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About this mod
Large mod that aims to make Prey's gameplay much more immersive. The most significant changes are: no healing and suit repair during combat, injuries affect Morgan's combat capabilities, and more realistic inventory. While increase in difficulty was not a direct driver for the mod, it will certainly provide much greater challenge than vanilla.
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Overview:
It may seem silly to want more realism from an alien-fighting sci-fi game, but what always breaks the immersion for me (not just in Prey, but in most RPGs, in general) is how the health and inventory are handled. Healing items restore health in an instant and during combat, plus you can stack an impressive amount of them in your massively oversized inventory and, unless an enemy can one-shot kill you, soon in the game you start being able to heal as fast as you get injured. And, perhaps the least realistic of all, your health is simply a number which goes up and down, largely unrelated to your fighting abilities. While the Prey game designers had a great idea with the introduction of the traumas, it feels like they left it undeveloped.
This mod tries to address the above. It makes the healing items more realistic. Healing and suit repair during combat and spacewalks are prohibitive. It overhauls the effects of enemy attacks on Morgan significantly. An enemy hit won't just reduce hitpoints, but will leave Morgan with an injury which will affect his/her combat capabilities until healed. These include weapons (reduced accuracy and damage), psi (increased power cooldown and casting cost) and/or movement.
Regarding the inventory, with this mod Morgan can carry far less items, and you will need to make a choice of weapons and items to carry. Check the screenshots to get an idea of the new inventory size. This change is also likely to lead to having less raw materials for fabrication, as Morgan won't have enough inventory space to carry all the junk (unless of course you decide to run back and forth to a Recycler all the time).
Another significant gameplay-altering change is that Morgan is much more visible and detectable in the open, as would be the case realistically for someone running around in a spacesuit and carrying weapons. So tactical play would be favored over "Doom-style" shootout.
Few balancing changes were also made, which should make the game challenging until the end.
The mod can also be used by first-time Prey players (I've tried to make the changes in the same spirit, triggering tutorials and providing a lot of in-game help; in fact probably more so than vanilla), however the increase in difficulty may be significant, even on Normal.
If you'd like to know the details, I've documented all the changes, but be mindful of spoilers.
Installation:
It requires a New Game, and Survival Mode with Traumas and Oxygen enabled (Weapon Degradation optional; the mod doesn't change anything related to it).
The files need to be put in subfolders of the Prey installation folder: the file patch_more_realistic_prey.pak goes in the subfolder GameSDK\Precache, whereas the file English_xml_patch.pak goes in the subfolder Localization. But make a copy of the existing English_xml_patch.pak file for when you want to uninstall this mod, in which case delete these two files and restore the original English_xml_patch.pak. That's it if you play Prey in English.
If you play Prey in Spanish, put also Spanish_xml_patch.pak and latin_american_spanish_xml_patch.pak in the subfolder Localization (but also make a copy of the originals in case you want to uninstall the mod).
The descriptions for all the changes are only for English and Spanish (sorry, those are all the languages that I speak). If you use another language, the mod will still work but it will be weird to play because none of the changes will be explained in the game (or worse, they will be wrong). In that case, if you don't mind having the game part in English, part in your language, you can replace only the modified files. To do that, open the modded English_xml_patch.pak with 7-zip and extract the modified files (detailed below), then open your respective language file (e.g. French_xml_patch.pak, but make a copy of it first) with 7-zip and add the modified files to it.
The modified files are:
text_ui_items.xml
text_ui_menus.xml
text_uncategorized.xml
ark\player\text_abilities.xml
ark\player\text_traumas.xml
ark\weaponmods\text_arkweaponmods.xml
The change to the file text_ui_menus.xml is minimal though (only replaces the hint about the inventory increase, which the mod doesn't allow), so you might as well skip it, if you don't want all the menus in English just for this change.
Compatibility with other mods:
This mod doesn't change anything regarding AI, levels (i.e. locations of enemies and items) or enemy characteristics (i.e. health, attacks used, etc.), so should work fine alongside mods that do these things. As mentioned in the summary, this mod doesn't directly try to increase the difficulty, but by making changes that make Prey play more realistically, the game will certainly be much harder. So I expect that if you pair it with a mod which overhauls the AI and the enemies, it should provide a very respectable challenge even for the most veteran Prey players.
