Prey: Mooncrash – Ricardo Bare Interview

Ricardo Bare, the lead designer at Arkane Studios, had a chat with Dualshockers at a recent Bethesda event during PAX West. The main topic was Arkane’s recently released roguelite Mooncrash DLC for Prey and its stark departure from the usual Arkane formula. There was also a brief mention of the studio’s future, but nothing definitive was said.

Here’s something to get you started:

L: Knowing that this genre somewhat clashed with what you guys are known for in the first place, why’d you decide to go down the route of making a roguelike anyway?

RB: A couple of reasons. One of them is that a bunch of us on the team just love roguelikes. I mean, in terms of a value proposition to the player, you’re paying the same price for something like a single-player game but you’re getting way more gameplay out of it because of how renewable and rejuvenating the content is.

Intrinsically, it’s something that rearranges itself into a new expression. So lots of us are just fans of roguelikes and games like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, Risk of Rain, and Dead Cells — we love those games. Because we typically make games where you give the player lots of abilities, tools, and weapons to improvise and create their own experience, we wanted to create something like that but have the environment be more dynamic also.

If you play a game like Prey where you have one character with like a bazillion abilities, one of the things that happens is that players get stuck in a rut. They get comfortable. They pick one or two powers, or one gun, and they just play the whole game like that. The thing is, the game is like this big but you only see this narrow slice of it. What we did with Mooncrash was we wanted to choose a game structure that would expose players to more of the game.

That’s why there are five characters and the five characters each have a subset of those powers — plus some new ones that we added. So when your first character dies and you’re forced to play as the second character, you’re forced to go into someone else’s shoes and play a different way and experience more of the game.