Prey tech tips: how to change FOV and disable intros

The new Prey [official site] is out and I am not here to tell you how it is. No, both Adam and John are currently Preying away, giggling while they roll around a space station as a mug. Me, I'm here with a few little tech tweaks that might make it merrier for you. Such as: a field of view setting isn't officially in the options menu just yet but you can tweak it yourself if you don't mind plunging your hands into config files. Also: yes, you can make it skip all those the many screens of logos and notices at launch. Those two spacemen have also sent me some brief impressions of how it runs for them.

First up, field of view. That's the setting for how wide a view the game simulates. Increasing it lets you see more of the world at the sides, and decreasing obviously the opposite. It's a setting which can use a bit of calibration to get a view which feels natural, depending on how big your screen is, how close you sit, and whether you just like seeing more. Bethesda say that an menu option for changing FOV is coming, but "During the final phases of testing, we found some bugs we would like to address before officially supporting it". In the meantime, they do explain how to fiddle with it:

• To enable FOV, edit the game.cfg file in Notepad. The file is located in the root Prey folder in your Save Games folder (likely c:\users\Saved Games\Arkane Studios\Prey )
• Look for cl_hfov = 85.5656
• 85 is the default horizontal FOV setting, but it can be replaced with values up to 120. (Note – some of the issues we are working on are more noticeable with higher FOV.)

If you want to disable the unskippable splash screens which play out every time the game launches, you can rename the video files. This Steam Community post explains that you should mosey on over to the steamapps\common\Prey\GameSDK\Videos folder and change the file extension of these four .bk2 files to .bak (or whatever you want - .bak is just a handy reminder they're backups):

Ryzen_Bumper.bk2
ArkaneLogoAnim_Redux_1080p2997_ST-16LUFS.bk2
Bethesda_logo_anim_white.bk2
LegalScreens.bk2

The location of that steamapps will change depending on where you installed Steam as well as Prey itself.

Both AMD and Nvidia have launched new graphics card drivers tailored for Prey too. AMD say their new driver, which bears the remarkable name Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.5.1, brings "up to 4.7% performance improvement" in Prey compared to an earlier driver. Nvidia don't give numbers but say the GeForce Game Ready 382.05 WHQL drivers are prepped to play Prey. I think AMD win the ridiculous name award there.

Prey does not have a demo on PC, unlike on console, though the developers suggest that, er, you should buy it on Steam and get a refund if you don't dig it.

Adam is planning to toss up some early impressions of Prey today, while John works to tell us Wot He Thinks. In the meantime, they've given me some brief thoughts on how it runs. John sez:

"For me on my 1080 GTX the game runs perfectly without a single hitch, on full spec at an unbroken 60fps. Apart from hacking the very constricted FOV I've not needed to fiddle at all, which is a rare treat."

Adam adds:

"I've been playing on the default 'High' visual settings in 1920*1080, with a GTX 960, and apart from a slight pause when entering a new area with lots of architecture to render, it's smooth no matter what's happening on screen. Explosions, mobs of mimics, falling through a grating and into heavy machinery - it's all good. If I bump it down to 'Medium' I lose that little pause and the only real difference I notice is with the more detailed textures. Framerate is between 50 and 60, though rarely dips and isn't stuttering from lower to higher consistently."

Alec chimed in with "it runs real nice". Then, to show off, added "100-140 frames per sec maxed out at 3440x1440 on a 1080 Ti (if I turn off vsync)."

Hark at you, sir.