• The Design of Dead Space - Game Maker's Toolkit (Pt1)
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[video=youtube;m5A0qttazXo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5A0qttazXo[/video]
I still think the first game is the best in the series despite the more sophisticated core gameplay in the sequels, for a lot of the reasons the video mentions and a couple that I hope come up in the next two videos: specifically the direction the game's story (and how it told that story) went from Dead Space 2 onwards; and how Dead Space 3 closed the loop on that with how all of its combat encounters are designed, along with the core changes to all enemies and certain weapons creating a worse meta than the One Gun problem from the first game. In the meanwhile, the main thing that worked about DS1 and DS2 both is the generous grace period that nearly all the enemies give you, and which you can create. You can see him run into a better position straight past a necromorph while it does nothing except get uncomfortably close to the camera, and several more which lurch towards him also doing very little. If you look closely at this part, you can see the Slasher hasn't started an attack animation, it's just tracking Isaac until he runs past [t]https://dl.dropbox.com/s/nywauk4q6gn1eiu/lull.PNG?dl=0[/t] Those brainfarts gave you time to size up an enemy and its incoming friends, admire their design and then start taking them apart all in the same scond. Then you get even more of it with a successful dismemberment of any limb, a good hit to the body with a strong weapon, explosions or high impact weapons like the Contact Beam, Javelin Gun or Force Gun knocking enemies prone altogether and of course stasis. That to me is why the Stalker encounters in Dead Space 2 were downright magical for playing with the enemy life cycle of 'spawn from vent > menace player > attack aggressively' that carried the entire first game and why they were just redundant when they finally showed up in Dead Space 3 where that initial grace was done away with and opportunities to extend it were greatly reduced. Every enemy behaved like a less subtle Stalker because they all began sprinting on sight of the player and had a much higher stun threshold which fewer tools could overcome before they reached you, usually just killing the enemy outright.
[QUOTE=Mericet;52145931]I still think the first game is the best in the series despite the more sophisticated core gameplay in the sequels, for a lot of the reasons the video mentions and a couple that I hope come up in the next two videos: specifically the direction the game's story (and how it told that story) went from Dead Space 2 onwards; and how Dead Space 3 closed the loop on that with how all of its combat encounters are designed, along with the core changes to all enemies and certain weapons creating a worse meta than the One Gun problem from the first game. In the meanwhile, the main thing that worked about DS1 and DS2 both is the generous grace period that nearly all the enemies give you, and which you can create. You can see him run into a better position straight past a necromorph while it does nothing except get uncomfortably close to the camera, and several more which lurch towards him also doing very little. If you look closely at this part, you can see the Slasher hasn't started an attack animation, it's just tracking Isaac until he runs past [t]https://dl.dropbox.com/s/nywauk4q6gn1eiu/lull.PNG?dl=0[/t] Those brainfarts gave you time to size up an enemy and its incoming friends, admire their design and then start taking them apart all in the same scond. Then you get even more of it with a successful dismemberment of any limb, a good hit to the body with a strong weapon, explosions or high impact weapons like the Contact Beam, Javelin Gun or Force Gun knocking enemies prone altogether and of course stasis. That to me is why the Stalker encounters in Dead Space 2 were downright magical for playing with the enemy life cycle of 'spawn from vent > menace player > attack aggressively' that carried the entire first game and why they were just redundant when they finally showed up in Dead Space 3 where that initial grace was done away with and opportunities to extend it were greatly reduced. Every enemy behaved like a less subtle Stalker because they all began sprinting on sight of the player and had a much higher stun threshold which fewer tools could overcome before they reached you, usually just killing the enemy outright.