I think Dead Space's best achivement was making the gaming industry realize how much immersion can have an effect on a game. The lack of a hud, or the minimialistic hud really sells the third person game as a movie you control aspect of it. I've seen it in several games since, most recently Resident Evil 7. The first time i played DS1's demo i was floored when the camera panned back from the starting cutscene and it was just...you. You and this space station full of hell.
Say what you will about three. I loved them all.
Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
This stuff about DS3 isn't much of a surprise, the corporate meddling was tremendously obvious. The microtransactions and resource bullshit were definitely the most obvious, but throwing the previously-great weapon system out the window for an incredibly shitty weapon crafting system (which was reliant on the crappy resource system) was another big indicator. Then we had the crap where an ally from DS2 gets reduced to eyecandy love interest in a terrifically bad 3-way "love story". Then there was the tremendous lack of polish for the game in general, plus the requisite tacked-on multiplayer.
Personally, I'm amazed it took all the way until the third game for the meddling to get excruciatingly bad. EA doesn't seem to waste any time on that sort of thing, so it's a surprise we got a good second game at all.
The weapon crafting was badass, and the resources were a non-issue. By the end of the game, you had three bots that were constantly supplying you.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
Skull2185 on
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
This stuff about DS3 isn't much of a surprise, the corporate meddling was tremendously obvious. The microtransactions and resource bullshit were definitely the most obvious, but throwing the previously-great weapon system out the window for an incredibly shitty weapon crafting system (which was reliant on the crappy resource system) was another big indicator. Then we had the crap where an ally from DS2 gets reduced to eyecandy love interest in a terrifically bad 3-way "love story". Then there was the tremendous lack of polish for the game in general, plus the requisite tacked-on multiplayer.
Personally, I'm amazed it took all the way until the third game for the meddling to get excruciatingly bad. EA doesn't seem to waste any time on that sort of thing, so it's a surprise we got a good second game at all.
They got lucky in the first game, then placated EA by shunting most of the meddling off to it's own encapsulated thing. What we got for DS3 wasn't bad, though the cutscenes could have been improved with more Carver, since he was integral to the emotional payoff at the end. And the DLC should have been in the base game.
I ain't gonna touch the 'love triangle'.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The weapon crafting was badass, and the resources were a non-issue. By the end of the game, you had three bots that were constantly supplying you.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
The weapon crafting was crap. It was trivially easy to make overpowered weapons that just shredded anything, which ruined one of the cornerstone design elements of the gameplay (shooting limbs to cripple first). Not to mention that it also meant the neat iconic weapons from the earlier games which clearly had real effort put into them got replaced with a bunch of random shit that looked like junk. And the design response to knowing the player is going to have overpowered weapons constantly? Crank up enemy movement speed to an absurd extent, tossing any kind of dynamic tension in combat in the garbage.
Resource-wise, the problem was completely the opposite of not having enough resources, of any kind. Mountains of ammo and upgrades were everywhere, so there was no reason to conserve what you got and also completely ruined another feature of the prior games (not wasting resources stupidly). I hardly used the bots and reached the end of the game with a packed inventory with weapons that trivialized the combat, albeit an extremely dull inventory because it was full of two things: health packs and universal ammo.
Which I blame EA for more than the developers, because all of those issues have to do with EA shoehorning in garbage to try and sell microtransactions rather than the developers going "we should just gut everything that was really good about the last two games and replace it all with some really half-baked ideas".
Someday I need to replay 1 & 2, and then go in and actually finish 3. (As I recall, I was still up in the debris swarm; I was at some point where I was waiting for a tram, some big, nasty thing came into the room, and my only recourse was to run Benny Hill-like around the room waiting for the door to open; apparently, my weapon-crafting was not up to snuff ...)
The weapon crafting was badass, and the resources were a non-issue. By the end of the game, you had three bots that were constantly supplying you.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
The weapon crafting was crap. It was trivially easy to make overpowered weapons that just shredded anything, which ruined one of the cornerstone design elements of the gameplay (shooting limbs to cripple first). Not to mention that it also meant the neat iconic weapons from the earlier games which clearly had real effort put into them got replaced with a bunch of random shit that looked like junk. And the design response to knowing the player is going to have overpowered weapons constantly? Crank up enemy movement speed to an absurd extent, tossing any kind of dynamic tension in combat in the garbage.
