Dead Space 3 Demo, As Experienced By Game Grumps

[Nonomori]

The second game was more of the same, except Isaac had finally finished his gobstobber from the first game. (Also, it had the eyeball machine which as far as I'm concerned is the closest the game has ever come to even being in the same room as horror.)

At that moment, I was no longer taking the story seriously. Exploding babies, "you owe me an eye", that bizarre eye poke machine, what a trip. Dead Space 2 is adorable, so close to Resident Evil 4 territory, and he barely knows.

too much ammo

Too much ammo? Methinks you're playing it a difficulty setting or two too low for what you want. On the higher settings, you'll be scrounging for every last Plasma Cutter charge. It adds a lot to the experience.

Good to know. I only played it once, and I never start on hard.

But I'm sorry, I expressed myself badly. "Too much combat". It's hard to feel terrified when you spend most of the game killing monsters with ridiculous weapons.

By the way, I could argue that Silent Hill 2 has too much ammo, but that never bothered me. I think the difficulty level isn't so important for a horror game. Amnesia is a very good example: the game isn't hard, but the player never gets too comfortable. It works.

 

[Silvanus]

But I'm sorry, I expressed myself badly. "Too much combat". It's hard to feel terrified when you spend most of the game killing monsters with ridiculous weapons.

By the way, I could argue that Silent Hill 2 has too much ammo, but that never bothered me. I think the difficulty level isn't so important for a horror game. Amnesia is a very good example: the game isn't hard, but the player never gets too comfortable. It works.

That's true of SH2-- there's something to be said of horror from unwieldy control systems. I got the impression it was at least partially on purpose; he's slow to respond to controls because he's an ordinary bloke, and swinging that plank of wood doesn't come naturally to him.

(Limited) mechanics of the game added a lot to the Resident Evils pre-Veronica, too, those static camera angles and the difficulty of moving well and controlling your environment.


Kinda lost in horror games like Dead Space, Fear series or Doom 3. You're playing as a bad-ass, responsive to the slightest touch and armoured to boot. Dead Space still does some damn impressive atmospherics, imo.

 

[ZLAY]

Jesus Christ, when that giant crab thing jumped out, and they started shooting at yellow parts on its legs it looked absolutely the same like couple of segments in Lost Planet...

 

[Vault101]

lets be honest here was dead space EVER honest to god scary?

 

[King Billi]

lets be honest here was dead space EVER honest to god scary?

I thought it was scary... Then again it would appear I don't have the first clue what "true" horror really is according to alot of people.

The bottom line is that what constitutes "scary" is incredibly subjective, I mean there are people out there legitimately terrified of clowns and such... I can't fathom why? but they still are.


P.S. Hmm? Perhaps thats what Dead Space needs in order to be considered scary again... more clowns?

 

[Sylveria]

I don't think Dead Space ever purported to be survival horror. From what I've seen, it's always been an action series with a fairly dark and grotesque aesthetic, but certainly not survival horror. Though this doesn't even seem to have the same grotesque visual style as the previous games.

 

[Nonomori]

But I'm sorry, I expressed myself badly. "Too much combat". It's hard to feel terrified when you spend most of the game killing monsters with ridiculous weapons.

By the way, I could argue that Silent Hill 2 has too much ammo, but that never bothered me. I think the difficulty level isn't so important for a horror game. Amnesia is a very good example: the game isn't hard, but the player never gets too comfortable. It works.

That's true of SH2-- there's something to be said of horror from unwieldy control systems. I got the impression it was at least partially on purpose; he's slow to respond to controls because he's an ordinary bloke, and swinging that plank of wood doesn't come naturally to him.

(Limited) mechanics of the game added a lot to the Resident Evils pre-Veronica, too, those static camera angles and the difficulty of moving well and controlling your environment.


Kinda lost in horror games like Dead Space, Fear series or Doom 3. You're playing as a bad-ass, responsive to the slightest touch and armoured to boot. Dead Space still does some damn impressive atmospherics, imo.

That's funny. I remember people complaining about the small field of view and slow camera of the first Dead Space. They "improved" it in the second game, and I also felt much lighter. Combat rolls seems a natural evolution for the franchise.

lets be honest here was dead space EVER honest to god scary?

