Dead Space 3 Catch-All

kuddles wrote:
mooosicle wrote:

Wasn't the girl supposed to be a cyclops?

That's what makes playing as the co-op character so awesome. The game is much more difficult for you because your screen has no depth perception.

But you won't notice without a 3D TV. What a neat Easter Egg!

Wait, does that mean everyone in the future have 9 inch lab grown peens to match their epeens?

SallyNasty wrote:

If your suit can withstand the cold of space - an ice planet shouldn't be a problem.

No, I mean ice crusting on the suit and jamming up the works, weighing you down until you're a statue.

nel e nel wrote:

Ha! This will be the 2nd time this week I've answered the "What about Ellie's eye?" question.

They established way back in '08 during the viral marketing of DS1 that they have the technology to grow limbs for injured miners.

http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/No_K...

Users take on the perspective of a psychologically deteriorating George Greggs, an organ replacement technician in his lab on the USG Ishimura's medical bay, where body parts are grown for injured crew members.

Anyone else ever stop to check that room out? It's creepy. A wall of glass jars: Big ones with arms and legs, smaller ones with hands and feet, and rows of tiny ones with an eyeball or a finger in each.

Well, I think they're fingers.

gains wrote:
SallyNasty wrote:

If your suit can withstand the cold of space - an ice planet shouldn't be a problem.

No, I mean ice crusting on the suit and jamming up the works, weighing you down until you're a statue.

Well that is actually a cool idea. I am sure they will do something neat.

PA Report had a write up that discussed the co-op a bit, as well as story and even the weapons being combined together now, instead of simply having fire/alt+fire.

gains wrote:
nel e nel wrote:

Ha! This will be the 2nd time this week I've answered the "What about Ellie's eye?" question.

They established way back in '08 during the viral marketing of DS1 that they have the technology to grow limbs for injured miners.

http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/No_K...

Users take on the perspective of a psychologically deteriorating George Greggs, an organ replacement technician in his lab on the USG Ishimura's medical bay, where body parts are grown for injured crew members.

Anyone else ever stop to check that room out? It's creepy. A wall of glass jars: Big ones with arms and legs, smaller ones with hands and feet, and rows of tiny ones with an eyeball or a finger in each.

Well, I think they're fingers.

Yeah, I played through both of the 'rooms' on that ARG. It was pretty cool as George's story kinda outlined the outbreak on the Ishimura, and the other story was a - I think - Unitology listening station that alerted the higher ups when the miners uncovered the Marker on the planet's surface.

EA: Dead Space 3 got co-op because Dead Space is too scary to play alone
From the original Gamasutra article:

For example, in examining the audience for the Dead Space brand, a study revealed that one limitation that might be preventing the critically-acclaimed title from breaking out into the wider mainstream in a big way was that it was just too scary for many people to play alone. Audiences enjoy horror and thrills, but jump-out-of-your-seat experiences are commonly shared with friends or significant others.

"That's how co-op was introduced," Miele says. "Cooperative play was the ticket; that is the key need and motivation for consumers. I genuinely believe that there's a deep strategy that isn't just about a checklist of, 'this game did quite well and it had co-op in it, so let's put co-op in this.'"

She also believes the Visceral team had a "phenomenal" time working on the co-op, which has added an additional dimension of gameplay for Dead Space.

Cooperative play was the ticket; that is the key need and motivation for consumers

IMAGE(http://www.pucemoose.com/pics/tableflip.gif)

I was skeptical of Dead Space 2 when they first previewed it, so I'm willing to give it a chance, but I'm very worried about these changes. First, the reason I loved Dead Space was precisely because it was a shooter that wasn't two bros with unlimited ammo shooting humans from cover while shouting sick burns at each other. Second, there has yet to be a game I have played that claimed SP and co-op options are both viable that isn't horribly compromised for either one or both of those options.

Scratched wrote:

EA: Dead Space 3 got co-op because Dead Space is too scary to play alone
From the original Gamasutra article:

For example, in examining the audience for the Dead Space brand, a study revealed that one limitation that might be preventing the critically-acclaimed title from breaking out into the wider mainstream in a big way was that it was just too scary for many people to play alone. Audiences enjoy horror and thrills, but jump-out-of-your-seat experiences are commonly shared with friends or significant others.

"That's how co-op was introduced," Miele says. "Cooperative play was the ticket; that is the key need and motivation for consumers. I genuinely believe that there's a deep strategy that isn't just about a checklist of, 'this game did quite well and it had co-op in it, so let's put co-op in this.'"

