaten", having a game of an hour assures everyone playing seriously will beat it.

Originally Posted by FireFly

Games are made to be beaten, and developers do design their titles around that dictum. That's why Valve wanted to make sure Gabe's grandfather (who'd never played a game before) could complete Half-Life 2!

And why didn't they make sure people who already have some experience could find a challenge in Half-Life 2?
That a wider variety of gamers are able to beat it is pretty useless to me.

[Tommy]

poeple you do realize this forum is for deathwalk fans right? Foxy if you hate deathwalk that much write your own forum about how much it sucks.

[0marTheZealot]

Deathwalk sucks because it doesn't force players to do anything different nor play better. A monkey could beat Prey and there's something very wrong with that.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by Zegraphoob

I was pointing out that players who are looking for a challenging and satisfying game, both in difficulty and length, don't like how developers make the game overly fair and easy for all audiences even on the hard difficulty level.

A title can abide by the 'games are meant to be beaten' principle, and still offer a challenging experience to all players. If you want an interesting example, consider Sin: Episodes, which automatically scales its difficulty to the player and offers a customisable level of challenge.

If they exaggerate even more with their "games are made to be beaten", having a game of an hour assures everyone playing seriously will beat it.

Well, that doesn't happen, and games are short because of content production timescales, not because developers use length as a difficulty balancing mechanism.

And why didn't they make sure people who already have some experience could find a challenge in Half-Life 2?
That a wider variety of gamers are able to beat it is pretty useless to me.

They did cater to gamers who already had some experience in an FPS, however yes, they didn't necessarily cater for very experienced FPS players. I would agree with you that the game would have benefited from an extra difficulty level.

[Foxy]

And that's exactly why you can't compare 'intrinsic challenge'. The concept is meaningless. Every user will experience a different amount of challenge, every user will have their own unique playstyle and every user will find different parts challenging for different reasons. Saying "it makes comparison easier" isn't an argument against its relevance. You can't just dismiss something because you don't want to deal with it.

Right, I'll illustrate why it isn't relevant:

Thief is the hardest game ever. If I waste one arrow, I've lost and have to restart the mission.
Serious Sam is the easiest game ever. All I had to do to win was to kill the first monster.

See how dumn it is to consider user-based objectives? A game is supposed to have fixed win/lose conditions, and provide a set challenge throughout play, period.

Deathwalk sucks because it doesn't force players to do anything different nor play better. A monkey could beat Prey and there's something very wrong with that.

Very well said.

poeple you do realize this forum is for deathwalk fans right? Foxy if you hate deathwalk that much write your own forum about how much it sucks.

So, you want a topic consisting entirely of people saying how much Deathwalk rules, and anyone who doesn't agree should just shut up? What's the point in that?

And I don't hate Deathwalk, I just don't like the way it made combat and combat skill utterly irrelevant.


I've addressed everything else, so I'll put this forward:

In Prey, you cannot die. You cannot lose. If you cannot lose, how can you consider yourself to have won?

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by Foxy

Right, I'll illustrate why it isn't relevant:

Thief is the hardest game ever. If I waste one arrow, I've lost and have to restart the mission.
Serious Sam is the easiest game ever. All I had to do to win was to kill the first monster.

It's neither. Easy or hard are subjective assessments based on the users own experiences. What may be challenging for one person may be easy for another. And at every level, players set their own objectives - subconciously or consciously - that's what their playstyle is.

You're clinging to the idea that challenge is a fixed constant, that you should judge difficulty in a vacuum, without considering how players actually react to the game.

What I'm saying is that how users react to a game is the judge of its success. So when asking "what challenge Prey does provide?", you have to ask "what challenge are users getting out of the game?", and you have to ask them, you have to watch them play, you to have to look at what objectives they're setting themselves and how they're being affected by deathwalk. There is no simple judge of challenge - it's messy, it's dirty, and it involves coming to a value judgement about how the challenges you're adding affect players, after watching them play.

You can't just say "according to these principles, based on how users should play, our game is this challenging". It doesn't work, and if you base a product around what you've defined as the 'right way of doing things', without consulting its users, there's a very good chance it will fail.

[CameO73]

Yes, it is. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. No, it isn't.

