http:/www.pcgamer.com/p_prey.html July, 1996 Prey 3D Realms Creating Quake Rival You are the hunter and the hunted, you are Prey -- here's an early look at a hot new game from the makers of Duke Nukem 3D. by Jason Bates FOR YOUR INFORMATION: Game: Prey Developer: 3D Realms Publisher: Apogee, P.O. Box 476389, Garland, TX 75049; (214) 271- 2268 http://www.3drealms.com Projected Price: TBA Percentage Complete: 25% In a nutshell: If 3D Realms accomplishes all they've set out to do with Prey, it could set new standards for first-person action and multi- player gaming. What's so special?: Try single player action that plays like deathmatch, a true 3D engine, and a built-in specs and level editor: Prey will be as much a gaming system as it is a game. But best of all, it's been designed for the Internet, allowing you to travel between servers and jump to other user-created Prey levels at will. Why should I care?: There's really only a couple of other games in this league. If the early descriptions of id Software's upcoming Quake had you drooling, or Duke Nukem 3D floored you, you can get just as excited about Prey. And when's it coming out?: Possibly Christmas, but early 1997 is more likely. 3D Realms, a division of Apogee, has really come into its own with the release of Duke Nukem 3D. In many ways, Duke is the first true successor to Doom; it's a game that doesn't just imitate the king- daddy of first-person shooters, but actually brings a lot of intriguing new elements to the table -- like high-res graphics, dynamic lighting effects, moving areas, underwater action, and a host of other technical innovations. Meanwhile, the development team working on 3D Realms' Prey has started from scratch, writing a next- generation game engine that promises to be more of a technological leap than even Duke's "Build" engine was. This is a true 3D graphics engine, letting designers create levels with multiple floors, elevated walkways, and other architectural treats that earlier game engines didn't allow. In addition, there can be light sources and shadows that move and change naturally, rather than merely strobing on and off -- all this, with a planned frame-rate in the mid to high twenties, which translates into very smooth animation without the need for a 3D accelerator card. "What our technology does is more than what those cards do," said Tom Hall, designer and driving force behind Prey. "If we had just had an environment where there was no lighting, no shadow and brightness, then they'd be a lot more useful -- but the stuff we have to do is basically more advanced than those things will let us do." The game's story is simple: A race of extraterrestrial overlords kidnap various alien warriors, pitting them against each other in gladiator-style combat. You play the human captor, with a biotech suit hardwired to your nervous system to make you a more efficient fighter. The objective of the abductors seems to be to study the fighting styles of various warrior cultures. They have defined six martial disciplines, aligned in what they call the "Warrior Wheel" and based on the three primary traits of might, agility, and wisdom. Blending those traits creates the other three disciplines: stealth, control, and balance. But these disciplines aren't tied to character statistics, as in standard roleplaying games. Instead, they're styles of fighting you will learn to use, based on your choice of weapons and tactics. Your opponents will be embodiments of a discipline: in order to defeat a disciple of might, for example, you would do well to adopt opposing tactics, such as stealth, and snipe away at him. In the endgame, you'll enter a "Citadel of Unity" and take on the masters of all the disciplines at once. Since Prey uses 3D, polygon-based enemies rather than the flat, bitmapped bad-guys of Doom and Duke, there must be fewer monsters for the sake of game speed -- maybe only a dozen or so on any given level. But what they lack in numbers, these bad boys will make up for in fierceness. "The enemies in Prey will try to think like a human player," said Mark Dochterman, the game's lead programmer. "They share the same weapons systems, and therefore can use the same ammunition as you. They require health and energy the same way you do, and they have the ability to ambush, chase, and retreat, just like a human player." Single-player mode is being designed in imitation of a good deathmatch battle, with enemy artificial intelligence that should result in longer, more intense conflicts. They won't be as smart as living, thinking opponents, but a lot of hard work is going into making them appear to be. "We're going to do some things to give the appearance that they really, really, really understand their parts of the levels, which should be interesting," said Tom Hall. Hall also hinted briefly about the weapons and special items you'll find in Prey, which will go beyond traditional weapons. One weapon under consideration would be similar to a tractor beam, which would let you pull enemies or objects toward you. Other interesting goodies, like flashlights and zero-gravity areas, promise to offer a truly complex environment. Programs like DeHacked and DEU, which gave Doom fanatics so much power to alter the game's appearance or even design all-new levels, are being built into the design of Prey. The team wants to give the user as much practical control over the game's mechanics as possible, so that Prey -- though an intense action game in its own right -- will also be a gaming system you can build on. "We're going to try to make it as easy as possible to customize," said Hall. That might mean a utility that breaks the original game's elements into separate files and directories. By replacing the graphics, sound, and configuration files that contain the combat stats and other parameters, it should be extremely easy to design your own game worlds. This creates a situation much like you have in a pen-and-paper roleplaying game, where you are free -- and even encouraged -- to change rules and build a whole world of your own. "Prey will be the most user-modifiable game to date," said Jim Dosˇ, one of the programmers. "The actual game portion of Prey is written in a scripting language that is interpreted in real-time during gameplay. Not only does this allow users to redefine any aspect of the game, but it lets them design a complete game using the Prey graphics, sound, and network engines. This flexibility makes Prey as much a game development system as a game." A Windows 95-compatible level editor will come with the full, registered version of the game. The concept of Prey players trading their home-grown levels online is inevitable -- Doom fans are already doing it with that game's .WAD files. But this game will have another, more intriguing online element, letting gamers use live Internet links to bind their custom worlds together. When a level of Prey ends, it doesn't just load the next level in a sequence; it jumps to a new level indicated by an Internet-style address. Even in single-player mode, the game has a client-server network model built in, the level addresses simply pointing to files on the player's hard-drive. But with the ability to specify an Internet address to a user-made Prey level, series of linked, virtual worlds that span the Net can be created. 3D Realms has even suggested that their companies may run huge Prey servers, where hundreds of gamers can meet and chat, or join a battle cooperatively, in teams, or in free-for-all deathmatches. "This may sound like the standard online service," said Dose, "except that it is all done within the Prey environment. The people you talk to are polygonal 3D models. The rooms you enter are Prey levels. Even the lobby can have the same dramatic lighting that is seen in the game. A single game can accomplish what the corporate online services never could. Prey will be to games what the World Wide Web is to a BBS -- a true virtual community."