She also believes the Visceral team had a "phenomenal" time working on the co-op, which has added an additional dimension of gameplay for Dead Space.

Ehhhh...I'd take these quotes with a grain of salt. I perused both links, and the OXM was basically just this excerpt only, with a barrage of replies from people with OCD talking about how they alphabetize their collections on the bookshelf. The actual Gamasutra article is a pretty interesting look at how market testing has traditionally been done, and how Miele and her team are trying to change that up to make game development and gamer feedback see more eye to eye.

I hear they added multiplayer to Mass Effect 3 because the core action gameplay was way too awesome.

I've been thinking about this a bit. I'm sure DS3 will be a decent enough game, but I can't get past the point that it will be fundamentally different to DS1 and DS2 in some factors that I consider key to "the game that I call Dead Space". There were already some big changes from DS1 to DS2, such as being linear rather than going around a deck, much more high adrenalin action and much more contact with other characters (and DS1 did have a fair amount of characters).

It seems to me that coop eliminates certain possibilities for atmosphere, although from the sounds of it Visceral have put some thought into the concept that it's putting in to replace those losses with the hallucinations, and presumable coop puzzles, etc. I remember from DS1 the moments of quiet. The "twinkle twinkle little star" area where you walk through where a ritual mass suicide took place, which sets up the area for when you return when that previous safe area is exploited by the necromorphs. I remember going on a long horizontal lift and a shape coming out of the darkness at me fast, which turned out to be a hanging corpse. When I think of coop I think of being yelled at to finish a puzzle faster, an incessant ping where they point out how to do the puzzle, my coop buddy running through a level instead of smelling the roses (and there's tons of detail in the DS1/DS2 worlds), or killing everything in an encounter because they've memorised the spawn locations or that there's a 'best' way to fight an area.

It's not that coop is bad, it just brings a different set of expectations to the game.

I know it's being said in a very scholarly way but it still smells like sell-out to me. They are actively working to make a horror game less scary for more money.

Weller from Dead Space: Extraction said it best:

"Man up, buttercup!"

And now, hyperbole theater . . .
Coming soon, Amnesia the Dark Descent, now with anti-scare early warning system! A quiet and polite voice will speak up five seconds before anything startling or grotesque appears on screen to warn you to cover your eyes. Now even tiny children and frail old people can enjoy the illusion of being scared without being scared! As an additional feature, the game will not launch until you have turned on every light in the house and started a marathon viewing of the "Alf" DVD box set in the neighboring room.

Amnesia ASEWS Edition. See what all the fuss is about, without all that fuss!

gains wrote:

I know it's being said in a very scholarly way but it still smells like sell-out to me. They are actively working to make a horror game less scary for more money.

To a certain extent, that's the nature of the beast. EA is a company that seeks to make money. (Paging Gameguru)

Something that irks me isn't that a coop DS game exists, there's earlier coop titles and a whole load of other offshoots for the series, it's that they insist on changing the core branch of the series and I assume they don't think a coop game is strong enough to bring in the numbers by itself. In the back of my mind every time EA add in such an online features I can't help thinking it's due to pressure from EA rather than because the developer wanted it, although that isn't impossible. I just imagine that someone at EA did the sums that DS3 with coop would be more profitable than developing DS3 as pure singleplayer and another dedicated DS coop game, and so it came to be.

I guess correct me if I'm wrong but I thought during E3 they said that if you don't play co-op there WON'T be a 2nd AI guy there with you. So...what's the issue?

Apparently in both SP and coop they're going to be playing tricks with you that your buddy/non-buddy is a hallucination, which continues the idea with Nicole from DS1/DS2 who presumably is now exorcised from Isaac's mind, but the impression I got is that there will be someone/something with you all the time. As I said, it does sound like they've put more thought into it than just bolting on another player. No idea quite what the differences between the player presence and the AI presence, but I guess that will be detailed in the coming months.

Hallucination theory has been debunked by the developers on the neogaf thread. (There's a whole lot of answers to people's concerns in that thread, but I've already posted the links above.) Based on what I've heard on post-E3 podcasts this week, it sounds like the single player experience will be more akin to Ellie & Stross in DS2: you'll interact with them, but they'll be on the other side of a ravine/fence/etc.

And as karmajay said, it's completely optional. No reason to act like your cornflakes have been urinated on. And complaints about DS2 being linear is kinda bunk. DS1 was just as linear, and had a fair amount of backtracking to boot.