Who are you guys trying to convince?

[Foxy]

The other guy. Duh!

[jizaboz]

Like one guy said, it's no different than loading a save game a million times. No reward for playing well? BS. The reward is not having to run around in a circle shooting mystic bats a million times.

[FireFly]

The difference is that save games don't change the nature of the challenge - you still have a limited amount of health, and a set challenge which you must complete with that health. With deathwalking on the other hand you have a theoretically infinite health pool, and everything you did before death is saved when you return.

Quicksaving allows you get the perfect playthrough, it accentuates your abilities as a player, but the challenge is still the same. With deathwalking on the other hand your in-game abilities are changed, you're immortal inside the game, rather than outside it.

[Foxy]

*blinks*

So you do get it?

[FireFly]

Just look at my first posts in this thread.

I don't understand why things have to be so black and white. I accept that Prey lacks a certain kind of challenge, but I also think users did get challenge of it, and that contributed to its success as a product.

[Foxy]

Right, so you have twigged on that it lacks challenge of the type that an FPS usually offers. So why did you spend the last umpteen replies pushing a hollow argument? Of course people were challenged by Prey ffs, that was never in question.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by Foxy

Right, so you have twigged on that it lacks challenge of the type that an FPS usually offers. So why did you spend the last umpteen replies pushing a hollow argument? Of course people were challenged by Prey ffs, that was never in question.

All I said initially:

"If you decide that you still don't want to die, then death still represents a failure of sorts, and there is still challenge."

From my third post:

"Counter to what? I'm saying that what matters is ultimately what players get out of the experience, and to assess the challenge Prey provides (to its customers as a whole) you'd have to look at how they're playing the game, what challenges they're setting themselves."

Next post:

I'm not saying Prey is necessarily challenging for you, but that it's challenging for other people, and that you have to look at how other people are playing the game - not just yourself, to assess the challenge gamers as a whole are getting out of it.

"Now whether there should have been set gameplay challenges is another issue entirely and I'm not debating that."

I clarified again:

"It removed the fixed developer set gameplay challenge. That doesn't mean players didn't get challenge out of the game."

And again:

And challenge is dependant on how people play the game. I'm arguing that people can be challenged by Prey, albeit in a more limited sense – is that so hard to understand?

Finally, I sum up my arguments:

1.) Players can have a challenging experience in Prey, if they decide they don't want to die.

2.) Therefore it's possible for most players to have a challenging experience, that most players had a challenging experience.

3.) Therefore it's possible that the game was successful because of player set objectives.


Now my argument is that because players can be challenged by Prey, the game's overall success as a product will be affected by player set challenge, so it's very relevant. And a game's success as a product is what defines its success overall, so what matters is what challenge players get of the game, not how difficult the game is according some arbitrary scale based on how the game should be played. That's a little bit more than just "players can be challenged by Prey", but obviously it requires that you accept that first, and I'm surprised that we've spent so many replies and still haven't moved forward on this issue, despite my repeated attempts at clarification.

[Foxy]

Now my argument is that because players can be challenged by Prey, the game's overall success as a product will be affected by player set challenge, so it's very relevant. And a game's success as a product is what defines its success overall, so what matters is what challenge players get of the game, not how difficult the game is according some arbitrary scale based on how the game should be played. That's a little bit more than just "players can be challenged by Prey", but obviously it requires that you accept that first, and I'm surprised that we've spent so many replies and still haven't moved forward on this issue, despite my repeated attempts at clarification.

If by clarification you mean 'bludgeoning me with the same argument until I give up out of sheer painful neuron frazzle', then yes you have clarified it quite frequently.

I'm simply saying that an FPS you should challenge your combat skills, and that there should be a built-in difficulty in beating the game. This measurable because it is enforced by the rules of the game. Once you gain this focus the abstract stuff about player experience becomes irrelevant. What you've said makes it impossible to compare the difficulty of any game to another just by a simple extension of logic.