Resource-wise, the problem was completely the opposite of not having enough resources, of any kind. Mountains of ammo and upgrades were everywhere, so there was no reason to conserve what you got and also completely ruined another feature of the prior games (not wasting resources stupidly). I hardly used the bots and reached the end of the game with a packed inventory with weapons that trivialized the combat, albeit an extremely dull inventory because it was full of two things: health packs and universal ammo.
Which I blame EA for more than the developers, because all of those issues have to do with EA shoehorning in garbage to try and sell microtransactions rather than the developers going "we should just gut everything that was really good about the last two games and replace it all with some really half-baked ideas".
In order to feel like a meaningful addition to a game, a weapon crafting system has to be sufficiently open and usable to allow players the feeling of "breaking the game," should they invest in the materials/time to do so. The material requirements being "grindy" isn't a thing that happened for the micros. Look at spell customization in say Morrowwind and the like. But adding a system to customize opens your game to trivialization, or you gate it or scale it to counter it and then it's unnecessary or a burden to players not wanting to build their own stuff, or google builds and the like to be able to function when the stock items just aren't up to snuff, etc. But the decision to trivialize the game by building a powerful weapon is up to and the fault of the user. Such is the pitfall of custom creation systems. IIRC, Dead Space 3 had the option to only use the classic universe options instead of going nuts with creation too? Been a while.
In all games, even if you play on hard, there's a dam point where even the natural progression of the player character makes things easier than they were before. Don't know what difficulty you played on, but that's also a factor. Making the player feel like they're gaining ground or becoming more powerful over time is a common theme. The better you are at games, the quicker you will break the dam and end up with all of the ammo and things. Sequels and familiarity with the enemies also speed this up. That's why they have to make the enemies stronger, faster, etc with each iteration of the game.
Trying to think of a game where the enemy growth was stagnant across sequels and drawing a blank atm.
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
The weapon crafting was badass, and the resources were a non-issue. By the end of the game, you had three bots that were constantly supplying you.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
The weapon crafting was crap. It was trivially easy to make overpowered weapons that just shredded anything, which ruined one of the cornerstone design elements of the gameplay (shooting limbs to cripple first). Not to mention that it also meant the neat iconic weapons from the earlier games which clearly had real effort put into them got replaced with a bunch of random shit that looked like junk. And the design response to knowing the player is going to have overpowered weapons constantly? Crank up enemy movement speed to an absurd extent, tossing any kind of dynamic tension in combat in the garbage.
Resource-wise, the problem was completely the opposite of not having enough resources, of any kind. Mountains of ammo and upgrades were everywhere, so there was no reason to conserve what you got and also completely ruined another feature of the prior games (not wasting resources stupidly). I hardly used the bots and reached the end of the game with a packed inventory with weapons that trivialized the combat, albeit an extremely dull inventory because it was full of two things: health packs and universal ammo.
Which I blame EA for more than the developers, because all of those issues have to do with EA shoehorning in garbage to try and sell microtransactions rather than the developers going "we should just gut everything that was really good about the last two games and replace it all with some really half-baked ideas".
In order to feel like a meaningful addition to a game, a weapon crafting system has to be sufficiently open and usable to allow players the feeling of "breaking the game," should they invest in the materials/time to do so. The material requirements being "grindy" isn't a thing that happened for the micros. Look at spell customization in say Morrowwind and the like. But adding a system to customize opens your game to trivialization, or you gate it or scale it to counter it and then it's unnecessary or a burden to players not wanting to build their own stuff, or google builds and the like to be able to function when the stock items just aren't up to snuff, etc. But the decision to trivialize the game by building a powerful weapon is up to and the fault of the user. Such is the pitfall of custom creation systems. IIRC, Dead Space 3 had the option to only use the classic universe options instead of going nuts with creation too? Been a while.