I thought it was scary... Then again it would appear I don't have the first clue what "true" horror really is according to alot of people.

The bottom line is that what constitutes "scary" is incredibly subjective, I mean there are people out there legitimately terrified of clowns and such... I can't fathom why? but they still are.


P.S. Hmm? Perhaps thats what Dead Space needs in order to be considered scary again... more clowns?

I think you know what pleases you, and that's enough. I really dislike this talk about "true horror", or "true RPG", or "true gamer", or true anything. It's a really lazy way to disqualify other peoples opinions.

My "problem" with the horror aspect of Dead Space is that I'm not afraid of monsters, just ugly monsters, silly things that don't exist. And it's all about jump scares, loud noises and shooting in the dark; creatures everywhere, dropping from air vents (in the most predictable ways, because it happens all the time) and begging to be killed with cool weapons. Isaac, an engineer, looks more like a super soldier, slaying hordes of Necromorphs. At least Daniel (Amnesia, again) has a good reason to be afraid of the dark.

But my kind of horror (or my "true horror") isn't about monsters at all, or the fear of being caught by one. And that's why I praise Silent Hill 2 and Rule of Rose. Maybe I prefer reflection than escapism, because there's something endearingly weird with a game that basically says to the player:

Hey, dude, there are frickin monsters in this game, but real life world with his real life problems is much more frightening, you know?

Indeed, it is.

 

[Burst6]

lets be honest here was dead space EVER honest to god scary?

I thought it was scary... Then again it would appear I don't have the first clue what "true" horror really is according to alot of people.

The bottom line is that what constitutes "scary" is incredibly subjective, I mean there are people out there legitimately terrified of clowns and such... I can't fathom why? but they still are.


P.S. Hmm? Perhaps thats what Dead Space needs in order to be considered scary again... more clowns?

Actually being scary is less subjective than one would think. Every person has instincts that can be exploited to cause fear. These things come pre-built into the average human body. Things like low frequency music, proper lighting, certain ambient noises, alien entities, a feeling of helplessness. They all tap into primal human instincts to evoke fear.

Yeah people have phobias, but a good horror game doesn't rely on phobias. Games like Amnesia use lighting and sound to build a strong atmosphere that makes people cautious and uses monsters to drive the point home. Dead space never really did that. They did a decent job of making a good atmosphere for some of the game, but when the enemies started coming the fear started going away. Jump scares don't really scare as much as startle, and dead space uses jump scares almost exclusively. Jump scares can keep a lot of people entertained, but for me the game started to get funny. When i was walking down a hallway and saw a necromorph laying on the ground pretending to be dead all i could think was "awww how cute".

In the end i just got frustrated because this third person shooter was too dark and hitting monsters got annoying. I'm sort of glad dead space 3 is moving away from horror. I don't think the devs have what it takes to make something truly frightening, so focusing on customization and fighting cool disgusting enemies could be a good thing.

 

[Lady Larunai]

I really dont get whats so funny about them.. Ive tried a few videos and they just yell stupidly for no reason. Its just not funny...

 

[teebeeohh]

I am getting this for Christmas, or whenever it hits 30euros or less, looks like something I would enjoy in coop.

 

[BakaSmurf]

...I find it worrying how many people are lamenting the loss of Dead Space as a 'survival-horror' when from day one the franchise has had one boot planted firmly in 'horror' and the other in 'action.'

Seriously, Isaac is too responsive and powerful from the point that he initially picks up a Plasma Cutter for the game to be considered 'survival horror.' Sure, the game started leaning quite heavily towards 'action' with the second, but that came across as more of the natural evolution of the gameplay and Isaac himself as a character. In the first Isaac has no idea what's going on or what he's dealing with and thus the atmosphere is suitably tense, in the second he's much more familiar with the Necromorph threat [small](to the point that he explicitly states that he's "had a lot of practice" in dealing with them [I may be paraphrasing a bit here] in the beginning of the game)[/small] and so greater emphasis is placed on the action, and by the third he's already single-handedly wiped out entire Necromorph infestations twice before and thus, quite logically I might add, any paralysis-inducing fear he, or we the players, may have felt from the Necromorphs is going to be understandably minimalized by this point in the story knowing that we're playing as a man that has literally or damn near literally single-handedly completely wiped out two seperate extraterrestrial undead infestations with naught but a fucking power tool that has had its safety limiters disabled [small](I realize that at least one actual military-grade firearm is available to the player in the original, three in 2, but Isaac has only ever canonically been portrayed as using the Plasma Cutter, and very briefly, the Javelin Gun, one of which is a mining tool with the safeties disabled, and the other a surveying tool with the safeties disabled, neither intended to function as an instrument of death)[/small].