[/QUOTE] Pretty much. For me the biggest fear factor in the first Dead Space was the extremely short lived, but slow shambling of most of the necromorphs. They drop in and get their bearings before attacking. Rarely did they ever outright sprint at you. Most of them would take a second to start their attack and in that quick second you have time to really see just how gruesome and creepy they really are. DS1 felt a lot like The Thing, DS2 being a spiritual successor, and DS3 being the shitty remake of The Thing. It felt like the enemies in DS1 were actually intelligent, figuring out their surroundings before they try to attack. It's enhanced even further on the harder difficulties because [I]they jump into vents to follow you around to other rooms.[/I] Those extremely little details in the encounters with them really speak volumes for how well the game did its job in shaping a terrifying atmosphere. Apart from everything else that felt plain wrong with DS3, I never considered it was the fact that every enemy just sprints at you, regardless of their own survival. After you mentioned that, it really made sense to me. It feels like you could shoot an endless stream of lead down a hallway and they'd all still come running to you. Even the more slow encounters, like when the game focuses on groups of necromorphs dropping from the ceiling they've clung to, there's nothing special about the reveals. It's just the same generic enemy type with a new skin. DS3 also seriously lacked interesting and engaging enemy variety. DS2 had a [I]surprisingly[/I] good pacing for enemy variety and when to bring them in. When I think about the first encounter with those freaky as shit baby things that screech and jump all over you I think of the moment that sold me on DS2. Just like with Stalkers, they didn't overdo when all these different and unique enemies show up. And their encounters are perfectly placed to bring out a lot of tension in the atmosphere. In DS3 it felt like there was hardly any variety at all considering every enemy just runs at you. The only real moment that felt stressful was anything that had a forced sense of urgency. In DS3 it feels like they took the very few, niche moments that most players talked about and based almost 4/5 of the game around it. What made the regenerators cool in DS1 and DS2 was the fact they felt like they belonged. In DS1 you just have to escape a myriad of rooms, then move a bunch of bunk beds in the next encounter, then lure it to the afterburner of a shuttle engine to destroy it for good in the last encounter. Each encounter, perfectly placed and sculpted to feel like it belongs. DS2 did just as good with it. The sense of urgency coming from having to hack all those doors. Completely vulnerable while you do it and hoping your stasis lasted long enough. It kept you on your toes the ENTIRE time, and again, it felt like it belonged. In DS3....? There's like, what, 5 of them that swarm the tram station? There's a sense of urgency in that situation, but it's coming from the wrong source. In the previous games the sense of urgency came down to your own ability to actually perform some kind of task that was an established mechanic in the game universe. Remembering the path you took to get to a room to easily backtrack, using kinesis to quickly move objects and create a path, using stasis and hacking doors to buy time. The encounters in DS1 and DS2 depended [I]entirely[/I] on individual player skill and situational awareness, the sense of urgency came from your own confidence. It was tense as hell. In DS3 the sense of urgency doesn't come from any of that. Your only "skill" is how much you can spam stasis while waiting around for a train to arrive in a set amount of time. There's nothing tense about it. It's annoying. DS3 basically took the parts that were fantastic in DS1 and DS2 and condensed them, then completely reversed what made them great. That's where the real fault of the game is.
Incidentally, Resident Evil 4 did something similar; enemies would stand around you, not always attacking immediately unless the subtle dynamic difficulty inclined them to be really pissy (this same youtuber has a video about that too), and they'd encircle and surround you before they really began giving you hell.
I still stand by my head canon that the events of DS3 were dreamed by Isaac on drugs while he was held in the hospital right before the events of DS2 :v:
Just been replaying Dead Space on PC because of this video and it still stands up to this day. FOV is a bit tight but it's manageable. If you go on PC gaming wiki you can download the PC mouse fix to lessen the really jank mouse acceleration.
Number 2 had the right balance of Action and Horror for me it basically went downhill after that, still loved the first 2 though, shame the 3rd basically was shit.
3 would have worked as a spinoff or something, but the complete lateral shift from kinda spooky to straight action didn't work as an actual Dead Space game. Still one of my favorite series, either way.
I would have liked to explore the actual universe of Dead Space, the necromorphs were ok but the actual Sci Fi stuff like the planet crackers and shit were awesome.