In all games, even if you play on hard, there's a dam point where even the natural progression of the player character makes things easier than they were before. Don't know what difficulty you played on, but that's also a factor. Making the player feel like they're gaining ground or becoming more powerful over time is a common theme. The better you are at games, the quicker you will break the dam and end up with all of the ammo and things. Sequels and familiarity with the enemies also speed this up. That's why they have to make the enemies stronger, faster, etc with each iteration of the game.
Trying to think of a game where the enemy growth was stagnant across sequels and drawing a blank atm.
Haha, no, pretty much anything but this. Blaming players for not "cooperating" with a poorly-designed crafting system? That's fairly absurd. In DS3, you could break the system in something like 2-3 hours, without even really setting out to do that. And the result is that you end up with a pretty boring shooter where you just hose everything with bullets and they fall over, with little challenge; that's a completely different tack from the first two games where making deliberate, aimed shots is a core feature of the gameplay. Crafting weapons is one thing, but if the system built for that can't make reasonably balanced weapons without crippling the player, it's a bad system. And DS3's weapon crafting was pretty terrible, as it lacked any kind of decent balance.
As far as enemy growth goes, there was a million things they could've done besides "crank up enemy speed". Yeah, the baseline necros should be the standard enemy, but just making them move faster to force the player to take damage is poor, lazy design, particularly since it was part of moving the game towards being a pretty standard shooter instead of keeping as unique as it was in the first two games. Not to mention the incredibly dull and bland human enemies.
Isaac becoming a powerhouse and slaughtering hordes of necromorphs is a staple of the series, absolutely, but DS1 and DS2 actually make you bother to earn that feeling, and thus it actually feels rewarding when you can stop cowering in corners so much and start obliterating hallways full of necros. In comparison, DS3 plays mostly as a tedious slog of pouring bullets downrange and everything falling over.
If people enjoyed the game, that's one thing, but DS3 was crap as a Dead Space game, which is apparently largely due to EA stepping in and forcing a bunch of crap on the developers that kept them from even being able to a decent Dead Space sequel.
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
I never did get around to DS3, don't have any opinions on it, except that Tau Volantis is an awesome name for a hostile planet. Just sounds good.
The weapon crafting was badass, and the resources were a non-issue. By the end of the game, you had three bots that were constantly supplying you.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
The weapon crafting was crap. It was trivially easy to make overpowered weapons that just shredded anything, which ruined one of the cornerstone design elements of the gameplay (shooting limbs to cripple first). Not to mention that it also meant the neat iconic weapons from the earlier games which clearly had real effort put into them got replaced with a bunch of random shit that looked like junk. And the design response to knowing the player is going to have overpowered weapons constantly? Crank up enemy movement speed to an absurd extent, tossing any kind of dynamic tension in combat in the garbage.
Resource-wise, the problem was completely the opposite of not having enough resources, of any kind. Mountains of ammo and upgrades were everywhere, so there was no reason to conserve what you got and also completely ruined another feature of the prior games (not wasting resources stupidly). I hardly used the bots and reached the end of the game with a packed inventory with weapons that trivialized the combat, albeit an extremely dull inventory because it was full of two things: health packs and universal ammo.
Which I blame EA for more than the developers, because all of those issues have to do with EA shoehorning in garbage to try and sell microtransactions rather than the developers going "we should just gut everything that was really good about the last two games and replace it all with some really half-baked ideas".
In order to feel like a meaningful addition to a game, a weapon crafting system has to be sufficiently open and usable to allow players the feeling of "breaking the game," should they invest in the materials/time to do so. The material requirements being "grindy" isn't a thing that happened for the micros. Look at spell customization in say Morrowwind and the like. But adding a system to customize opens your game to trivialization, or you gate it or scale it to counter it and then it's unnecessary or a burden to players not wanting to build their own stuff, or google builds and the like to be able to function when the stock items just aren't up to snuff, etc. But the decision to trivialize the game by building a powerful weapon is up to and the fault of the user. Such is the pitfall of custom creation systems. IIRC, Dead Space 3 had the option to only use the classic universe options instead of going nuts with creation too? Been a while.
In all games, even if you play on hard, there's a dam point where even the natural progression of the player character makes things easier than they were before. Don't know what difficulty you played on, but that's also a factor. Making the player feel like they're gaining ground or becoming more powerful over time is a common theme. The better you are at games, the quicker you will break the dam and end up with all of the ammo and things. Sequels and familiarity with the enemies also speed this up. That's why they have to make the enemies stronger, faster, etc with each iteration of the game.
