Prey’s Original Ending Didn’t Quite Go As Planned

Bethesda released Prey earlier this year, and it proved to be a much different game than what we saw on the Xbox 360 a few years back, leaning just as much on survival as it does first-person action.

But the ending for the game, which many of you have seen by now, is an interesting one, mainly because that’s not the one that the development team originally decided to roll with. Obsidian co-founder Chris Avellone recently sat down with the team at SugarBombed to talk about the project, and how decisions were made to change its ending around.

There are spoilers ahead, so don’t move forward unless you’ve already beaten the game, or don’t mind hearing how it ended up.

OK, still here? Here goes.

Avellone noted, “It was not the original ending for the game, it came in later in development. For me (and we discussed this at Arkane), the key thing to be careful of is disrupting the player’s attachment to their avatar.”

This is in reference to the ending indicating that you aren’t, in fact, the lead character you thought you would be, but rather a captive alien who’s being treated to a number of experiments to see if things can be diplomatic with humans or not. How you play obviously affects this.

Avellone actually compared this to the Spider-Man comics, in which he noted that the Spider-Man that readers followed for more than two decades actually turned out to be a clone. Most people weren’t fans of this story twist, however, so Avellone and company wanted to make sure they treaded carefully in Prey.

“If you ever choose to do this in a narrative, you need to be careful and take precautions (I feel Prey did these things) was tie the reactivity in the game to that ending, so your actions still mattered (at least in the drafts I saw), but the danger of being disassociated from your avatar was a very real thing and should be treated very, very carefully,” says Avellone.

So there you have it. It could’ve gone a lot differently, but things still turned out pretty well for the game – well, depending on your perspective, obviously.

Prey is available now for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC.