Arkane Studios isn't just busy refining Dishonored 2 these days. At E3 2016, Arkane also showcased Prey's reboot for the first time and Bethesda garnered some criticism because of the game's apparent lack of any connection with previous Prey games, not to mention the ever-looming shadow of Human Head's cancelled Prey 2 game.
Bethesda's VP of PR and Marketing Pete Hines talked about this in an interview published by MCVUK. According to him, Arkane's Prey can simply silence the negative chatter around the game by virtue of eventually turning out great.
First of all, we absolutely looked at a whole host of other options, with perhaps calling it something else. We ended up on Prey because it fit the tone of the vibe of the thing that they are making. We didn’t tell the team that they had to have a portal gun or the same characters or stuff like that, so they were good with it.
For folks who may have played the original Prey a decade ago, they’re going to have to take this new one in and of itself, and not hold on to anything from the previous game. If you don’t know what Prey is, then it doesn’t matter. It is a cool name that captures the essence of what they’re making.
Our belief is that, regardless of which camp you fall in, ultimately we are going to get judged on what we put out. Not to bring up bad memories, but we cancelled a Doom game that was in development, that wasn’t living up to our expectations, and we started over with the game we shipped this year. Ultimately, whether or not that was a good idea was entirely judged by the quality of the product that came out. If it’s great, then nobody is talking about the cancelled title, or asking why we didn’t call it Doom 4. None of that matters when it’s a really good game. The same holds true for Prey.
Prey won't be a horror game. Rather, it has been described as a blend of shooter and RPG in person view much like Dishonored, with an added psychological twist as well as the unique space station setting. Prey, now powered by CRYENGINE, also features a big contiguous space instead of Dishonored 2's set of missions; it should be out in 2017 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.