In many regards, Arkane Studios’ 2017 first-person horror/sci-fi title Prey was considered to be a critical success. However, the game’s final third had a noticeably different tone and gameplay cadence than what came before it, something which fans seemed to either love or hate. In a recent episode of Kotaku’s Splitscreen podcast, Arkane co-founder Raphael Colantonio (who left the company last year) commented on Prey’s polarizing endgame and how it relates to some of the larger issues that game developers have to constantly grapple with.
Specifically, Colantonio discussed how, since games are created through the work of several different segmented teams, it can be hard to fully comprehend the final product until it’s mere months away from being shipped to the public. Ratcheting up the challenge of Prey’s final act via several major plot developments sounded good on paper, but as Colantonio explains, in practice it didn’t quite gel as well as the development team initially thought it would:
“I think we did our best as far as planning — we thought on paper it’d be a nice change of pace toward the end, so it feels more intense and more like an acceleration as opposed to ‘Here is more story.’ So on paper it seemed right. The problem is when you implement those things, even the designers can only see so much of it, because they don’t see the rest of the game, they only see their part.”
The full interview is worth listening to if you’re at all interested in how ongoing issues such as crunch and publisher mandates can affect how a game ultimately turns out. It’s also interesting to note that the interview likely wouldn’t have even happened if Colantonio hadn’t left the company he co-founded. This is because Arkane Studios is owned by the publishing company Bethesda, a company which has had Kotaku on a strict PR blacklist for the past several years. When Colantonio left Arkane, he was also apparently freed of whatever radio silence he was forced to comply with as part of Bethesda’s blacklist policy.
In other Arkane Studios news, the company recently confirmed that its popular Dishonored IP has been shelved in favor of other ongoing projects. And as for Prey, the game’s standalone Mooncrash expansion has been augmented by a ‘Blue Moon’ update that fixes several bugs and adds in new cosmetic items.