It's like throwing up your hands and saying that because morals are defined by each individual person, there is no reason to question each other's morals. Now I'm aware that this is marked down as a philosophical theory, but simple logic tells you that this is useless thinking. Why? Extend it. It makes anything moral. It's dumn. To make any useful output from this you have to come to the realisation that, despite the inherent fuzziness in the subject, you CAN draw a line in the sand on the beach of ideas and firm things up around it. In this case, it's majority opinion. Most people think that pedophilia is sick, so it's generally accepted that this is so. That's as far as you can get without falling right over into the land time forgot: logic extends you into your doom.

Now with this question of difficulty, there is similar fuzziness. Everyone has a different experience, so extend logic and you fall off the world. It's impossible to compare difficulty simply by that means, because there's nothing to grasp. Oops. This is the substance of your argument: and it's meaningless! Yet everyone knows that some games are really hard, and others are easy. So, you reduce down. Majority opinion? Not helpful here really, it's split, so bin that. It's not useful in this case either, since it's just saying 'meh' and not producing any meaningful conclusion.

Luckily, with this subject there is is nice little fact that games have rules. Take a game of laser tag. Example: You are a lone wolf trying to get into a 'base'. You need to score one hit to 'kill' a defender. What happens if you make it into two hits? The difficulty increases. Independently of the individual player. Scale this up to a computer game, and you can see it is perfectly possible to compare difficulty in isolation from player experience. It's more complicated than the laser tag example, but it is possible.

Key thing to note: If you don't remove player experience, logic runs away and drags you over the edge of the earth.

In other words, game difficulty can be compared independently of player experience. In this case, it can be generally accepted that the Deathwalk mechanic in Prey made the game impossible to lose and removed any meaningful difficulty of combat and bosses. Thus, compared to other FPSs, Prey is fundamentally too easy.

And now I need some Coca-Cola.

[Zegraphoob]

Originally Posted by FireFly

A title can abide by the 'games are meant to be beaten' principle, and still offer a challenging experience to all players. If you want an interesting example, consider Sin: Episodes, which automatically scales its difficulty to the player and offers a customisable level of challenge.

Sounds nice, but I can see some irregularities with that. Some of them similar compared to my complaints of deathwalking.

Originally Posted by jizaboz

Like one guy said, it's no different than loading a save game a million times.

How is it not different? You have to restart from that savegame a million times then. With deathwalking, you do not. You can just continue.
I really do not understand why some people have trouble seeing the difference.

Originally Posted by jizaboz

No reward for playing well? BS. The reward is not having to run around in a circle shooting mystic bats a million times.

That is not scaring me, being in the spirit world for 5 second does not intimidate me at all.

[prey fan]

i love this game and i love deathwalk but i got an idea for you all maybe thay can make prey 2 have a option for deathwalk go to game options or when the gameplay is set at hard but other than that i loved prey and deathwalk i think is the greates idea but it takes the challege out of the game witch the game would be very hard without it iv come across a part in the game were i had to go into deathwalk 6 times before i finally got done so without deathwalk it would take me months too beat that level and after you beat that nobody would atempt to play cherokee mode so this game would be nerly impossible to beat without deathwalk

[0marTheZealot]

Originally Posted by jizaboz

Like one guy said, it's no different than loading a save game a million times.

Wrong. Let's take a real-world example. The lobby battle on the 19th level of FarCry. It's basically you vs 6 guys with faceplates that block headshots and a rocket launcher sniper at the end of the hallway.

In FarCry, you have to replay the section several times in order to get lucky enough to win. If deathwalking was in, you'd have to play it once. Whenever you kill a guy, he is dead and removed. If you happen to die afterwards, that's okay because you can just come back. However, in traditional FPS design, if you die to the last guy, you have to repeat the entire section over, the way God intended.

Ergo, quicksaving is not the same as deathwalking, not by a long shot. Look, a well-balanced FPS (ie not FarCry) will never need a feature like deathwalking. Prey is actually pretty well-balanced. There's really no part of the game that's overly difficult. Prey, simply, did not need deathwalking. But apparently HH and 3DR is shooting for that tough-to-target demographics of people in persistant vegetative states.

[9Nails]

Foxy, respectfully, shaddup!!!

You don't speak for everyone when you say that Deathwalk removes the challenge of the game.

P.S. If it really upsets you, don't use it.

[d3ad connection]

Originally Posted by 9Nails

Foxy, respectfully, shaddup!!!