[QUOTE=StrawberryClock;52153490]I would have liked to explore the actual universe of Dead Space, the necromorphs were ok but the actual Sci Fi stuff like the planet crackers and shit were awesome.[/QUOTE] Most people I've seen want the opposite. Almost every complaint levelled at Dead Space 2 and 3 (which weren't rightful complaints about the story direction of the microtransaction bullshit) was that the games didn't have enough necromorphs and too much everything else. To me the Necromorphs were getting boring near the end of the first game, the world they built in the games was much more interesting to me. Also this may just be me but the complaints of "Why did you make it actiony, you should have kept it scary" seem very silly to me. The first Dead Space wasn't scary (at least to me) and it's very difficult to have an enemy remain scary after the player has slaughtered several hundred of them.
Developers and gamers alike often fail to spot the difference between "tense spooks" and "true horror". Dead Space, like Resident Evil before it, masterfully used tension to keep you on edge, try to get you to slip up and so forth, but you were still encouraged to blow away your threats so long as you did so tactfully and with management of your supplies. It's kind of like F.E.A.R. in that regard, except obviously not concentrated on constant gunfights and focusing entirely on the monsters. Dead Space 3's main flaw in regards to that was throwing solid tension out the window for the sake of scaling up combat to ridiculous degrees while also turning your weapons from situational usage to being able to upgrade them (through grinding or microtransactions) into instruments of excessive death. There's no tone control, arguably both the devs and EA were infact tone deaf the entire time besides some neat ideas like player-exclusive hallucinations if you're in co-op and the like.
Dead Space 3's biggest problem* is encounter design. In Dead Space you'd usually be attacked by one enemy from the front and a secnd enemy would spawn in behind you but not immediately be aggressive. That way depending on what you're doing the second guy could jump out at you when you thought the danger was gone, and they had enough encounters with only one enemy that you never know when to expect an attack from behind. Dead Space 2 kept the design but added larger areas where enemies could come from almost any angle, even though they rarely did. They also had the hallucinations where you thik you're being attacked, or about to be attacked, and just when you start to react the game pulls it away from you to reveal it was actually nothing. This makes you doubt every fight because not only can there always be more enemies but it's also possible there are no enemies at all. Dead Space 3 mostly has enemies charging at you from the front. Which is incredibly boring. Being set on an ice planet was the perfect opportunity to fuck with players by having frozen necromorphs which burst out and attack, or frozen humans who have extra ice to give them a silhouette of a necromorph. Instead we get like 2 scenes in a snow storm where the necromorphs just charge at you (and one who is scripted to run away, spooky) and a few pitch black rooms. You have a torch for the entire game, so the narrow corridor of enemies who always come from the front isn't much scarier. Dead Space 3 wasn't worse because it was more action oriented, that's just a natural progression for this type of game, it was worse because the action was boring and uninspired. At least, that's my opinion of it. *Aside from the story, coop focus, and microtransactions.
Anybody got that clip where a gun modded to hell and back had like ludicrously high melee speed?
[QUOTE=damnatus;52152029]I still stand by my head canon that the events of DS3 were dreamed by Isaac on drugs while he was held in the hospital right before the events of DS2 :v:[/QUOTE] He dreamed it when he escaped with Ellie. And to be honest, DS2 is a much better ending than DS3. It makes way more sense.
I feel like DS3 was action oriented due to Isaac no longer being afraid of the necromorphs. He fought them twice already and survived both times. He refused to simply turn into another hapless survivor/victim. Instead he decides to face his fears and end the necromorph threat. The third game is far from a masterpiece, but the action at least makes thematic sense to me. But I will say that universal ammo was bullshit and totally ruined any tension you could face. The combat mechanics worked well, but I still hate not scrounging for resources. That made the other two games more fun due to you having to constantly change your strategy depending on what guns you could use based on how much of a certain ammo type you had.
