What changes do you think will reinvigorate the Dead Space franchise?

[al4674]

I think people give Dead Space 3 too much flak. The game was every bit as scary, disturbing and atmospheric as the previous ones. Sure, it did have shooting sequences - but there were very few and they were very short. Saying that DS3 was in any way shooterized is, imo, a gross overexaggeration. I played it on impossible mode from the get go I was one the edge throughout the game.

You can criticize the crafting system, as it decreased the need to dismember enemies, however I felt that the crafting system encouraged creative problem solving, when your current weapons would no longer cut it (pun intended).

The trilogy is a solid and more of that will be enough for me.

 

[IBlackKiteI]

C'mon, we all know DS is effectively a stagnant cash cow by now and any kind of revitalizing is hugely unlikely. At best it'll be a Battlefield-esque situation where each installment continues to essentially be the last one with some improvements here and there, the Dead Space we have now is almost without a doubt 90% of the Dead Space we'll ever get.

If some changes were made though, I reckon when it comes down to it Dead Space just needs to go back to being a creepy, atmospheric, immersive, fairly open and adventure-y survival horror shooter. Dead Space 1 was to me one of the best balancing acts of horror with action, it's downright creepy throughout and frightening at points while having a brutal in your face style of combat and eerie transitions from outright action to lonely spookiness nothing else has really matched. The original had its flaws but it had a number of things and a general feel about it that I don't think any other game has ever really come close to, but it was lost as levels became more linear, characters and situations became more bland and the tension, general creepiness and scare factor took too much of a backseat to straight up action in later installments. Dead Space is in kind of a weird place now. If you want a solid third person shooter you might as well play Gears of War, Mass Effect 3 and others, if you want a damn good horror game and not much else you can reach for Amnesia, Outlast and others, but if you want something that's an effective balance of both you can play Dead Space 1, and not much else. Sure we've got stuff like the Metro and STALKER series and every game now seems to try to throw in a scary moment or enemy or two now, but I feel the original Dead Space hit that sweet spot right in the middle of horror and action, with enough openness to have you wandering a little and enough linearity to keep you and the game focused, and I think having lost that there's little keeping Dead Space truly interesting or above the crowd now.

 

[infohippie]

Nothing. I think it is over, done. It should have been over after DS2. Come up with new IP, developers! No need to franchise everything. Tell a story, a proper story with a beginning, middle, and end, and leave it at that. Don't beat it into the ground.

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

Isn't that a bit... actiony though? Not that action is bad, far from it, but it's not really scary.

I might go so far as to say that you can't have horror without tightly controlled, read: scripted, gameplay. So many elements must be controlled! The sound, the lighting, the pacing; all stuff that's hard enough for a human creator to set up, let alone a machine.

Then again I suppose there is the AI Director in the Left 4 Dead franchise and that does a pretty good job, although the hunter that leaps on you as you're trying to find gubbins is more thrilling than chilling. I imagine that is about the best you could do with AI driven content.

It is not jsut for enemies, it also defines what kind of hazards you face. On the normal difficulty the director rolls one curve ball to throw at you and will reroll one extra bad curve ball while in high difficulties the director rolls 3 curve balls to throw at you. An example will be say Isaac have to restore power to the building to move on, on one situation he will simply face a wave of necros on normal, on hard he may deal with the said necro wave followed by a complication (Like his rig's interface suddenly got a shortage, locking out item usage for a moment, or a damaged statsis generator means Stasis costs twice as much power or worst yet the environment is out to get him from falling debris to gas pockets that ingite which harms you more than it harms the necromorph.

 

[Qvar]

I think people give Dead Space 3 too much flak. The game was every bit as scary, disturbing and atmospheric as the previous ones. Etc etc

HAHA no. The only disturbing thing in that game were the guys in blue at the end of the game that went all "huehuehue", and even then it was more so because they were ridicolously dangerous compared to the rest of the monsters, not because they'd put you in scary situations.

Why the game wasn't (as) scary as previous Dead Space:

1. Enemies were too easy to kill. No I'm not saying "make every enemy a tank". In fact, enemies with tons of hp kill the terror because you get to see them for a looong while doing not much meanwhile you kill them. The game started with some easy-peasy human npcs IIRC, and by now everybody knew how to face the bird-looking weirdos.