Trying to think of a game where the enemy growth was stagnant across sequels and drawing a blank atm.
Haha, no, pretty much anything but this. Blaming players for not "cooperating" with a poorly-designed crafting system? That's fairly absurd. In DS3, you could break the system in something like 2-3 hours, without even really setting out to do that. And the result is that you end up with a pretty boring shooter where you just hose everything with bullets and they fall over, with little challenge; that's a completely different tack from the first two games where making deliberate, aimed shots is a core feature of the gameplay. Crafting weapons is one thing, but if the system built for that can't make reasonably balanced weapons without crippling the player, it's a bad system. And DS3's weapon crafting was pretty terrible, as it lacked any kind of decent balance.
As far as enemy growth goes, there was a million things they could've done besides "crank up enemy speed". Yeah, the baseline necros should be the standard enemy, but just making them move faster to force the player to take damage is poor, lazy design, particularly since it was part of moving the game towards being a pretty standard shooter instead of keeping as unique as it was in the first two games. Not to mention the incredibly dull and bland human enemies.
Isaac becoming a powerhouse and slaughtering hordes of necromorphs is a staple of the series, absolutely, but DS1 and DS2 actually make you bother to earn that feeling, and thus it actually feels rewarding when you can stop cowering in corners so much and start obliterating hallways full of necros. In comparison, DS3 plays mostly as a tedious slog of pouring bullets downrange and everything falling over.
If people enjoyed the game, that's one thing, but DS3 was crap as a Dead Space game, which is apparently largely due to EA stepping in and forcing a bunch of crap on the developers that kept them from even being able to a decent Dead Space sequel.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. On all of this.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
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chiasaur11Never doubt a raccoon.Do you think it's trademarked?Registered Userregular
I don't know, if they made the DS3 that they "wanted" it would have "failed" with respect to the volumes needed to sale vs cost even harder, imo.
Can't say that particularly matters to me from a player POV. Either way, it flopped hard enough to kill the series, so I'm not going to cry a river if it got a little nicer a headstone. And it went out on a bum note, which is worse. If you're going to kark it, best to at least set your own terms, right? More dignified that way.
I don't know, if they made the DS3 that they "wanted" it would have "failed" with respect to the volumes needed to sale vs cost even harder, imo.
Yeah, maybe not the most popular sentiment, but you are actually right. EA probably made the right call there in terms of their bottom line. But the better call would have been not to force multiplayer in at all. That being said, from what I played of it I thought the co-op mode was much higher quality then the majority of games and based on the trophies a decent amount of players at least tried it.
Though it would have gotten more play from me if it had split screen.
I will also say that there is a lot of revisionist reactions to the video on the internet at large. A lot of people saying that EA ruined the series by making it into an action game, but Dead Space was an action game since the first game. The horror is a theme, but it's definitely an Resident Evil 4 action game at the core.
Overall Dead Space 3 gets a bad rap. While I'd agree that it's not as good as the first two, especially the second one, which is the pinnacle of the RE4 style in terms of weapon / enemy design and encounter design, it's still way better then what Capcom was doing with RE5 and 6. The crafted weapons aren't as well balanced the designed weapons from the previous games, but it feels like the developers attempting something new to keep the series from getting stale. My biggest complaint is that they reduced the weapons you could hold from 4 to 2, so there is a reduction in terms of multi-weapon strategies.
The character writing is lack luster, but the overall plot is actually pretty stellar. They take the claustrophobic horror of the first two and go full cosmic horror with it. I mean the plot is basically At The Mountains Of Madness. Transitioning the Necromorphs into a much larger threat while still maintaining a sense of horror is an underrated achievement, and it's a satisfying climax to the series which is pretty rare for video game trilogies.
I don't know, if they made the DS3 that they "wanted" it would have "failed" with respect to the volumes needed to sale vs cost even harder, imo.
Can't say that particularly matters to me from a player POV. Either way, it flopped hard enough to kill the series, so I'm not going to cry a river if it got a little nicer a headstone. And it went out on a bum note, which is worse. If you're going to kark it, best to at least set your own terms, right? More dignified that way.
