I've never played a Dead Space game. I can't really handle horror games, but that's a different thing.
I'll never understand why publishers mess with established IPs. Dead Space already had an audience; why not double-down on the things that they like, make them better, make a better game? That is how you grow an audience; Dark Souls is a perfect example of a niche game growing into a pretty broad market.
Instead you get a half-assed horror game, half-assed action game that does neither thing very well and everyone walks away dissatisfied and annoyed.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
Dead Space is an EA franchise, which basically sums up the entirety of what happened with DS3. Horror games, as a rule, do not sell tens of millions of copies the way an idiot publisher like EA wants, so they push it to be more like franchises that do reach those numbers. Which obviously causes shitloads of problems, when you're talking about a franchise like Dead Space which was built so much on trying not to ape your standard 3rd-person action-oriented shooter.
If the game isn't selling at least 6-8 million copies, that's a "loss" to EA and they couldn't give a shit about the franchise anyway, so they didn't really see a problem stepping in and fucking it up.
EDIT: Haha, I did not watch that video before saying any of that, pretty (sad) funny to see that coming back at me like two minutes into the video.
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.
Or, since the original weapon blueprints were in the game, you could just roll with the original, well-balanced weapons?
Every game with a difficulty slider is giving you control over balance; the crafting system expands on that.
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Haha, okay, you win, it's not crappy game design, it's that I don't play video games the right way. I guess it really is dumb when people do things like exploit bugs or use cheats to break a game. Wait, except I didn't do any of that, I just played the exact game the devs gave me.
But I guess it's still somehow my fault that it was a shitty crafting system, nevermind that it was, by their own admission, a cheapo, incomplete version of what they intended.
+1
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Sirialisof the Halite Throne.Registered 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.
They could have let you walk through the entire Ishimura without a single necro and it would still have been a hair raising experience.
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Haha, okay, you win, it's not crappy game design, it's that I don't play video games the right way. I guess it really is dumb when people do things like exploit bugs or use cheats to break a game. Wait, except I didn't do any of that, I just played the exact game the devs gave me.
But I guess it's still somehow my fault that it was a shitty crafting system, nevermind that it was, by their own admission, a cheapo, incomplete version of what they intended.
Broken builds have been around in games for years. Is a game bad because you can spec your character to be unkillable or create a super good skill synergy?
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
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Dark Raven XLaugh hard, run fast,be kindRegistered Userregular
One thing I never really got; in terms of lore, was the spine indicator on Isaac's suit something that monitored his vital signs, or just showing the integrity of the suit itself?
Presumably its done that way so you can keep an eye on people's status when working in vacuum?
Oh brilliant
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Psychotic OneThe Lord of No PantsParts UnknownRegistered Userregular
One thing I never really got; in terms of lore, was the spine indicator on Isaac's suit something that monitored his vital signs, or just showing the integrity of the suit itself?
Presumably its done that way so you can keep an eye on people's status when working in vacuum?
Essentially its a health monitor. Isaac was wearing one even in the asylum and I don't think they'd be overly concerned about the integrity of his straight jacket. But the at a glance is this person OK is the most straight forward reason for it. Assume hit by debris and knocked out. This lets others around you know if you are ok, critical, or dying at a glance.
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Haha, okay, you win, it's not crappy game design, it's that I don't play video games the right way. I guess it really is dumb when people do things like exploit bugs or use cheats to break a game. Wait, except I didn't do any of that, I just played the exact game the devs gave me.
But I guess it's still somehow my fault that it was a shitty crafting system, nevermind that it was, by their own admission, a cheapo, incomplete version of what they intended.
Broken builds have been around in games for years. Is a game bad because you can spec your character to be unkillable or create a super good skill synergy?
This is not that. You are being unfair. It was trivially straightforward to have one gun be machine gun with alt fire grenade, and the other gun be shotgun with alt fire traps. With that setup, not optimized in any way, you can fire center mass for the rest of the game and are in fact encouraged to do so. The number of enemies, toughness of their limbs, and speed of their attacks does not make the first game's playstyle very valuable.