You don't speak for everyone when you say that Deathwalk removes the challenge of the game.

P.S. If it really upsets you, don't use it.

^^^^^

[Foxy]

Foxy, respectfully, shaddup!!!

You don't speak for everyone when you say that Deathwalk removes the challenge of the game.

P.S. If it really upsets you, don't use it.

Wow, I must be skilled, I managed to offend someone that I've never even seen before. What's your problem, jack? Where did I say that I spoke for everyone? Why are you taking it personally? /poke

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by Foxy

I'm simply saying that an FPS you should challenge your combat skills, and that there should be a built-in difficulty in beating the game. This measurable because it is enforced by the rules of the game. Once you gain this focus the abstract stuff about player experience becomes irrelevant. What you've said makes it impossible to compare the difficulty of any game to another just by a simple extension of logic.

Yes, my argument is you can't compare difficulty like that because it's a property of the users' experience, not the game.

I understand what you're trying to do, and it's interesting. I believe what you're saying is the challenge - the objective and the set of rules given to complete that objective, define the nature of the game's difficulty requirements. You can look at a game and say "this requires the player to do this, therefore it requires X skills", and then you're looking at difficulty in terms of the requirements for the player.

The problem is that difficulty is not a measure of 'what needs to be done', but how good the human brain is at doing it. That is: how well the requirements of the game match up with what the user has in his natural store of abilities. So until you sit a user down in front of a game you can't measure how challenging that game is. And not just one user, because that user may be abnormal: he may have skills that most people don't possess, so the challenge he experiences may not be a reflection of the challenge that the rest of us will experience. However as you test more people you'll find they're all different as well! Each will get a different amount of challenge, for different reasons. Some may have better reflexes, others may be more intelligent, and how the game favours these things will affect how challenging the game is to users with different amounts of both.

Because each user has different abilities, different focuses and a different playstyle, changes in a game's mechanics will have differing effects for different users. For example if you emphasise stealth in an FPS, some people will find your game harder as a result, and others will find your game easier.

And because of the differences between games and users, there is no common ground to compare. Is rock climbing more difficult than chess? That's what you seem to be arguing as well: you can't extend the logic - it doesn't work.

It's like throwing up your hands and saying that because morals are defined by each individual person, there is no reason to question each other's morals. Now I'm aware that this is marked down as a philosophical theory, but simple logic tells you that this is useless thinking. Why? Extend it. It makes anything moral.

You don't want a philosophy debate as well do you?

If you extend the belief what you end up with that moral or immoral aren't global properties. Everything isn't either immoral or moral, it's neither. Morality only makes sense within the context of a person's experience. The colour blue isn't a property of the sky, but of our visual system. Perhaps someone looks into the sky and sees something different.

It doesn't make sense to say that the guy who sees the sky as a different colour is wrong.

Now with this question of difficulty, there is similar fuzziness. Everyone has a different experience, so extend logic and you fall off the world. It's impossible to compare difficulty simply by that means, because there's nothing to grasp. Oops. This is the substance of your argument: and it's meaningless!

Exactly. I'm saying it isn't meaningful to ask whether X game is harder than Y game, unless they're the same game! And if you ask how hard game X is you then have to ask "who is playing?".

Yet everyone knows that some games are really hard, and others are easy. So, you reduce down. Majority opinion? Not helpful here really, it's split, so bin that.

I think majority opinion is all we have. The best you can say is "this is true for everyone we know", but there's always a chance someone will come along and change that.

Luckily, with this subject there is is nice little fact that games have rules. Take a game of laser tag. Example: You are a lone wolf trying to get into a 'base'. You need to score one hit to 'kill' a defender. What happens if you make it into two hits? The difficulty increases. Independently of the individual player. Scale this up to a computer game, and you can see it is perfectly possible to compare difficulty in isolation from player experience. It's more complicated than the laser tag example, but it is possible.

Did you make that example without putting the players into it? Or did you think "this variable will be the same across all players", because if you're right, you shouldn't have needed to do the latter. However in your example, I think there is a change to the game's mechanics. If it only requires 1 shot to kill someone, being stealthy is of utmost importance, because you don't get a second chance. If you're attacking a position, and you get hit, you won't be able to respond, so the players who are very quick at spotting enemies will have a natural advantage.