Indeed, it actually beat out Space: Above and Beyond in terms of a narrative hole to climb out of in the surprise event of a revival.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
I may be alone, but I think they made it pretty obvious where the fourth game would have to go, given how they ended Awakening.
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
I actually played coop through with a woman from the 2k games forums. The main problem with coop is that if you weren't playing as Carver, you really lost out on a lot of the cool parts and what made coop actually interesting in the first place. This was something they fixed in the DLC and there are some great moments in the DLC when playing it coop it should be said.
Player freedom is a double edged sword, and it tends to alienate those players who want a highly curated experience.
Every single open world game suffers from some players complaining that it ruins the pacing. Well, in the good open worlds, the pacing is up to the player.
Same thing with a crafting system. Yes, you could build a gamebreaking weapon, or you....don't have to. It's in your hands.
I dunno, some folks don't like being asked to participate in making the experience what they want. That's fine. Understandable. But I'm a guy who moseys through a game, and gets a little worried that i didn't fully explore that ridge. I'm the guy who picks a compass direction in fallout and walks to the end of the map. I like freedom.
Dead space 3 had a lot of problems. Crappy interpersonal narrative, yes. Fast necros, yup.
But it was by far my favorite in the series for taking the questions we had about the DS universe and making the answers truly amazing.
I like, but don't love the gameplay of DS3. I fucking ADORE the broader setting storyline/narrative.
curly haired boy on
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
Every single open world game suffers from some players complaining that it ruins the pacing. Well, the in good open worlds, the pacing is up to the player.
Same thing with a crafting system. Yes, you could build a gamebreaking weapon, or you....don't have to. It's in your hands.
Word. I eventually run out of patience with Open World games because they meander so much. "Ohmygawd, move the danged story along already," grumbles the big guy behind the keyboard (that's me).
Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The space graveyard at the beginning of Dead Space 3 was one of the best settings in the entire series.
Hell my problem with 2 was that the environments weren't that interesting, aside from one notable stint back to the Ishamura. Dead Space 3 had some really cool environment design.
The weapon-crafting system in DEAD SPACE 3 was great, easily the best part of the game. How can you not love a rivet-firing Minigun ?
The thing about the crafting system is that it was trivially easy to make something overpowered, thus making the combat dead easy and sucking all the fun out of the game design. After 3-4 hours of playing I had a machine gun that fired a spray of spikes that made every center-of-mass burst dismember anything, so there was zero challenge and zero tension to the combat.
"Shoot the limbs" was a signature element of the gameplay for the franchise, ditching it to trivialize the combat with crafted weapons turned the game into a pretty conventional and mediocre third-person shooter.
The space graveyard at the beginning of Dead Space 3 was one of the best settings in the entire series.
I think they made a mistake leading with that graveyard, because it was so awesome that I was hugely disappointed with everything that came after. Swapping the stunning orbital scenery for a bunch of icy walkways and cold corridors was a big, big step down, and you spend most of the game on the planet rather than in space.
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
I got the joy of playing carver for those and had no idea what I was in for. That shit was disturbing.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
I got the joy of playing carver for those and had no idea what I was in for. That shit was disturbing.
Yeah, that was pretty awesome. I need to go back and play his side sometime.
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
I got the joy of playing carver for those and had no idea what I was in for. That shit was disturbing.
Yeah, that was pretty awesome. I need to go back and play his side sometime.
I would totally do that for you if they make it backwards compatible on the bone.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
My favorite thing about DS3 was co-op horror. Hearing your buddy freak out over the headset at something you can't see is a very unsettling experience.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
I got the joy of playing carver for those and had no idea what I was in for. That shit was disturbing.
Yeah, that was pretty awesome. I need to go back and play his side sometime.
I would totally do that for you if they make it backwards compatible on the bone.
This thread being active gave me the itch to play again. Was sad to see that only the first game was backwards compatible.
After 3-4 hours of playing I had a machine gun that fired a spray of spikes that made every center-of-mass burst dismember anything, so there was zero challenge and zero tension to the combat.