It's like you're saying "Just never pick up the Tanooki suit! Why are you even breaking the game by using it??" As if he's doing something deviant or against the spirit of the thing.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
One thing I never really got; in terms of lore, was the spine indicator on Isaac's suit something that monitored his vital signs, or just showing the integrity of the suit itself?
Presumably its done that way so you can keep an eye on people's status when working in vacuum?
Essentially its a health monitor. Isaac was wearing one even in the asylum and I don't think they'd be overly concerned about the integrity of his straight jacket. But the at a glance is this person OK is the most straight forward reason for it. Assume hit by debris and knocked out. This lets others around you know if you are ok, critical, or dying at a glance.
Given that the first two games bother with things like putting a backstory or explanation on most things, I'm pretty sure the in-universe explanation is that rig color makes it easy for somebody else to tell if you are hurt or not. In DS2, the one guy can tell Isaac is hurt by the color of his rig, so it's definitely a matter of being injured rather than suit integrity.
Not such a big deal on the surface of a planet where you can simply see if somebody is badly hurt, but definitely something useful in a place where most people are in space suits and you can't really tell anything by looking at them, short of them being impaled on something.
One thing I never really got; in terms of lore, was the spine indicator on Isaac's suit something that monitored his vital signs, or just showing the integrity of the suit itself?
Presumably its done that way so you can keep an eye on people's status when working in vacuum?
Essentially its a health monitor. Isaac was wearing one even in the asylum and I don't think they'd be overly concerned about the integrity of his straight jacket. But the at a glance is this person OK is the most straight forward reason for it. Assume hit by debris and knocked out. This lets others around you know if you are ok, critical, or dying at a glance.
Given that the first two games bother with things like putting a backstory or explanation on most things, I'm pretty sure the in-universe explanation is that rig color makes it easy for somebody else to tell if you are hurt or not. In DS2, the one guy can tell Isaac is hurt by the color of his rig, so it's definitely a matter of being injured rather than suit integrity.
Not such a big deal on the surface of a planet where you can simply see if somebody is badly hurt, but definitely something useful in a place where most people are in space suits and you can't really tell anything by looking at them, short of them being impaled on something.
It's a hard thing to watch grandpas life meter go down a little a day...
Dead Space is an EA franchise, which basically sums up the entirety of what happened with DS3. Horror games, as a rule, do not sell tens of millions of copies the way an idiot publisher like EA wants, so they push it to be more like franchises that do reach those numbers. Which obviously causes shitloads of problems, when you're talking about a franchise like Dead Space which was built so much on trying not to ape your standard 3rd-person action-oriented shooter.
If the game isn't selling at least 6-8 million copies, that's a "loss" to EA and they couldn't give a shit about the franchise anyway, so they didn't really see a problem stepping in and fucking it up.
EDIT: Haha, I did not watch that video before saying any of that, pretty (sad) funny to see that coming back at me like two minutes into the video.
Like it or not EA is a big company and they want to get a good return on the games they make otherwise they will cease to exist as a company. Even if they are making a profit they are considering the opportunity costs of having a team work on a game that isn't as profitable as they would like.
I actually think the "executive meddling" in Dead Space 3 probably came from people closer to the dev team in the company who legitimately wanted the game to succeed and knew that DS3 was the last shot before higher ups canned the franchise.
EA put a lot of money in marketing Dead Space, hoping to establish a new franchise, but they never sold what they deserved for how high quality those games were. From a business perspective EA did the right thing, just sucks as a fan of the series.
Dead Space is an EA franchise, which basically sums up the entirety of what happened with DS3. Horror games, as a rule, do not sell tens of millions of copies the way an idiot publisher like EA wants, so they push it to be more like franchises that do reach those numbers. Which obviously causes shitloads of problems, when you're talking about a franchise like Dead Space which was built so much on trying not to ape your standard 3rd-person action-oriented shooter.