If the games did the Resident Evil thing and switched protagainists with every major installment I could see them maintaining the tense atmosphere for a while, but when you've got the same guy taking on an entire space zombie apocalypse all by his lonesome, twice, and both times coming out quite victorious... Well, it'd actually be quite illogical of them to not place greater emphasis on the action with each consecutive installment.

This is all assuming you don't play on the harder difficulties, or course. Zealot, Hard Core, and Impossible all arguably shift the game into survival horror mode, but I have no desire to get into that right now.

All that aside, haters gonna hate while the rest of us are going to get this game and enjoy it for what it is - an action-horror with much of the emphasis placed firmly on the action side of things.

 

[Rancid0ffspring]

I learnt 2 things from this video:

First, these Game Grump guys are idiots. Apparently shouting at stuff is comedy.

Second, having seen the game in action, & knowing that you don't have some intrusive RE4 style AI co-op partner, I will be getting this game... Once I'm not as poor as I currently am :/

 

[loa]

Dead space has always been an action game about killing things and upgrading your guns with high replayability.
It's resident evil 4 in space.
The third one holds true to that, the weapon customizing thing looks interesting, but everything that made dead space dead space which would be the zero g and vacuum areas and focus on exotic weaponry that cuts things which, you know, has been firmly established to be more effective than bullets has been toned down massively.

Now we fight human soldiers with assault rifles in open areas with chest high walls with the whole carefully aiming to cut off limbs aspect toned down drastically.
This game has lost a lot of its identity.
I hope this is just a very small portion of it and the rest is some actual dead space.

Also dodgeroll. I hope they remove that.
Quick dodgerolls don't make any sense given how heavily armored isaac is and generally don't fit the tone of dead space whatsoever.
If something flies at you, you can either sidestep, hide behind walls or telegrab/shoot it to avoid getting hit.
That's how it works in dead space. A dodgeroll doesn't fit the tone at all.

 

[Frankster]

lets be honest here was dead space EVER honest to god scary?

For me it was Tight corridors with flickering lights and monsters appearing suddenly to go ouga bouga in ye face really was a tense and horrific experience from my view.

But a little background: watched Aliens really young and it forever instilled a fear of being all alone in a spaceship with murderous aliens going around killing people. Whats worst is i also went to some kinda attraction based on Aliens where you and a group of 10 other tourists were escorted by a man in marine suit (armed with a gun that seemed real at the time..he even warned us not to get in his line of fire or we would be shot!) as you ran across a set of dark narrow corridors whilst people in aliens suits tried to grab the tourists to "eat them".
Even though i knew it was all make belief (especially when i saw the girl who got "grabbed" early on outside when the tour was over), it felt really real at the time and forever conditioned me to be scared of these kinda settings.
So when dead space games came out i knew they were practically made for me

So yeh, laugh it all you want folks, but i really did find Dead Space 1 and 2 scary.

Otherwise since ive started going on about my personal subjective view: DS3 has no chance of scaring me in the way the previous ones did on account of the setting change alone. I love snow so the cold setting actually cheers me rather then scares me. Im neutral about the coop though as i do love my coop games even if i acknowledge coop makes being scared a lot harder since there's no longer feeling of isolation.

 

[Vault101]

snip.

I think the thing with alot of us here is we are desensitized to game violence...so the gore and necromorphs don't really phase us after a while....I am not one of those people who enjoy horror or are hard to scare

to me Dead Space is like "Aliens" rather than "Alien" its not "scary" but its nerve wracking and intense

I learnt 2 things from this video:

First, these Game Grump guys are idiots. Apparently shouting at stuff is comedy.

Jontron..on of the guys is actually pretty good, (he does AVGN style game videos in his "jontron" show) I agree in that I find stuff like gamegrups just too unstructured to be enjoyable

I dont want to have to sit through jerking around to get to the funny stuff