{"id":18922,"date":"2018-04-30T15:03:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T15:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/view\/news\/317195"},"modified":"2018-04-30T15:03:00","modified_gmt":"2018-04-30T15:03:00","slug":"blog-designing-a-vast-urban-sprawl-for-the-cancelled-prey-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/04\/30\/blog-designing-a-vast-urban-sprawl-for-the-cancelled-prey-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Blog: Designing a vast urban sprawl for (the cancelled) Prey 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra\u2019s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.<\/small><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

*All ideas mentioned are from my memory and shouldn’t\u00a0be considered official.
*All names mentioned are internal to be renamed if the game had ever been released.
*All material is considered Pre-Alpha.<\/strong><\/h6>\n

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Now that Arkane\u00a0Studio<\/a>\u2019s version of Prey<\/a> is out and living its own life, I rummaged through some old notes I had on Human Head Studio<\/a>‘s Prey 2<\/a>\u00a0world.<\/p>\n

What you\u2019ll be looking at are top-down designs from the 3D environments. Areas the player could not reach in the distance are not included. So don\u2019t interpret these layouts as small city islands. Central City on Exodus was a vast urban sprawl surrounding the player.<\/p>\n

The planet Exodus was tidal locked, so regions\u00a0had a fixed amount of light\u00a0for the whole day. Only the weather conditions changed. Spanning the equator was Central City at the edge of night. The Bowery was one of the many districts found there. Undercity was below the raised Central City, so it was naturally dark surrounded by massive caverns. The Depot was just south at the edge of Central City in the colder\u00a0night. And Locktown was out in the baking hot sun.<\/p>\n

The Bowery\u2019s the entertainment, neon-noir hub the public saw at E3 in 2011<\/a>. It\u2019s filled with loads\u00a0of vice and wares. This city layout went through 3-4 different versions.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s some scraps from an early version I did.\u00a0 Various paths and population density provided diversity to different neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

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The further north you went in this district the more elevated and opulent it became. The northern edge featured glitzy casinos and blood sport arenas. The southern edge featured seedy theaters and questionable gambling.<\/p>\n

Solar energy collected on the light side of Exodus beyond Locktown fueled various Energy Hubs throughout Central City. These arched over the sky and were sometimes subject to raids. One of these anchored itself on\u00a0the eastern edge of the district.<\/p>\n

The Bowery was also the main marketplace for Central City. This huge hive of activity was right in the middle of the district.<\/p>\n

As with any district, it featured a lot of verticality. Primary streets tracked the player to different points-of-interest while more challenging routes shortcutted across, over, and under the neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

More playtesting and ways to improve navigation prompted another version. This in turn spawned Version 3 which was showcased at E3.<\/p>\n

This Bowery was like a big block of swiss cheese. Where most games at the time provided some verticality, they relied a lot on moving horizontally across the game to get to new content. In the Bowery, events could be found on platforms layered above and below one another.<\/p>\n

You could sprint over local rooftops, still dwarfed in the shadows of larger suspended buildings out of reach above. You could slip underneath the main promenades to avoid detection. Some characters couldn’t\u00a0be reached unless you had the right gadget or knew the right climbing path to encounter them.<\/p>\n