If the game isn't selling at least 6-8 million copies, that's a "loss" to EA and they couldn't give a shit about the franchise anyway, so they didn't really see a problem stepping in and fucking it up.
EDIT: Haha, I did not watch that video before saying any of that, pretty (sad) funny to see that coming back at me like two minutes into the video.
Like it or not EA is a big company and they want to get a good return on the games they make otherwise they will cease to exist as a company. Even if they are making a profit they are considering the opportunity costs of having a team work on a game that isn't as profitable as they would like.
I actually think the "executive meddling" in Dead Space 3 probably came from people closer to the dev team in the company who legitimately want the game to succeed and knew that DS3 was the last shoot before higher ups canned the franchise.
EA put a lot of money in marketing Dead Space, hoping to establish a new franchise, but they never sold what they deserved for how high quality those games were. From a business perspective EA did the right thing, just sucks a fan of the series.
No, I completely agree, companies exist to make money. EA is a shit company, but it's still a company and it's bottom line is to make money.
But it was still EA's fault from the start, seeing as they budgeted a horror franchise to become a mega-seller and that virtually never happens, especially not a new horror franchise. And because EA is driven entirely by the corporate mindset, nobody could pull the plug because nobody in charge wanted to admit they screwed up.
If EA had applied some actual brains to the franchise, they would've started it as a lower-budget franchise that was less risky and easier to make a profit from, but the big publishers have been too idiotic for years to remember that the best way to make big, successful franchises is to let them start smaller and then make them big later, instead of the prevailing all-or-nothing approach where a franchise is either a huge success or a massive failure.
The real surprise is that a second, much less a third, game was allowed to be made, because there sequels that got axed for selling millions more copies than DS1 did.
*Drinks directly from whisky bottle while reading this thread*
Hey, theres hope. System Shock 3 is actually happening.
Has anyone been following the progress of Prey ?
That's touting itself as a spiritual successor to SS, but I don't want to see too many videos as I don't want to spoil too much if I decide to get it in May.
I enjoyed DS3 but I suppose I'm part of the problem. My first DS was DS2 which included more action and voice acting for Isaac. It's a damn shame because I actually enjoyed the coop campaign with a buddy but you can tell DS3 felt cheaper than DS2. Hopefully, RE7 will encourage more developers to do sci fi horror games.
Started a new playthrough of DS1 on XBone last night. Was holding off until all three were on back compat so I could do a trilogy run. I think all three are really fantastic games, but the first one is a particularly amazing example of stellar game design IMO.
I really love this franchise so much... wish EA didn't abandon it
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
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FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
Have you played SYSTEM SHOCK 2 ? DS1 is an updated version of that game, and if you're that big of a fan then you would probably enjoy SS2. SS2 does have more ordinary FPS combat, tho, without the requirement to always target appendages.
Have you played SYSTEM SHOCK 2 ? DS1 is an updated version of that game, and if you're that big of a fan then you would probably enjoy SS2. SS2 does have more ordinary FPS combat, tho, without the requirement to always target appendages.
Eh I'd say Dead Space is more Resident Evil than System Shock. Though I'm one of the few people who wasn't a fan of the evolution of the shock style of games.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
Dead Space was a great franchise and the third may have not been great but the the second game still remains one of my favorite games of all time.
I seriously must have played that game in double digits from start to end.
To me it felt like resident evil 4, with that blend of science fiction and lovecraftian horror that binded with great pacing and some memorable sequences.
I can see why in the third they went from space to ice environments. The space stuff was awesome and yes perhaps it should have stayed there but when you have say films like The Thing or the story At The Mountains of Madness by H.P Lovecraft, you can capture isolation and fear in a cold unliving tundra as much as the cold blackness of space when done right.
Regardless that now Deadspace is effectively dead and a reboot may one day or never happen it's great to see the comments on this thread and it's got me thinking......"I need to play Dead Space again."
