The new sci-fi thriller Prey is all about exploring an intricately designed space station. Unfortunately, it seems to want to lead you around that space station by the nose.
That’s right, it’s me! The guy who’s always telling you to try playing games without minimaps and other navigational aids. I’ve played a couple of hours of Prey and while I really like it so far, I wish there were more options for tweaking the HUD. Or really, any options for tweaking the HUD.
In particular, I wish mission objectives weren’t visible by default. As soon as you arrive in the first open area, you’ll see an objective marker on your HUD. Go here, the game says. Go get the video file. Go. Go get it.
Here’s what the marker looks like:
I was unable to find much by way of HUD customisation in the menu, so I checked under the “objectives” tab in my journal. Turns out, yep, you can deactivate your current objective. Select the objective in your journal, hit the button to “set inactive”, and you’re good to go.
Here’s what it looks like with the objective marker off:
Ah, freedom!
Each time you pick up a new mission, it seems like the game automatically makes it active and visible, so you’ll have to go in and turn it off each time. It isn’t too much of an inconvenience, and Arkane lead designer Ricardo Bare said on Twitter that they are planning to add more HUD options. So hopefully there will be some options to let us tweak the HUD to the extent that we could in their last game, Dishonored.
I know I say this about most games, but I really do urge you to try playing Prey with no visible mission objectives. It’s an unusually open-ended game that’s just begging you to mess around and explore it. By paying attention to my surroundings, I’ve had little trouble figuring out where I am and where I should be going. And hey, there are maps everywhere!
The Talos I station has struck me as an unusually well thought-out place so far, and I’ve been having a lot of fun to just poking around and exploring. You don’t need a mission objective telling you where to go next. Go wherever you want.
Comments
10 responses to “If You’re Playing Prey, Try Turning Off Mission Objectives”
This is a smart idea. I always turn off those sort of bloody markers, they ruin adventure games. I dont mind if they tell you the rough area to go to, that’s fine. But when it tells you the exact spot, bugger that.
Can we cut it out with the “this UI feature gives you information so the correct way to play is to turn it off” posts? I swear it’s been every AAA game this year.
Not everyone is an Explorer-type.
Not even now, there’s an article that keeps coming up in searches for me from back when Splatoon was about to come out saying “the first thing you should do to make the game playable is turn gyro aiming off” which is just laughably wrong 😛
They can’t help themselves. Prey doesn’t have fast-travel, so they can’t tell you not to use it.
I’d argue against this. Not to be Devil’s Advocate, but the demo quickly started to bore me simply, because I didn’t know where to go after getting the first eye-stabbing upgrade.
Eye-stabbing isn’t any kind of emphatic adjective. It’s just that I couldn’t remember what the things were called.
Funny…..i often leave the objective on so i know where not to go if i don’t want to advance the story.
I’m exactly the same, I always feel like I’m going to miss out on something hidden if I don’t explore everywhere but the place they’re telling me to go
Imagine trying to play Witcher like this…no objective markers…far out!!! I’m sweating just thinking about how long it would take to do some missions.
Up until you are googling where to go…
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like these type of articles, then simply don’t click the link to read them. Everyone wins.