System Shock 2 Dev Comments on Prey 2 as Spiritual Successor Rumors

There have been some fairly substantiated and insistent rumors about Prey 2 recently, a title that was initially developed by Human Head Studios for Bethesda and now is apparently being rebooted as a System Shock 2 spiritual successor by Arkane (you can find the coverage here on Kotaku, including some leaked emails from Raphael Colantonio), which gave IncGamers an interesting subject to talk about with System Shock 2 project manager Jon Chey. Here’s a snip:

Peter: I’m not sure. It’s a lone email that says their pitch for Prey 2 was (spiritual successor to System Shock 2.) I mean obviously . I don’t know if either of you guys played Dishonored, but they pretty heavily influenced by aspects of the Thief series.

Jon: Well I mean, Harvey Smith worked on Deus Ex, so that came out at a very similar time and has a lot of similar ideas to System Shock and so that’s . I’m not surprised that they’re working in that area.

And I think System Shock 2’s one of those games where it probably didn’t spawn a whole host of similar games. There wasn’t an obviously gold mine to be dug there. But on the other hand I think it certain has influenced a lot of other . like Portal games, for example. They’re different games but they have the rogue AI which is taunting you, interacting with you and guiding you through .

Dorian [Hart]: . a strange, science fiction environment.

Jon: So a lot of different games have picked up a lot of different bits and pieces, which of course is true of the games industry in general. It always feeds off itself. But yeah, I’d love to see more people try to pick up the legacy and do things with it.

I’m very tempted to try to do something like that myself. There are a lot of interesting things that could be explored, perhaps focusing more on the sort of stuff we were talking about earlier, the angst-driven resource scarcity and fear aspects of the game.

I certainly wouldn’t mind to see another take on System Shock 2’s mechanics, so any team that wants to attempt that is welcome to do so in my book.