+1
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AegeriTiny wee bacteriumsPlateau of LengRegistered Userregular
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.
Or, since the original weapon blueprints were in the game, you could just roll with the original, well-balanced weapons?
Every game with a difficulty slider is giving you control over balance; the crafting system expands on that.
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Your argument is extremely terrible. Yes, it is their problem they designed a weaponcrafting system that trivializes the game after a few hours of gameplay. It's because it's simple to do completely unintentionally.
Given that a lot of rewards and similar tie into weapon crafting, there is literally no good reason to assume the game wasn't encouraging players to use it as much as possible.
EA is shutting down Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space, the publisher said today. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and move to a different studio.
“Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe,” EA’s Patrick Söderlund said in a blog post. “In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.”
Söderlund added that Visceral will be “ramping down and closing” and that “we’re in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA.”
EA is shutting down Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space, the publisher said today. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and move to a different studio.
“Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe,” EA’s Patrick Söderlund said in a blog post. “In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.”
Söderlund added that Visceral will be “ramping down and closing” and that “we’re in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA.”
EA has had a quiet year as far as saying / doing stupid shit and here we are at last. It bothers me that they're taking a dump on story-driven games like this, which is really a roundabout way of attacking single-player games. EA has previously talked about multiplayer being 'better' for business.
Psychotic OneThe Lord of No PantsParts UnknownRegistered Userregular
I was hoping they would let them go back and polish up the trilogy for an HD release or at the very least reboot the series for a new story. Let V get back to what they did best. But EA did the EA thing and made them do stuff out of their wheel house then took them to the mass grave behind the headquarters for a quiet execution. Hope the studio and its devs finds life somewhere else or under a new name. Loved their work but who didn't see this coming with all the EA Corporate hands in their cookie jar.
Posts
I've never played a Dead Space game. I can't really handle horror games, but that's a different thing.
I'll never understand why publishers mess with established IPs. Dead Space already had an audience; why not double-down on the things that they like, make them better, make a better game? That is how you grow an audience; Dark Souls is a perfect example of a niche game growing into a pretty broad market.
Instead you get a half-assed horror game, half-assed action game that does neither thing very well and everyone walks away dissatisfied and annoyed.
If the game isn't selling at least 6-8 million copies, that's a "loss" to EA and they couldn't give a shit about the franchise anyway, so they didn't really see a problem stepping in and fucking it up.
EDIT: Haha, I did not watch that video before saying any of that, pretty (sad) funny to see that coming back at me like two minutes into the video.
Or, since the original weapon blueprints were in the game, you could just roll with the original, well-balanced weapons?
Every game with a difficulty slider is giving you control over balance; the crafting system expands on that.
You're abdicating responsibility for building your gamebreakingly good gun.
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Haha, okay, you win, it's not crappy game design, it's that I don't play video games the right way. I guess it really is dumb when people do things like exploit bugs or use cheats to break a game. Wait, except I didn't do any of that, I just played the exact game the devs gave me.
But I guess it's still somehow my fault that it was a shitty crafting system, nevermind that it was, by their own admission, a cheapo, incomplete version of what they intended.
They could have let you walk through the entire Ishimura without a single necro and it would still have been a hair raising experience.
Broken builds have been around in games for years. Is a game bad because you can spec your character to be unkillable or create a super good skill synergy?
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
Presumably its done that way so you can keep an eye on people's status when working in vacuum?
Essentially its a health monitor. Isaac was wearing one even in the asylum and I don't think they'd be overly concerned about the integrity of his straight jacket. But the at a glance is this person OK is the most straight forward reason for it. Assume hit by debris and knocked out. This lets others around you know if you are ok, critical, or dying at a glance.
This is not that. You are being unfair. It was trivially straightforward to have one gun be machine gun with alt fire grenade, and the other gun be shotgun with alt fire traps. With that setup, not optimized in any way, you can fire center mass for the rest of the game and are in fact encouraged to do so. The number of enemies, toughness of their limbs, and speed of their attacks does not make the first game's playstyle very valuable.