"Shoot the limbs" was a signature element of the gameplay for the franchise, ditching it to trivialize the combat with crafted weapons turned the game into a pretty conventional and mediocre third-person shooter.
They didn't ditch it, you did.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
After 3-4 hours of playing I had a machine gun that fired a spray of spikes that made every center-of-mass burst dismember anything, so there was zero challenge and zero tension to the combat.
"Shoot the limbs" was a signature element of the gameplay for the franchise, ditching it to trivialize the combat with crafted weapons turned the game into a pretty conventional and mediocre third-person shooter.
They didn't ditch it, you did.
GL convincing people that min-maxing themselves out of a challenge is their own fault. I mentioned this before. lol
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
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Psychotic OneThe Lord of No PantsParts UnknownRegistered Userregular
The space graveyard at the beginning of Dead Space 3 was one of the best settings in the entire series.
Hell my problem with 2 was that the environments weren't that interesting, aside from one notable stint back to the Ishamura. Dead Space 3 had some really cool environment design.
Titan Elementary was probably one of the best original locations in DS2. But that chill down your spine when the tram stops at the Ishamura at THAT level makes just about everyone who played the first games blood run cold.
After 3-4 hours of playing I had a machine gun that fired a spray of spikes that made every center-of-mass burst dismember anything, so there was zero challenge and zero tension to the combat.
"Shoot the limbs" was a signature element of the gameplay for the franchise, ditching it to trivialize the combat with crafted weapons turned the game into a pretty conventional and mediocre third-person shooter.
They didn't ditch it, you did.
GL convincing people that min-maxing themselves out of a challenge is their own fault. I mentioned this before. lol
If a dev designs a combat system that makes a prior feature completely meaningless (and does it rather easily), then no, I didn't ditch anything. It's not my job to balance the game for the devs; if they can't balance a system, the system is shit and they shouldn't have bothered with it. Blaming players for using what the devs design but using it the "wrong" way is pretty incredibly absurd.
For the prior Dead Space games, you can have incredibly powerful weaponry by the end, but that's part of the power curve and there's actual thought and skill that goes into designing something like that; each weapon also ended up still performing a unique function for things like traps, crowd control, precision damage, etc, and there was an actual use for those options.
DS3's crafting system was a lazy pile of crap that tossed the curve out the window and then tries to make up for it by just cranking the enemy counts way up and then also making enemies all super-speedy compared to the prior two games. Which was entirely because the devs knew it wasn't a good weapon design system, but they had to come up with some way to try and jam some challenge back in there.
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That said, any DS4 that we get, if it ever materializes, has to end horribly even if somehow, someway, the win condition is used.
Say what you will about three. I loved them all.
Personally, I'm amazed it took all the way until the third game for the meddling to get excruciatingly bad. EA doesn't seem to waste any time on that sort of thing, so it's a surprise we got a good second game at all.
The bots also made the microtransactions a non-issue. I think they were slipped in there against EA wishes or something because there was never any need to actually buy anything.
I didn't play it much, bit I liked it. It was like L4D's PvP.
I ain't gonna touch the 'love triangle'.
The weapon crafting was crap. It was trivially easy to make overpowered weapons that just shredded anything, which ruined one of the cornerstone design elements of the gameplay (shooting limbs to cripple first). Not to mention that it also meant the neat iconic weapons from the earlier games which clearly had real effort put into them got replaced with a bunch of random shit that looked like junk. And the design response to knowing the player is going to have overpowered weapons constantly? Crank up enemy movement speed to an absurd extent, tossing any kind of dynamic tension in combat in the garbage.
Resource-wise, the problem was completely the opposite of not having enough resources, of any kind. Mountains of ammo and upgrades were everywhere, so there was no reason to conserve what you got and also completely ruined another feature of the prior games (not wasting resources stupidly). I hardly used the bots and reached the end of the game with a packed inventory with weapons that trivialized the combat, albeit an extremely dull inventory because it was full of two things: health packs and universal ammo.
Which I blame EA for more than the developers, because all of those issues have to do with EA shoehorning in garbage to try and sell microtransactions rather than the developers going "we should just gut everything that was really good about the last two games and replace it all with some really half-baked ideas".