Here's footage of the single player:

http://videos.videogameszone.de/vide...

I'll be as pissed off as I like about the fact that "Alone in the Dark" is now "The Buddy System in the Dark." For me, horror that features isolation is the best kind.

As I've said, they've already got my $60 so it's not killing the sale for me. I'll probably only play it in co-op experimentally (and hopefully with a friend who screams like a 4 year old girl when frightened)

So, Lobster. How high is your singing voice?

Preeeetty high. 360 or PS3?

360.

PS3 never did win me away. The last time I said to myself "Why not? Let's pick one up" was the week that they got so badly hacked they had to take everything down. That soured me on the idea so I didn't bite, even when GS dropped the price after the outage to try to lure me back.

OK, cool beans.

Please note that if co-op does indeed spoil the horror atmosphere I reserve the right to stop and say "Waitaminnit! Did you hear that?" and then play a sound clip from The Exorcist into my headset mic every three minutes.

Hell, I should do that with every game. DIY survival horror.

Full episode of GTTV dedicated to Dead Space 3. It looks like it's the E3 demo in full, with both solo and co-op gameplay:

http://www.gametrailers.com/episode/...

Well, I took a look at the video and I just can't get myself as excited as I was with the first two. It's just all action, little scares, no dark, silent, creepy environments and necro's that can use weapons? I'm sure this will be a great action game, but I'm very saddened by the way this series has headed.

EA Says Dead Space 3 Has To Sell 5 Million To Survive

EA wrote:

In general we're thinking about how we make this a more broadly appealing franchise, because ultimately you need to get to audience sizes of around five million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space.

Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them.

f*cking ridiculous.

MeatMan wrote:

EA Says Dead Space 3 Has To Sell 5 Million To Survive

EA wrote:

In general we're thinking about how we make this a more broadly appealing franchise, because ultimately you need to get to audience sizes of around five million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space.

Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them.

f*cking ridiculous.

How much truth is there to that though? I realize certain companies have gone in the tank as of recent, but is it one of those things where you kind of dig yourself into a hole due to the scale and pay you set yourself? There are so many other smaller companies that can succeed by making much less in terms of numbers. It's all about the people wanting to make big bucks and the rich just getting greedy. Games now should be cheaper to make than ever.

Two questions:

1: What did DS1 and DS2 sell each?
2: What did each of the spin-off titles sell?

I just typed "dead space" into the site everyone doubts the credibility of, and it said the total of everything in it's database was 6.53m. Even if you take that story a low estimate as they don't have the whole story (digital), that 5m target is very ambitious.

To move into "talking random rubbish generally" territory, I'd mark this down as a sign of AAA heading into bad times, or some mismanagement of Visceral/Dead Space that they need such a figure, although they say that's

...to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space.

"Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them.

and not the break even point. If Dead Space hasn't been pulling down numbers like that before, it seems to me stupidly optimistic that a sequel will make it.

MeatMan wrote:

EA Says Dead Space 3 Has To Sell 5 Million To Survive

f*cking ridiculous.

A mere decade ago, selling a million copies was amazing. Now they have to sell 5 times that for it to even be considered worthwhile? Insane.

Scratched wrote:

Two questions:

1: What did DS1 and DS2 sell each?
2: What did each of the spin-off titles sell?

I just typed "dead space" into the site everyone doubts the credibility of, and it said the total of everything in it's database was 6.53m. Even if you take that story a low estimate as they don't have the whole story (digital), that 5m target is very ambitious.

To move into "talking random rubbish generally" territory, I'd mark this down as a sign of AAA heading into bad times, or some mismanagement of Visceral/Dead Space that they need such a figure, although they say that's

...to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space.

"Anything less than that and it becomes quite difficult financially given how expensive it is to make games and market them.

and not the break even point. If Dead Space hasn't been pulling down numbers like that before, it seems to me stupidly optimistic that a sequel will make it.

Well according to wikipedia, as of August 2010, DS1 had sold 2 million, and DS2 sold 2 million in it's first week. So it's probably a safe guess to say they've sold ~5 million between the 2 of them at this point. Considering the mixed reception DS3 is getting right now, my guess is they'll be lucky if they sell the same as DS2.

As far as mismanagement is concerned, wouldn't that fall on EA? I mean, Visceral turned out a sequel (as well as Dante's Inferno, FWIW) in just over 2 years time. A sequel that many folks felt had much higher production values. And they are owned by EA.