Acknowledgement:
Kudos to RoSoDude, for the Prey Modding Guide.
It may seem silly to want more realism from an alien-fighting sci-fi game, but what always breaks the immersion for me (not just in Prey, but in most RPGs, in general) is how the health and inventory are handled. Healing items restore health in an instant and during combat, plus you can stack an impressive amount of them in your massively oversized inventory and, unless an enemy can one-shot kill you, soon in the game you start being able to heal as fast as you get injured. And, perhaps the least realistic of all, your health is simply a number which goes up and down, largely unrelated to your fighting abilities. While the Prey game designers had a great idea with the introduction of the traumas, it feels like they left it undeveloped.
This mod tries to address the above. It makes the healing items more realistic. Healing and suit repair during combat and spacewalks are prohibitive. It overhauls the effects of enemy attacks on Morgan significantly. An enemy hit won't just reduce hitpoints, but will leave Morgan with an injury which will affect his/her combat capabilities until healed. These include weapons (reduced accuracy and damage), psi (increased power cooldown and casting cost) and/or movement.
Regarding the inventory, with this mod Morgan can carry far less items, and you will need to make a choice of weapons and items to carry. Check the screenshots to get an idea of the new inventory size. This change is also likely to lead to having less raw materials for fabrication, as Morgan won't have enough inventory space to carry all the junk (unless of course you decide to run back and forth to a Recycler all the time).
Another significant gameplay-altering change is that Morgan is much more visible and detectable in the open, as would be the case realistically for someone running around in a spacesuit and carrying weapons. So tactical play would be favored over "Doom-style" shootout.
Few balancing changes were also made, which should make the game challenging until the end.
The mod can also be used by first-time Prey players (I've tried to make the changes in the same spirit, triggering tutorials and providing a lot of in-game help; in fact probably more so than vanilla), however the increase in difficulty may be significant, even on Normal.
If you'd like to know the details, I've documented all the changes, but be mindful of spoilers.
Installation:
It requires a New Game, and Survival Mode with Traumas and Oxygen enabled (Weapon Degradation optional; the mod doesn't change anything related to it).
The files need to be put in subfolders of the Prey installation folder: the file patch_more_realistic_prey.pak goes in the subfolder GameSDK\Precache, whereas the file English_xml_patch.pak goes in the subfolder Localization. But make a copy of the existing English_xml_patch.pak file for when you want to uninstall this mod, in which case delete these two files and restore the original English_xml_patch.pak. That's it if you play Prey in English.
If you play Prey in Spanish, put also Spanish_xml_patch.pak and latin_american_spanish_xml_patch.pak in the subfolder Localization (but also make a copy of the originals in case you want to uninstall the mod).
The descriptions for all the changes are only for English and Spanish (sorry, those are all the languages that I speak). If you use another language, the mod will still work but it will be weird to play because none of the changes will be explained in the game (or worse, they will be wrong). In that case, if you don't mind having the game part in English, part in your language, you can replace only the modified files. To do that, open the modded English_xml_patch.pak with 7-zip and extract the modified files (detailed below), then open your respective language file (e.g. French_xml_patch.pak, but make a copy of it first) with 7-zip and add the modified files to it.
The modified files are:
text_ui_items.xml
text_ui_menus.xml
text_uncategorized.xml
ark\player\text_abilities.xml
ark\player\text_traumas.xml
ark\weaponmods\text_arkweaponmods.xml
The change to the file text_ui_menus.xml is minimal though (only replaces the hint about the inventory increase, which the mod doesn't allow), so you might as well skip it, if you don't want all the menus in English just for this change.
Compatibility with other mods:
This mod doesn't change anything regarding AI, levels (i.e. locations of enemies and items) or enemy characteristics (i.e. health, attacks used, etc.), so should work fine alongside mods that do these things. As mentioned in the summary, this mod doesn't directly try to increase the difficulty, but by making changes that make Prey play more realistically, the game will certainly be much harder. So I expect that if you pair it with a mod which overhauls the AI and the enemies, it should provide a very respectable challenge even for the most veteran Prey players.
Acknowledgement:
Kudos to RoSoDude, for the Prey Modding Guide.