In order to feel like a meaningful addition to a game, a weapon crafting system has to be sufficiently open and usable to allow players the feeling of "breaking the game," should they invest in the materials/time to do so. The material requirements being "grindy" isn't a thing that happened for the micros. Look at spell customization in say Morrowwind and the like. But adding a system to customize opens your game to trivialization, or you gate it or scale it to counter it and then it's unnecessary or a burden to players not wanting to build their own stuff, or google builds and the like to be able to function when the stock items just aren't up to snuff, etc. But the decision to trivialize the game by building a powerful weapon is up to and the fault of the user. Such is the pitfall of custom creation systems. IIRC, Dead Space 3 had the option to only use the classic universe options instead of going nuts with creation too? Been a while.
In all games, even if you play on hard, there's a dam point where even the natural progression of the player character makes things easier than they were before. Don't know what difficulty you played on, but that's also a factor. Making the player feel like they're gaining ground or becoming more powerful over time is a common theme. The better you are at games, the quicker you will break the dam and end up with all of the ammo and things. Sequels and familiarity with the enemies also speed this up. That's why they have to make the enemies stronger, faster, etc with each iteration of the game.
Trying to think of a game where the enemy growth was stagnant across sequels and drawing a blank atm.
Haha, no, pretty much anything but this. Blaming players for not "cooperating" with a poorly-designed crafting system? That's fairly absurd. In DS3, you could break the system in something like 2-3 hours, without even really setting out to do that. And the result is that you end up with a pretty boring shooter where you just hose everything with bullets and they fall over, with little challenge; that's a completely different tack from the first two games where making deliberate, aimed shots is a core feature of the gameplay. Crafting weapons is one thing, but if the system built for that can't make reasonably balanced weapons without crippling the player, it's a bad system. And DS3's weapon crafting was pretty terrible, as it lacked any kind of decent balance.
As far as enemy growth goes, there was a million things they could've done besides "crank up enemy speed". Yeah, the baseline necros should be the standard enemy, but just making them move faster to force the player to take damage is poor, lazy design, particularly since it was part of moving the game towards being a pretty standard shooter instead of keeping as unique as it was in the first two games. Not to mention the incredibly dull and bland human enemies.
Isaac becoming a powerhouse and slaughtering hordes of necromorphs is a staple of the series, absolutely, but DS1 and DS2 actually make you bother to earn that feeling, and thus it actually feels rewarding when you can stop cowering in corners so much and start obliterating hallways full of necros. In comparison, DS3 plays mostly as a tedious slog of pouring bullets downrange and everything falling over.
If people enjoyed the game, that's one thing, but DS3 was crap as a Dead Space game, which is apparently largely due to EA stepping in and forcing a bunch of crap on the developers that kept them from even being able to a decent Dead Space sequel.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. On all of this.
Can't say that particularly matters to me from a player POV. Either way, it flopped hard enough to kill the series, so I'm not going to cry a river if it got a little nicer a headstone. And it went out on a bum note, which is worse. If you're going to kark it, best to at least set your own terms, right? More dignified that way.
Why I fear the ocean.
Yeah, maybe not the most popular sentiment, but you are actually right. EA probably made the right call there in terms of their bottom line. But the better call would have been not to force multiplayer in at all. That being said, from what I played of it I thought the co-op mode was much higher quality then the majority of games and based on the trophies a decent amount of players at least tried it.
According to https://psnprofiles.com/trophies/1830-dead-space-3:
Though it would have gotten more play from me if it had split screen.
I will also say that there is a lot of revisionist reactions to the video on the internet at large. A lot of people saying that EA ruined the series by making it into an action game, but Dead Space was an action game since the first game. The horror is a theme, but it's definitely an Resident Evil 4 action game at the core.
Overall Dead Space 3 gets a bad rap. While I'd agree that it's not as good as the first two, especially the second one, which is the pinnacle of the RE4 style in terms of weapon / enemy design and encounter design, it's still way better then what Capcom was doing with RE5 and 6. The crafted weapons aren't as well balanced the designed weapons from the previous games, but it feels like the developers attempting something new to keep the series from getting stale. My biggest complaint is that they reduced the weapons you could hold from 4 to 2, so there is a reduction in terms of multi-weapon strategies.