I actually found DS3 the most enjoyable, if not on-par with the rest, other than the awful cliff-climbing parts. Which is funny considering I prefer, for example, Mass Effect 1 over 2 or 3. Though I never really saw the awkward controls from the same perspective - it does kinda make sense for making it difficult to aim and such. Anyway, it has non-linear elements and buttloads of customisation - the weapon combos you can make are really fun (The rivet gun is OP as fuck, in the best way). The only complaint I have on it is that the environments generally don't lend themselves well to the necros' behaviour. As a pretty diligent and thorough player, it found it too easy to clock where the next wave would be attacking from (Basically any and all vents), where they might stick in a jumpscare (Eg the coffins) and maintain situational awareness - so in most fights, I never really felt panicked or pressured and this is in part due to those weapon combos. An assault rifle/shotgun combo makes crowd control and targeting individuals trivial, as soon as they pop out of a vent, you can knock them on their arse, cryo, then take out their friends in the same manner before it gets back up. Also an issue is the universal ammo, I hate, hate, hate that shit. It would've been way more interesting if different ammunition types required different materials to craft, and force a more diverse choice of weapons.
Good example of how Dead Space manages to stay fresh despite how old it is: [twitch]RudeBadWaffleDoggo[/twitch] I think it's the only time you intentionally get jumped when you're on a bench in the game. On my last playthrough (years ago on the Xbox 360 when I was a wee lad) I never used that bench and I never got attacked because of it. There a lot of moments like that where you get unique encounters that don't get repeated which keeps you guessing. I mean heck, the reason I turn around there is because of the whole "sometimes you get a silent necromorph sneaking up behind you" thing which I think only happens a 4th or a 5th of the time.
ive always wanted to play dead space but i kept constantly crashing in the same spot early on and i could never find a fix. didnt see a point in playing 2 either if i didnt play 1 to begin with
[QUOTE=Furnost;52157946]ive always wanted to play dead space but i kept constantly crashing in the same spot early on and i could never find a fix. didnt see a point in playing 2 either if i didnt play 1 to begin with[/QUOTE] Crash on PC, I'm guessing?
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;52153521]Also this may just be me but the complaints of "Why did you make it actiony, you should have kept it scary" seem very silly to me. The first Dead Space wasn't scary (at least to me) and it's very difficult to have an enemy remain scary after the player has slaughtered several hundred of them.[/QUOTE] "why did you make it actiony" doesn't necessarily imply that Dead Space was ever scary, just that the horror theme made it more fun than it would have been as a straight action game. like the necromorphs were never scary, but they're cool enemies because they're super gross and imaginative, and their disfigured design informs how you fight them. but then your first enemy in DS3 looks like this guy [thumb]https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/deadspace/images/9/9d/Scaf_pilot_fodder.png/revision/latest?cb=20161108190744[/thumb] and he just comes at you with a regular old axe and he dies with a headshot and it's just like "really?"
Part 2 is here, covers Dead Space 2. [media]https://youtu.be/A1x6Jy2CYNo[/media] Part 3 will be out May 8th.
Eh, i feel like he was a bit unfair and overly subjective with this one, especially in regards to the games lore. I, for one, am fascinated with the Dead Space universe. The Marker and the Necromorphs, the advancements in human technology and our progression further into space, it's all pretty cool stuff and i was excited that DS2 added a lot more to that. Hnestly i wish there was more even on top of that, especially in regards to the human and sci-fi side of things.
Yeah. Dead Space 2, in my opinion, was not quite as good as the first one, but it was still a great game and an awesome sequel. The lore is great, it's really interesting seeing the unitologists welcome the necromorphs with opens arms (right until they're in their face, at which point they freak out as any normal human being would), and I genuinely find it fascinating how the Earth government barely even cares about the consequences in their desperate search for a new energy source. All in all, the only real downsides I feel is that Isaac now talks (though that's a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things) and that the combat doesn't feel as desperate as it did in the first game.
