Prey Inteview (con't)

FiringSquad: What are some of the more interesting locations in Prey?

Tim Gerritsen: My favorite areas are when we go in and out of the shuttles, our flying vehicles. We tried to make sure there wasn't just a 'shuttle level' as you see in other fps games with vehicles. We decided to really integrate them so that you have to get in and out of them a number of times to proceed. One of my favorite areas is a round asteroid where you can run around. It features limited gravity so you get to jump around like Neil Armstrong on this big round rock while the rest of the world you are on goes sideways and upside down as you move. It's a nice little mind trip.

FiringSquad: What are the development team's favorite weapons to use in the game?

Tim Gerritsen: Everyone has their favorite. I like the Hider Weapon, which is basically a big acid shooting shotgun. It also paints with a fluorescent yellow goo, so you run around painting up the world, and your enemies as you go.

FiringSquad: What are some of the more interesting creatures that are encountered in Prey?

Tim Gerritsen: The quadharvester is an interesting creature. It has four spider-like legs, and a humanoid torso, and shoots rockets. When you do enough damage, you blow out the legs, and the torso then crawls over to a regeneration station where it can be regrafted onto a new set of legs. Nasty.

FiringSquad: What will make the game's multiplayer elements different than the norm?

Tim Gerritsen: Insanity. There's really no other way to put it. The experience is deathmatch, but since we incorporated the major features of the single player game such as portals, gravity manipulation and the fact that you can walk up certain surfaces as well as spirit walking and shuttles it turns into an experience similar to one of MC Escher's paintings. The effect is amazing as you run into spaces that make no sense by the laws of physics of our world, but in the game you quickly come to understand them and it makes for a really intense game. Several testers have commented to us that "this makes deathmatch fun again." That really was the best compliment they could have given us.

FiringSquad: What other interesting gameplay elements does Prey have?

Tim Gerritsen: As I alluded to above, there are a number of things we tried to do to make Prey unique.

FiringSquad: How hard was it to adapt the Doom 3 engine for Prey's needs?

Tim Gerritsen: The hardest part was really just working with an unfinished engine. Since id hadn't resolved all the issues with the tech when we started, we frequently had to merge our code and then fix the issues that new optimizations on their end broke in our game. The code itself, however, is quite good to work with, and we were able to adapt it for our needs with out much difficulty.

FiringSquad: Are there any plans for a demo of Prey to be released for the PC and Xbox 360?

Tim Gerritsen: Yes. We feel pretty strongly that a demo is pretty critical to getting people really excited about the game. We've gotten a ton of press coverage, and everyone who's seen the game in person gets really excited about it, but we need to release the demo to show gamers themselves why we're excited about Prey. We don’t have any exact timeframe for the demo, but there definitely will be one.


FiringSquad: What is the current status of the game's progress and when will it be released?

Tim Gerritsen: The game is very close to finished. Since it is a 3DR game, the only answer we can ever give is "When it's done."

FiringSquad: Are there any plans for new content to be released for the game following its shipment to stores?

Tim Gerritsen: Absolutely. We plan on releasing material for the PC and for the 360 on Live. We'll be creating new skins and models for the game as well as new multiplayer character models to choose from. We're also releasing the editor and game SDK and plan to support the mod community heavily. Depending on sales, we hope to be able to put a lot of post release support into Prey.

FiringSquad: Finally is there anything else you wish to say about Prey?

Tim Gerritsen: We can't wait to see what the mod community does with the new toybox we've created in Prey. We eagerly await what budding gamers do with the game.

We too, eagerly await Prey! We’d like to thank Human Head’s Tim Gerritsen for answering our questions about the game, and can’t wait to check it out once it’s released later this year.