If it requires two shots to kill someone then players who are hit can fire back, and if they've got better accuracy and reflexes, they might actually win this time. So as you move from sudden death to multi-shot modes, the nature of the challenge changes, and you start to favour different people and different skillsets. This means that for some players you're making the game easier, and for others you're making the game harder.

Key thing to note: If you don't remove player experience, logic runs away and drags you over the edge of the earth.

But isn't 'player experience' everything? Isn't 'player experience' why people play games? Even if there was a way to strip challenge out, I would ask, what's the point? If a difficulty metric doesn't have a bearing on what challenge players actually experience when they play the game, then it's worthless. In your example what you're saying is: "we can assess how difficult the game is for players, without involving them". Well what do you gain by not involving them?

And that comes back to Prey. I think all that matters is what players got out of the game. I know I care about having a set challenge, but do the rest of the fanbase care? How are they effected, has it harmed their experience and to what extent?

In other words, game difficulty can be compared independently of player experience. In this case, it can be generally accepted that the Deathwalk mechanic in Prey made the game impossible to lose and removed any meaningful difficulty of combat and bosses. Thus, compared to other FPSs, Prey is fundamentally too easy.

I totally agree that Prey offered a lesser challenge; it gave you an infinite amount of resources, so resource (or health/time) management wasn't a requirement.

But my response here is that the types of challenge are different and can't be compared. Prey may be challenging between points, like when you're in the Shuttle and don't want to die (one of the instances where there is player punishment), but you're almost guaranteed to make it to the end. So no matter how challenging Prey is within that context, it can't be compared to other games.

If you added the ability to die in Prey, to have a finite amount of health, players would have a new type of challenge – the game would be saying ‘this all you have, now make best use of it’. They'd have more work to do. It's the same situation if you for example, add puzzle elements in between segments of an action game - more is required of the player.

But how that adds to the challenge will depend on the players themselves. You could add the ability to die in deathwalk mode, but for those players that don't die in deathwalk mode with this ability added, the game might not be significantly more challenging for them. So what I'm saying is you always have to look at how the players experiences are affected by new challenges.

As a final illustration: you might have one arcade game with a fixed challenge, where the player has a finite amount of health. However, the game is ridiculously easy for most players to complete. You might have a second game, where the player is respawned every time he dies, but his progress is significantly set back. In this game, it's very hard to kill enemies, but the player will still eventually complete the game because he has infinite lives. Which is more challenging?

[jizaboz]

That is not scaring me, being in the spirit world for 5 second does not intimidate me at all.

It's not suposed to scare you. It's suposed to annoy you if you are bad enough at the game to keep being thrown in there.

[hagatha]

There are people like me, who sometimes just want to have some fun after a stressful day at work. My interest in a game is not how hard it is and how "tough" I am if I can beat it without being killed every five seconds, but how immersive it is. If I get significantly stuck in a game for a long time, I'll quickly lose interest in it -- because for me the value of the experience is in moving forward and finding out what happens next. The Dreamwalk allowed me to do that.

I keep seeing comments, on this forum, that people who need something like the Dreamwalk are wimpy, and other perjoratives of that ilk. But being able to destroy imaginary electronic targets doesn't make you tough. It's just a game - little flashing lights on a flat screen. All it means is you have faster reflexes, or better eyesight, in this specific context, than another person. It's really nothing to feel superior about.

[Justintiime]

Originally Posted by Foxy

What's the point in that?

Keeping inane drivel out of every single deathwalk thread. I motioned awhile ago that there should be a seperate forum or something, or to merge all the deathwalk sucks/rules posts into one. It gets old seeing this arguing in every damn deathwalk thread....

[hagatha]

The other point about the Deathwalk is that it allows you to do things that you otherwise could not -- like activating remote consoles. Some of the puzzles are far more intruiging because you have to figure out how to get someplace or how to do something by separating Tommy into two, and you wouldn't get that level of complexity without the Deathwalk.