[QUOTE=Spetsnaz95;52173163]Yeah. Dead Space 2, in my opinion, was not quite as good as the first one, but it was still a great game and an awesome sequel. The lore is great, it's really interesting seeing the unitologists welcome the necromorphs with opens arms (right until they're in their face, at which point they freak out as any normal human being would), and I genuinely find it fascinating how the Earth government barely even cares about the consequences in their desperate search for a new energy source. All in all, the only real downsides I feel is that Isaac now talks (though that's a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things) and that the combat doesn't feel as desperate as it did in the first game.[/QUOTE] i don't get why they had Isaac talking anyway if he's mostly just a boring everyman. he just says exactly what you would expect him to, and when he does have a more complex thought the Nicole hallucination usually spells it out without him even saying anything. it would have been a lot more interesting if the hallucinations spoke for him and everything else was in his mannerisms and actions.
As someone who's played DS3 recently, it has massive problems. While a lot of the game is still super solid, and way better than people give credit, most of the shooting scenes are plagued with atrocious encounter design that feels amateur at best. Enemies just kinda come from nowhere, cover shooting sections just -don't- work properly. The worst is the random zombie enemies just added. They're so lazily made and are the lamest thing in the world to fight. The fact that the game [B]opens[/B] with you fighting them is really stupid.
Not a fan of this miniseries TBH. Normally Game Maker's Toolkit is an analytical breakdown of game design or analyses on game design choices. This just seems like very opinionated reviews dressed up as a design analysis. If you're going to be doing an objective analysis of a series you shouldn't heap praise on one game and then go out of your way to talk down about the sequel. There's no place for phrases like "The game is just sniffing its own farts..." or "Maybe I'm giving it too much credit... but the game is too twitchty to focus." If he wants to do a series of personal reviews or one on why he thinks the Dead Space games got worse over time that's fine. It's that he's dressing it up as a fairly objective analysis, like most of his other videos, that bothers me.
[QUOTE=DeVotchKa;52172896]Eh, i feel like he was a bit unfair and overly subjective with this one, especially in regards to the games lore. I, for one, am fascinated with the Dead Space universe. The Marker and the Necromorphs, the advancements in human technology and our progression further into space, it's all pretty cool stuff and i was excited that DS2 added a lot more to that. Hnestly i wish there was more even on top of that, especially in regards to the human and sci-fi side of things.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=Janus Vesta;52173271] If you're going to be doing an objective analysis of a series you shouldn't heap praise on one game and then go out of your way to talk down about the sequel. There's no place for phrases like "The game is just sniffing its own farts..." or "Maybe I'm giving it too much credit... but the game is too twitchty to focus."[/QUOTE] Honestly, I'm a bit torn on my opinion of this part of the video. I can see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, I [b]totally[/b] agree with DeVotchKa - Dead Space's lore is absolutely [b]fantastic[/b] in my opinion, and I absolutely love to get as much of it as I can. I never played Dead Space 3, but I read the wiki on the [b][url=http://deadspace.wikia.com/wiki/Brethren_Moons]Brethren Moons[/url][/b] and I absolutely loved every word written about them - it's just spine-chilling stuff. But at the same time, I agree with the video when he says that it's boring, especially the museum bit he uses to highlight the fact. I absolutely think that the lore is a great thing to share in the games, but at the same time, I feel like the way Dead Space 2 was designed just doesn't really [b]fit[/b] sharing lore. Or at least, not in the ways that it did, and honestly not even the way Dead Space 1 did it. Dead Space 2, as he described in the video, is just too fast-paced and twitchy of a game. The game has a breakneck speed of constantly having Isaac on the move and the player on their toes, even with their over-the-top cinematic cutscenes. As he described it, it has a very "Uncharted in space" feel. So when you slow the game to a crawl to dish out lore, like the museum did, it's a bit at odds with the overall pacing of the game. You could definitely argue it's a breather, and one that's much needed, but at the same time, it just sort of jams the gears of the game. Even the audio-logs and such that play passively, while you can continue exploring and even fighting, are a bit at odds with the pacing of the game, because they're a bit dichotomous - they want you to at once pay attention to the story they're painting and so focus on it, but at the same time are telling you "this story stuff isn't important so you can just ignore it". The crossed signals those audio logs throw out suggests a similar disagreement within the development team - the storytellers were obviously very excited to share their story, but it feels like the game designers wanted to focus on thrills and speed. The audio logs, then, came out as a compromise, it feels to me. So I'm really torn as to what my final opinion of how Dead Space 2 delivers it lore is. All I can say is that I definitely think a Dead Space post-facto novel would be absolutely [b]great[/b]. A story from the point of view of someone studying the Necromorphs and all their associated lore, or even learning about all of it from second-hand sources - maybe something like an investigative reporter doing a piece on the Necromorph phenomenon, interviewing survivors of the various outbreaks and piecing together a grand narrative. I'd read the [b]shit[/b] out of a book like that.