The character writing is lack luster, but the overall plot is actually pretty stellar. They take the claustrophobic horror of the first two and go full cosmic horror with it. I mean the plot is basically At The Mountains Of Madness. Transitioning the Necromorphs into a much larger threat while still maintaining a sense of horror is an underrated achievement, and it's a satisfying climax to the series which is pretty rare for video game trilogies.
Indeed, it actually beat out Space: Above and Beyond in terms of a narrative hole to climb out of in the surprise event of a revival.
3 was my least favorite but playing it co-op was fun.
By far though Dead Space 2 was the high point for me and must have replayed that game about as much as resident evil 4.
Kind of interesting that someone spent the time to do this.
Every single open world game suffers from some players complaining that it ruins the pacing. Well, in the good open worlds, the pacing is up to the player.
Same thing with a crafting system. Yes, you could build a gamebreaking weapon, or you....don't have to. It's in your hands.
I dunno, some folks don't like being asked to participate in making the experience what they want. That's fine. Understandable. But I'm a guy who moseys through a game, and gets a little worried that i didn't fully explore that ridge. I'm the guy who picks a compass direction in fallout and walks to the end of the map. I like freedom.
Dead space 3 had a lot of problems. Crappy interpersonal narrative, yes. Fast necros, yup.
But it was by far my favorite in the series for taking the questions we had about the DS universe and making the answers truly amazing.
I like, but don't love the gameplay of DS3. I fucking ADORE the broader setting storyline/narrative.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Word. I eventually run out of patience with Open World games because they meander so much. "Ohmygawd, move the danged story along already," grumbles the big guy behind the keyboard (that's me).
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
Hell my problem with 2 was that the environments weren't that interesting, aside from one notable stint back to the Ishamura. Dead Space 3 had some really cool environment design.
The thing about the crafting system is that it was trivially easy to make something overpowered, thus making the combat dead easy and sucking all the fun out of the game design. After 3-4 hours of playing I had a machine gun that fired a spray of spikes that made every center-of-mass burst dismember anything, so there was zero challenge and zero tension to the combat.
"Shoot the limbs" was a signature element of the gameplay for the franchise, ditching it to trivialize the combat with crafted weapons turned the game into a pretty conventional and mediocre third-person shooter.
I think they made a mistake leading with that graveyard, because it was so awesome that I was hugely disappointed with everything that came after. Swapping the stunning orbital scenery for a bunch of icy walkways and cold corridors was a big, big step down, and you spend most of the game on the planet rather than in space.
The best was the co-op levels where you're like "things are pretty calm over here" and you'd look over at your partner to see they were fighting dozens of imaginary enemies.
I got the joy of playing carver for those and had no idea what I was in for. That shit was disturbing.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yeah, that was pretty awesome. I need to go back and play his side sometime.
I would totally do that for you if they make it backwards compatible on the bone.
pleasepaypreacher.net
This thread being active gave me the itch to play again. Was sad to see that only the first game was backwards compatible.
They didn't ditch it, you did.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
GL convincing people that min-maxing themselves out of a challenge is their own fault. I mentioned this before. lol
Titan Elementary was probably one of the best original locations in DS2. But that chill down your spine when the tram stops at the Ishamura at THAT level makes just about everyone who played the first games blood run cold.
If a dev designs a combat system that makes a prior feature completely meaningless (and does it rather easily), then no, I didn't ditch anything. It's not my job to balance the game for the devs; if they can't balance a system, the system is shit and they shouldn't have bothered with it. Blaming players for using what the devs design but using it the "wrong" way is pretty incredibly absurd.
For the prior Dead Space games, you can have incredibly powerful weaponry by the end, but that's part of the power curve and there's actual thought and skill that goes into designing something like that; each weapon also ended up still performing a unique function for things like traps, crowd control, precision damage, etc, and there was an actual use for those options.
DS3's crafting system was a lazy pile of crap that tossed the curve out the window and then tries to make up for it by just cranking the enemy counts way up and then also making enemies all super-speedy compared to the prior two games. Which was entirely because the devs knew it wasn't a good weapon design system, but they had to come up with some way to try and jam some challenge back in there.