2. For gods sake, horror-games developers, if you have to do just ONE thing of what I will say here, it's this: STOP SHOWING WHICH ENEMY WILL SCARE ME NEXT. Seriously, this is the worst mistake ever in a horror game, and I see it in pretty much 90% of games. They build suspense, they make those sounds telling you that something is coming... Oh, there it is, looking you from a window at a safe distance, not even threatening. Probably doing some ridicolous animation that will send your terror back to sleep. By the time it bursts through a door or something you'll probably be thinking "I'll torn this mofo to pieces", not "Mommy I'm so scared of that funny-looking thing".

3. Too damn much open and daylight spaces. No(t enough) claustrophobia, no(t enough) corridors where you don't see a thing and anythigncould be lurking rigth there, just that you haven't paid attention.

4. No baby/child necromorphs. Ok there's a lore reason for this. Still, it gave an extremely creepy touch to DS and DS2.

5. You are not alone. You have a bazillon people with you. No "Dead" Space anymore.

6. Hell, not even "Space" anymore. Space is scary. The void, the emptyness, the deafness, the incomunication... Sure, freezing to death sucks too, but that's something we can easily imagine any day we got out our front door at winter without enough clothes. Dying a slow death endlessly drifting thought the void, not so much.

7. No schizophreniac drama anymore, unless you're playing cooperative. Mental illnesses are scary. Specially if it's you who is (suposed to be) suffering it (or not).

8. Related to point 2, no real scares anymore. Just jump-scare when the 2091934th enemy comes from the snow under your feet or some vent system (really who built those? Somebody wshould tell him a couple of things).

9. General inconsistencies regarding the objectives of the markers. As in "I finally came to the conclusion that the marker in the first game wanted X but now this game says that they are Y and that would mean ¬X, but that's impossible because...", making the history sort of bland and a cheap excuse for milking dollars. Which isn't good for the playing mood.

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

I think people give Dead Space 3 too much flak. The game was every bit as scary, disturbing and atmospheric as the previous ones. Etc etc

5. You are not alone. You have a bazillon people with you. No "Dead" Space anymore.

8. Related to point 2, no real scares anymore. Just jump-scare when the 2091934th enemy comes from the snow under your feet or some vent system (really who built those? Somebody wshould tell him a couple of things).

Having people with you is as much as a danger as a boon. They got their own personalities, motives and none of them good. A good example of a horror experience for a team experiences would be cutthroat caverns where the main theme is "Without Teamwork you will never survive, without treachery you will never win". So having to backstab your partner before they backstab you would be another way to up the survival horror ante. That is what I loved about Dead Money, your partners may not be gunning for the money but their personality flaws are bad enough that treading poorly will make your hardcore ironman playthrough end badly because your personality rubbed them the wrong way.

Scares should be coupled with situation being constantly fubar and not because of plot reasons, hence the slight "random factor".

 

[Qvar]

Having people with you is as much as a danger as a boon. They got their own personalities, motives and none of them good. A good example of a horror experience for a team experiences would be cutthroat caverns where the main theme is "Without Teamwork you will never survive, without treachery you will never win". So having to backstab your partner before they backstab you would be another way to up the survival horror ante. That is what I loved about Dead Money, your partners may not be gunning for the money but their personality flaws are bad enough that treading poorly will make your hardcore ironman playthrough end badly because your personality rubbed them the wrong way.

Scares should be coupled with situation being constantly fubar and not because of plot reasons, hence the slight "random factor".

Sure, it could work, and other games make it so. But at DS3 you already know how it goes well enough for it to be scary: Ellie is obviously a good person, her new boyfriend (Norton) is a jealous guy and will most-likely hold anything he can against you, and Danik... Well, he's pretty much the card-carrying villain. The only query remaining was Carver, who half-way throught the game makes clear that rather sympatizes with the "united we survive" idea (if you didn't know already that he's the co-op character).

Mind you, I'm not saying that DS3 was a bad game. In fact I liked it. I say that it was no terror game.