[0marTheZealot]

Originally Posted by hagatha

The other point about the Deathwalk is that it allows you to do things that you otherwise could not -- like activating remote consoles. Some of the puzzles are far more intruiging because you have to figure out how to get someplace or how to do something by separating Tommy into two, and you wouldn't get that level of complexity without the Deathwalk.

err, that's spiritwalking, which is entire different.

[OnyxBMW]

Foxy:

From the way you post, you're the kind of guy who gets a joygasm playing games like nija gaidan on xbox.

Prey has a challenge. To get from point A in the story to point Z where you kill mother.

That is prey's challenge.

EVERY game's challenge is simply summed up by getting from point A to Z, and enjoying point's B C D E F G H etc along the way.

All deathwalk did was remove the frustration of dieing followed by the constant downtime of reloading every 2 minutes and replaced it with a 15-30 second minigame that was highly annoying.

You know what it really did? It's like playing prey through and quicksaving every second and then, if you die, you just reload a previous save (only without the load screen).

You know what it also did? If you wanted, you came back with more spirit/health than you had when you died. However, if you didn't kill any wraiths, you came back at 25 health/0 spirit energy, which is where you'd be had you not recieved a fatal shot.

It gives you a desire to NOT want to die, while still not punishing you for screwing up by HALTING THE STORYLINE and forcing you to replay something.

You can simulate the results of deathwalk by literally quicksaving every time you kill an enemy, it's that simple to emulate what deathwalk does in prey.

I bet you didn't even notice that your minimum health was always 25% (12.5% with the peace pipe) so that, if you hadn't recieved a fatal shot, you'd still be at the bare minimum that you leave deathwalk from.

Prey isn't designed to get your blood boiling like ninja gaiden (god that game sucked ass). It's designed to be a FUN game that offers a challenge to those who aren't blind.

Quicksaving is EXACTLY the same, and it isn't a constant quicksave+reload like games like ninja gaiden for xbox are.

I'm sorry you can't see the game for what it is and have to devalue it for having such a GREAT feature in it, but no one said you had to use it, either.

You die? what's to stop you from personally reloading from a previous save?

It's the same arguement in MMO's and permadeath. You want permadeath? Delete your own character, don't force something most people don't want on everyone else.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by OnyxBMW

You can simulate the results of deathwalk by literally quicksaving every time you kill an enemy, it's that simple to emulate what deathwalk does in prey.

But that doesn't emulate what deathwalk does, which is to allow you an infinite amount of health, an infinite amount of in-game attempts.

Think of it this way: in a conventional game, you get given 100 health points and you have to find a way through the game that will allow to keep at least 1 of those points. That's the challenge - to manage your scarce supply of health.

Now it doesn't matter how many attempts you get given, the challenge doesn't change. So if you succeed on your 150th attempt it's only because you've found a way of the solving the problem, you've found a way of keeping at least some of your health.

In Prey, the problem doesn't exist. You can have as many health points as you need, so the set challenge of "survive with X amount of health" is gone.

You die? what's to stop you from personally reloading from a previous save?

Nothing. And by reloading a previous save all you're doing is having another go at the same challenge, which is still: "survive with these limited resources". Deathwalk on the other hand gives you infinite resources.

[Mr_Diffrence]

How many people out there truly loved the deathwalk ability in the game?

It worked exactly as it should, after awhile I didn't feel ripped out of the game and it kept on encouraging me to play.

[OnyxBMW]

Originally Posted by FireFly

But that doesn't emulate what deathwalk does, which is to allow you an infinite amount of health, an infinite amount of in-game attempts.

Think of it this way: in a conventional game, you get given 100 health points and you have to find a way through the game that will allow to keep at least 1 of those points. That's the challenge - to manage your scarce supply of health.

Now it doesn't matter how many attempts you get given, the challenge doesn't change. So if you succeed on your 150th attempt it's only because you've found a way of the solving the problem, you've found a way of keeping at least some of your health.

In Prey, the problem doesn't exist. You can have as many health points as you need, so the set challenge of "survive with X amount of health" is gone.


Nothing. And by reloading a previous save all you're doing is having another go at the same challenge, which is still: "survive with these limited resources". Deathwalk on the other hand gives you infinite resources.