Yeah but you're doing what he did, he laid like 5 five objective changes and then went completely off tangent into "I like, don't like" within a minute. He also glossed over that the team was under absolutely batshit amounts of pressure to sell the same number of copies as Mass Effect 2, hence the L4D multiplayer under Girbaud's direct insistence, and so a compressed game was as good as you were going to get, also the insistence of including three boss fights, none of which Sledgehammer wanted unless it made sense. The entire reason the Ishimura is there is because they could literally pad the game out two more levels without having to retool assets. He doesn't address any of that cause he's too busy lamenting the loss of horror, and those affected the design decisions more than anything. It's a solid game for the most part, but you can very easily see all the cracks starting to form.
[QUOTE=27X;52176115]He also glossed over that the team was under absolutely batshit amounts of pressure to sell the same number of copies as Mass Effect 2, hence the L4D multiplayer under Girbaud's direct insistence, and so a compressed game was as good as your were going to get, also the insistence of including three boss fights, none of which Sledgehammer wanted unless it made sense. The entire reason the Ishimura is there is because they could literally pad the game out two more levels without having to retool assets.[/QUOTE] Right, it's easy to forget that the whole 2011-2013 timeframe was a complete and utter mess for developers under EA. The infamous game codes for multiplayer to attempt to curbstomp used games sales, the severe rushing of Mass Effect 2 and 3 as well as Battlefield 4, the immense pressure that Dead Space 2 and 3 were under to hit it big or get fucked over (which they did after 3), and EA breathing on everyone's necks all the while to make sure mass market appealing factors like multiplayer or microtransactions were shoehorned in to make as much bank as possible. Pretty much only Battlefield 3 (and 4, after over a year of patching) and Mass Effect 3 got away with a good multiplayer in that mess, and simultaneously the latter was rushed enough and given all hell because of the sloppy and rushed ending, while Dead Space 3 was basically forced to be more of an action game because EA wanted microtransactions and co-op wedged in like a nail in your eyeballs. And then topped off with a DLC ending cliffhanger that will never be resolved due to sales numbers not meeting their 'standards'.
[QUOTE=Cone;52173227]i don't get why they had Isaac talking anyway if he's mostly just a boring everyman. he just says exactly what you would expect him to, and when he does have a more complex thought the Nicole hallucination usually spells it out without him even saying anything. it would have been a lot more interesting if the hallucinations spoke for him and everything else was in his mannerisms and actions.[/QUOTE] I liked that Isaac learned to talk. It was just straight up weird to me in DS1 how Isaac wasn't interacting with the world and other characters, especially considering the nature of most of 'conversations' in the game (video chat of them monologuing at you). Isaac didn't feel like an 'insert yourself' kind of character because he had other crewmembers and a personal motive (Nicole) separate from the player. I consider it to just be a weird design choice that devs corrected with the sequel. Having Isaac give absolutely no reaction towards scripted sequences and plot events was uncanny, and not in a good way to me. Sure, he's not the most interesting kind of guy out there, although I kind of liked his evolution between DS2 and DS3, he's more than a silent protagonist. Silent protags can't have personal motives and agendas by definition.
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