It's like you're saying "Just never pick up the Tanooki suit! Why are you even breaking the game by using it??" As if he's doing something deviant or against the spirit of the thing.
Given that the first two games bother with things like putting a backstory or explanation on most things, I'm pretty sure the in-universe explanation is that rig color makes it easy for somebody else to tell if you are hurt or not. In DS2, the one guy can tell Isaac is hurt by the color of his rig, so it's definitely a matter of being injured rather than suit integrity.
Not such a big deal on the surface of a planet where you can simply see if somebody is badly hurt, but definitely something useful in a place where most people are in space suits and you can't really tell anything by looking at them, short of them being impaled on something.
It's a hard thing to watch grandpas life meter go down a little a day...
Like it or not EA is a big company and they want to get a good return on the games they make otherwise they will cease to exist as a company. Even if they are making a profit they are considering the opportunity costs of having a team work on a game that isn't as profitable as they would like.
I actually think the "executive meddling" in Dead Space 3 probably came from people closer to the dev team in the company who legitimately wanted the game to succeed and knew that DS3 was the last shot before higher ups canned the franchise.
EA put a lot of money in marketing Dead Space, hoping to establish a new franchise, but they never sold what they deserved for how high quality those games were. From a business perspective EA did the right thing, just sucks as a fan of the series.
Hey, theres hope. System Shock 3 is actually happening.
No, I completely agree, companies exist to make money. EA is a shit company, but it's still a company and it's bottom line is to make money.
But it was still EA's fault from the start, seeing as they budgeted a horror franchise to become a mega-seller and that virtually never happens, especially not a new horror franchise. And because EA is driven entirely by the corporate mindset, nobody could pull the plug because nobody in charge wanted to admit they screwed up.
If EA had applied some actual brains to the franchise, they would've started it as a lower-budget franchise that was less risky and easier to make a profit from, but the big publishers have been too idiotic for years to remember that the best way to make big, successful franchises is to let them start smaller and then make them big later, instead of the prevailing all-or-nothing approach where a franchise is either a huge success or a massive failure.
The real surprise is that a second, much less a third, game was allowed to be made, because there sequels that got axed for selling millions more copies than DS1 did.
Has anyone been following the progress of Prey ?
That's touting itself as a spiritual successor to SS, but I don't want to see too many videos as I don't want to spoil too much if I decide to get it in May.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I'm sorry, was that meant to be a negative?
To me yeah, I just feel they are soul less compared to the system shock 2 games they are emulating.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Game is definitely in top 3 of games (that I know comes out this year) so far.
My Backloggery
They can also be purchased digitally.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
I really love this franchise so much... wish EA didn't abandon it
Eh I'd say Dead Space is more Resident Evil than System Shock. Though I'm one of the few people who wasn't a fan of the evolution of the shock style of games.
pleasepaypreacher.net
I seriously must have played that game in double digits from start to end.
To me it felt like resident evil 4, with that blend of science fiction and lovecraftian horror that binded with great pacing and some memorable sequences.
I can see why in the third they went from space to ice environments. The space stuff was awesome and yes perhaps it should have stayed there but when you have say films like The Thing or the story At The Mountains of Madness by H.P Lovecraft, you can capture isolation and fear in a cold unliving tundra as much as the cold blackness of space when done right.
Regardless that now Deadspace is effectively dead and a reboot may one day or never happen it's great to see the comments on this thread and it's got me thinking......"I need to play Dead Space again."
Your argument is extremely terrible. Yes, it is their problem they designed a weaponcrafting system that trivializes the game after a few hours of gameplay. It's because it's simple to do completely unintentionally.
Given that a lot of rewards and similar tie into weapon crafting, there is literally no good reason to assume the game wasn't encouraging players to use it as much as possible.
Source
I bet the chucklefuck focus test group that EA used complained that it wasn't open-world... RIP in peace Visceral
:sad:
It was.