For all the talk of Prey being 'Dishonored in space', a recent chat with director Raphael Colantonio and designer Ricardo Bare have revealed one big difference: everything is linked.
While Dishonored and its sequel are a series of discrete, self contained areas, Prey is simply one big mission. Your access might occasionally be blocked - and require you to complete certain objectives to unlock powers or open up paths - but you're more or less free to crisscross, explore and re-explore the game's space station setting as you see fit.
Which makes it far harder to predict how things will turn out, according to Bare. "What’s the last half of the game like?" he says, "I have to have actually have played the first half of the game to know because all the history is built in the playthrough," he explains. "Because I’m still crisscrossing the same spaces. Did I already loot this cabinet or not? Did I kill this guy here or not? Will if I didn’t then he’s still here. Whereas in a mission-based game I’ve left that space, I’ve moved on."
Colantonio really drives this idea home by saying the entire game is "like one big mission." He adds that "whatever you did potentially still has an impact on the end. The corpse that you killed has been moved there, and now the dude that was supposed to come in is going to bump into him. We have legacies all along."
From a testing point of view he does mention "it’s a nightmare" but from a gaming angle that sounds hugely exciting - imagine if every kill or decision you made in Dishonored 2 had the potential to directly affect the ending physically, not just in a high/low chaos score count. Maybe you wouldn't set rats on everyone quite as much, eh?
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