In Dead Space 3, a posse of Necromorphs are playing poker together when you come in the room. Now you get nervous when enemies aren’t around, even if that’s rare. Vents are a chore, confrontations with Necromorphs are the norm and the tense moments become the parts WITHOUT enemies. In Dead Space 2, a Necromorph comes out of every vent. That’s tension, albeit in its most reductive, primitive form. When you walk into a room in the first Dead Space, there might be a vent. So let’s look at the mistakes Viceral (and EA) made, and how they could have fixed them. In pursuing the most mainstream of audiences they lost their hardcore fans, and this is in spite of Resident Evil’s recent spectacular failure showing how flawed that approach can be. EA slowly morphed the series from survival horror into an action game, and they lost their audience while failing to attract the one they were chasing. A lukewarm reception has resulted in Dead Space 4 being canned and the series is now left in limbo. Still, sections like the nursery showed that the Dead Space series hadn’t forgotten its roots, and even if the moment-to-moment gameplay was more action based, it still had enough scares to retain the survival-horror fans. It was still a great game with a focus on atmosphere and psychological terror, but it was less claustrophobic and Isaac felt more capable and less vulnerable. When Dead Space 2 came along it amped up the action… and many thought this was a mistake. Dead Space was the only place for gamers to go if they wanted resource scarcity and low ammunition as they struggled to survive in a claustrophobic nightmare. The Resident Evil series was no longer about survival horror. They created a game that filled a big gap in the market. Dead Space was a gamble for EA, and more than any other it paid off. While it didn’t pay immediate dividends for EA, it did win them a lot of cred from hardcore gamers, and even made them look like the good guys – at least when compared to the attitudes being shown at the time by Bobby Kotick at Activision. To do this, they created games like Army of Two, Mirrors Edge and Dead Space He wanted them to broaden their appeal to gamers and create new franchises. At the time, John Riccitiello was moving EA in an exciting new direction. Dead Space the first was a great survival-horror game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |