Various videos allegedly showing gameplay from the cancelled sequel to Prey, the 2006 original, not the 2017 one, recently surfaced online. Nobody knows why such an unearthing has taken place just now, but it certainly reminds us of how much has been lost, because it looked so amazingly good.
The quick and responsive gunplay, the modern movement, and the beautiful neon-fuelled aesthetics of this fresh alien world make it hard to believe you're looking at an in-development game, especially one from 2011.
Not only is it clear that the minds at Human Head that made the original Prey such an original FPS still had a lot of juice left in them, but also that the game was surprisingly far into its development, despite the official channels only showing off a few previews before announcing its cancellation. How come we got robbed of a game that looked as cool as Cyberpunk 2077 ended up, minus all of its early gameplay bugs?
Why did Bethesda cancel Prey 2?
2006's Prey remains one of the most underrated shooters of all time. Though successful, it just fell short of sending the shockwaves through the FPS world that it should have. Anyone who'd played it is likely to remember its many unique takes on FPS level design and will certainly remember that it did portals even before Valve's Portal made them cool. Prey sold over one million copies. A sequel went into development, and Bethesda bought the rights to the IP. We even got to see a cool teaser in 2011, but after a supposedly long development hell, the game was cancelled in 2014. The reasons would forever remain the stuff of myth.
Though Bethesda claims development issues led to the game never reaching the company's ambitions as the main reason behind its cancellation, Jason L Blair, Prey 2's narrative designer and writer, took to Twitter in 2013 to allege that Prey's sequel was actually completed.
We'll probably never know what the true reason behind Prey 2's cancellation was. But all this footage, should it be real, sure does seem to tip the scales towards the less Bethesda-friendly side of the debate.
In his brilliant Destructoid Checkpoint piece, Aidan O'Brien mentions the works of Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, authors who, to put it very succinctly, delved into the arts and entertainment industry's current addiction to foregoing any attempt at originality, opting instead for repackaging an old thing as new to sell it over and over again. The Prey sequel we ended up getting suffers from that in the most baffling way.
2017's Prey is a damn good title, features an original story, and provides one of the most unique FPS experiences in a long while. That's strange, considering it has the same name as its predecessor, denouncing Bethesda's bizarre attempt to popularize it via association with an unrelated brand that was never that big in the first place, let alone one decade later. Bethesda cancelled one Prey, then made a completely fresh title look like it was a repetition of something else. Nobody gained anything from this. Gamers never got Prey 2, Bethesda lost one game due to a supposed competitor that was anything but, and the Prey series suffered a profound and incomprehensible blow to its identity, one that possibly deterred non-fans from getting into a series they didn't know.
Though Prey was never a massive hit, Prey 2's cancellation still echoes as one of the saddest of all time to me. It’s a damn shame we’ll never get to play this one, especially now that one might wonder if it's somewhere out there, ready to play.
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The post Prey’s cancelled sequel gameplay allegedy leaked online, so here’s a reminder of how Bethesda killed it in the crib appeared first on Destructoid.
