Prey, the horror FPS immersive sim cut from the cloths of System Shock, Bioshock, Deus Ex and Dishonored, is out now. Interestingly the game offered an early demo before launch, something rarely seen today, but it’s limited to only on consoles. An odd choice, since PC gamers would be the one to be of most benefit of a demo- as it helps determine if the setup you have is fit for the game even if the specs requirements are shared.
Developers Arkane have given a statement why is it so in an interview with Ausgamers. Game director Raphael Colantonio explained that they could only do either a console demo or a PC demo. “It’s just a resource assignment thing. We couldn’t do a demo on both the console and on the PC, we had to choose,” he explained.
Colanonio later explains why they chose to do it on consoles rather on PC. “And besides, PC has Steam. Steam players can just return the game [prior to playing] 2 hours so it’s like a demo already.”
While it’s true that Steam refunds can be a way for people to try the game first and see if it works, that also means you must have the cash to buy it outright in the first place. So the appeal of a demo as a risk-free download is absent. Also, if the trend continues where we see people keep buying and refunding just to demo games, there is a chance that Steam will flag these people for abusing the refunds. This piece on Rock Paper Shotgun breaks down how using the Steam refunds to buy and “demo” a game is ultimately unreliable.
This is all worrisome sounding for the PC version, considering Arkane’s last game, Dishonored 2, has some troubling performance issues on PC. Rest assured, Colantonio is confident that Prey will not be suffering from the same issue. Prey is running on a different engine (CryEngine 3, rather than Dishonored 2’s Void Engine based of id Tech 5).
“I also want to clarify that there’s no PC port. I keep on hearing ‘oh they’re going to screw up the PC port’ there is no PC port. We do the game on PC. It’s a PC game. It’s a different engine to Dishonored as well. So we might have our own sets of problems, but we are of course very careful because of what happened with Dishonored 2. So we wanted to make sure the PC version of Prey is good.”
Prey is out now on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Unfortunately for Asia regions, the console demo is nowhere to be seen, so you will have to have access to an alternate region account to give it a go.