EA’s E3 2012 press conference seemed prime for backlash, what with the DLC-promoting intro and the stale showing of some of the games, but the negative reception that surprised me most was directed at Dead Space 3. That franchise has kind of a soft-spot in my heart and I felt that many other gamers shared my affection but after the co-op footage showed off a new direction for the game, things kind of went south in the public’s eyes.
Visceral Games just put out a whopping 20 minutes of Dead Space 3 gameplay footage, so you can decide for yourself on whether or not Dead Space 3 is changing for the worse.
So, what do you guys think? It’s just a first glance, but how is DS3 shaping up for you? Will the third title cap off an excellent series? What do you think about the fact that EA has said that Dead Space 3 needs to sell five million copies to keep the franchise going?
This is pretty much exactly what they showed behind closed doors at E3, and my opinion hasn’t changed, it looks awesome. Forget the haters, the game won’t be any different for us single player guys. Also, I want some of whatever EA is having, because that must be some good shit. More broadly appealing? The Dead Space games already sell tons of copies and make them a good profit, and haven’t they heard the saying “make something for everyone and you end up making something for no one”?
I feel that they’re trading what made Dead Space remarkable and trading it for mass appeal. I think they did it in Dead Space 2 as well, but not to the extent that’s shown here. It looks like if Resident Evil 5 took place in space and had a disfigurement engine and to me that makes for a $20 game, while a Dead Space that would actually focus on survival and horror like I felt the first game did but with some polish added to the atmosphere and horror elements then we could have something very interesting.
It kind of scares me that in the industry we have more over-the-shoulder action shooters than we know what to do with and less than a handful of good horror games, but the good horror franchises are just opting into becoming over-the-shoulder action shooters like the rest. Where Isaac Clarke started out as an engineer fighting for his life in a muted fear that created an extremely immersive and frightening atmosphere, he’s now taken the John McClane treatment of becoming an over-the-top action hero who I have a hard time believing can really see anything as a threat now with everything that he’s survived.
I’m sure that Dead Space 3 will be a fun action game but I won’t be buying it. I’ve already played plenty of games like it and nothing about it looks interesting to me personally. I’m giving it a hard time because of how the franchise started, and that’s not the most fair way to prejudge an upcoming title, but seeing the transformation that this series has taken really represents a lot of what I don’t like about the game industry right now: take any franchise, start making big sequels, and make each one more unstylishly, ridiculously action-packed than the last for the sake of mass appeal. If everybody only made games for mass appeal then we wouldn’t have anything interesting anymore, just spam.
I just want to see a decent horror franchise pop up again and keep to a steady path of horror. People say that when you make a sequel you need to raise the stakes, but that doesn’t always mean that everything has to keep getting a bigger scale to it. Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 (and hell, even Silent Hill 3) pretty much stayed in the same realm of danger and tension and all three of them were damn good horror games. They were sequels that didn’t raise the stakes, they just improved on eachother, and regardless of if Silent Hill 3 wasn’t as good as 2 it was still really good.
Games are getting less diverse and I feel like Dead Space is a harbinger of what’s to come for the industry’s creativity when it comes to big titles. I’m not liking what I’m seeing.