In prey, your minimum number of health was 25. Test it out. Go on. get shot below 25% without the piece pipe and watch what happens. It REGENERATES TO TWENTY FIVE.

All deathwalk does is emulate quicksaving every single fricken second, with the option to reload with slightly more health.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by OnyxBMW

In prey, your minimum number of health was 25. Test it out. Go on. get shot below 25% without the piece pipe and watch what happens. It REGENERATES TO TWENTY FIVE.

Right, and that doesn't change the fact that you still have a finite amount of health at any one time, and that health will only regenerate at a fixed rate. So the game says "this is how much health you have, this is how much health we're going to give you over time, now complete the game with that".

The challenge is therefore to survive within those criteria, to survive when you're being bombarded with enemy fire and only have 25 HP, or less. When you die in Prey, you die because that allowance wasn't enough for you; you weren't managing your health efficiently.

Now when you quickload the game, you're put in the same situation again, 1 second, 3 seconds, 30 seconds before your death, and you have to make a different choice, you have to manage your health more effectively, you have to avoid that grenade that killed you last time or finish that enemy off before he has a chance to hit you. So the challenge isn't changed - you still have a finite amount of health, and if that amount isn't enough then you fail.

When you go into deathwalk mode, you don't need to make any changes at all, because you haven't failed. The game says to you "we gave you 25 HP of regenerating health but that wasn't enough, so we're going to give you more. In fact we're going to give you as much as you need". And you don't have to worry about doing anything differently, ever, because the game never says to you "that's all the health you're going to be getting".

If you want to visualise the differences, imagine someone playing through a version of Prey in which there is no deathwalk mode, and just visualise the perfect playthrough comprised of all the quicksaves stitched together (without the failures). Now imagine someone playing through Prey as it is now, with the deathwalk mode, with Tommy dying and coming back to life. In the first case Tommy survives because of his skill. In the second Tommy survives because he is invincible.

[OnyxBMW]

duck around a corner and hide and it regenerates in a handful of seconds. Any competent FPS'er can pull that off. Your point stands invalidated on all counts.

[FireFly]

duck around a corner and hide and it regenerates in a handful of seconds. Any competent FPS'er can pull that off. Your point stands invalidated on all counts.

And that is the challenge - to engage enemies without taking damage, either by being careful or retreating to regenerate health. If that isn't a problem for anyone, if nobody ever dies in Prey because everyone uses the regenerating health to perfection, and the game never puts the player in a situation where he's surrounded by enemies, then Prey's gameplay isn't challenging; deathwalk or no deathwalk.

As soon the player dies, there's a difference between his experience with deathwalk and what his expereience would have been without deathwalk. With deathwalk, the player hasn't 'failed' because he gets given as much health as he needs to complete the encounter. Without deathwalk the player has failed, failed to make effective use of his store of health (regenerating or not), and he must make changes. He can't simply do the exact same thing again.

So the only way to make my argument irrelevant is to say that the player never dies. Do you think that's realistic?

[d3ad connection]

Originally Posted by Mr_Diffrence

It worked exactly as it should, after awhile I didn't feel ripped out of the game and it kept on encouraging me to play.

^^^^^

[OnyxBMW]

Originally Posted by FireFly

And that is the challenge - to engage enemies without taking damage, either by being careful or retreating to regenerate health. If that isn't a problem for anyone, if nobody ever dies in Prey because everyone uses the regenerating health to perfection, and the game never puts the player in a situation where he's surrounded by enemies, then Prey's gameplay isn't challenging; deathwalk or no deathwalk.

As soon the player dies, there's a difference between his experience with deathwalk and what his expereience would have been without deathwalk. With deathwalk, the player hasn't 'failed' because he gets given as much health as he needs to complete the encounter. Without deathwalk the player has failed, failed to make effective use of his store of health (regenerating or not), and he must make changes. He can't simply do the exact same thing again.

So the only way to make my argument irrelevant is to say that the player never dies. Do you think that's realistic?

When the player dies, he DIES. THAT is the challenge. This game just had the balls to add a system that didn't make you want to throw your monitor (or controller) when you DID die, unlike some games like ninja-gaiden where they expect you to be a god the second you start playing and make you break your controller in seconds.

Deathwalk kept the challenge for me in the game without making it damned frustrating when I did die like what most games do.

[0marTheZealot]

Originally Posted by OnyxBMW

When the player dies, he DIES. THAT is the challenge. This game just had the balls to add a system that didn't make you want to throw your monitor (or controller) when you DID die, unlike some games like ninja-gaiden where they expect you to be a god the second you start playing and make you break your controller in seconds.

Deathwalk kept the challenge for me in the game without making it damned frustrating when I did die like what most games do.

There is a difference. In games like FEAR, Quake4, etc etc, you have only 1 chance to beat an encounter. When you fight a squad in Q4, you have to beat the entire squad at once, or never at all. In Prey, you can equip your wrench and roll any squad. It requires no strategy, no tactics, nothing. You never need to do anything different, ever, to suceed at Prey. Terri Schiavo could beat Prey.

What FireFly is trying to say is this: if you have 5 enemies, you need to kill all 5 enemies in 1 try to win. In Prey, you can kill 1 enemy, die to the other 4, get resurrected, kill 1 one more, die to the other three, ad nausem until all the enemies are dead. The player can never lose ever. It's playing with loaded dice. Fundementally, there is no difference from having infinite health and Prey's system. The player never, ever, has to improve his skills during the course of the game. In contrast to games like Quake 4, where the enemy count increases as well as their firepower, one has to get more accurate, kill faster and utilize cover better if they want to beat the game. You don't to do anything different, ever, to beat Prey.

Ninja Gaiden was the shit anyways. It weeded out the men from the boys. Every game should be at least as hard as NG. If you found Prey difficult.... I'm at a loss of words. Prey is the anti-difficult game. It's like a puzzle with 3 pieces, and two of them are already put together.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by OnyxBMW

When the player dies, he DIES. THAT is the challenge.

Right, and in games without a deathwalk mode that means you're forced to manage your health effectively. You're faced with X situation and X amount of health and the challenge is working out how make it through that situation with some of your health remaining. Every time you fail (die), you have to start again and revise your tactics, trying something different.

Now, quicksaving just gives you more attempts at the problem; it doesn't change the nature of the challenge.

Deathwalk does however, because it gives you as much health as you need to complete each encounter, so the requirement of "complete situation X with X amount of health" (regenerating or not) is gone. That means that when you die you haven't failed, and you don't have to do anything differently.

Now whether or not you as a player appreciate this difference isn't the issue. I'm simply saying that there is a fundamental difference between a game with (just) quicksaving and a game with deathwalk. The former gives you a specific gameplay challenge you must complete to progress; the latter does not.

[OnyxBMW]

The fundamental difference, Firefly, is that a game with just quicksaving requires a player to constantly break any semblance of immersion the game may offer to press a key on the keyboard completely unrelated to gameplay to allow for a continuous experience through the game and, if they forget to press quicksave, then they are forced to restart from significantly farther back.

A game with deathwalk still has pre-set everything. If you suck, you still die, but you don't lose potentially hours of time fighting through content you already fought through to get back to where you were.


here's a nice, realistic challenge for you.

Play the game without using deathwalk once or, play the game and complete it in the fastest time possible.

These are realistic goals that exist within the game that don't break immersion or challenge.

And, remember, in prey, you still have preset levels of ammunition. The only gun that has unlimited ammo is the assault rifle styled gun which, by the way, takes for freaken ever and a year to regenerate ammo to a smidgeon of what is considered "full" which, in a firefight, is far longer than you have to spare.

Argueing over whether deathwalk eliminates the challenge or enhances it is no longer even worth fighting for.

Everyone's taken sides, this topic has just degraded into a worthless political debate about a non-issue in a game designed around fun moreso than challenge where, if you wished for challenge, you could still achieve it quite readily, it just doesn't FORCE any semblance of your version of challenge on those who don't wish for it.

I still see the challenge, I don't understand why you don't, but I know it's there. However, I will no longer participate in a thread based on opinion and speculation, where neither side truly has a point based on anything beyond mere opinion.

So, with that, I bid you adieu.

Edit to add:

And, Foxy, at least Prey allows you the opportunity to beat the game using nothing but a pipe wrench.