The Design of Dead Space - Part 3

The changes to Dead Space, paid off. Dead Space 2 was well received, meaning fans of the original were okay with the slight shift towards action. And it sold better than the first game, with roughly two million sales. But EA still wasn't happy. Frank Gibeau said the publisher would "need to get to audience sizes of around five million to really continue to invest in an IP like Dead Space". So the design shifted even further.

If Dead Space 2 started to pull away from the franchise's horror roots, then in Dead Space 3 that legacy is a dot in the rear view mirror of a spaceship that's shooting down mines, smashing through debris, and crash landing into a big load of rocks.

If you were under any doubt about how much the franchise has shifted towards being an action-packed shooter, you'll find out soon enough because, after a short prologue, the game kicks off with cinematic set pieces, automatic weapons, shoot outs in office buildings, and Isaac blasting away at human enemies using his new cover system and combat roll. Luckily, once you go to space, things even out a bit and it begins to feel more like a Dead Space game. But, the focus on action manages to permeate the entire experience.

Isaac is now the most agile he's ever been - making his original influence, Leon Kennedy, look like an old age pensioner. Plus, by default, the game has switched from a wonky camera angle that makes perfect shots tricky to line up, to the centred reticule seen in other shooters, making head-shots, and later, limb shots, easy to pull off. The game now uses universal ammo, which means that every gun you own can fire bullets from the same, shared ammo pouch. This almost completely nullifies resource management, and ammo counts will never factor in to your decision to use a specific gun.

Ammo won't be a problem in general, by the way: supplies are more plentiful than ever in this game and, at times, I was walking around with more than 1000 bullets in my inventory. The universal ammo thing is presumably there to support the game's new crafting system where you can upgrade guns or make weapons from scratch, using bits and bobs found scattered throughout the levels. It's an interesting system, supposed to highlight Isaac's engineering abilities. Problem is: you are capable of making something so versatile and powerful - and, of course, compatible with every bullet you have - that you'll never need another gun in the entire game.

Some have said that they played the entirety of Dead Space 1 with an upgraded plasma cutter. Well, I'm the same, only, replace Dead Space 1 with Dead Space 3, and replace plasma cutter with combination assault rifle and rocket launcher with acid-laced bullets and boosted damage, reload, and clip sizes. Unsurprisingly, walking around with an incredibly powerful gun not only reduces any need for weapon switching, and resource management, and shifts most of your decision making away from the tension of the battlefield, and into the quiet, safe solace of a menu screen...

But it also just means that the player is so empowered that Dead Space 3 is practically never scary, relying almost entirely on a few jump scares to get any sort of reaction out of you. Like, there are these deadly new enemies called feeders and they react to light and noise so don't shine a torch at them and use kinesis to oh sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of me shooting them all to death! Even the regenerating enemy who freaked me out in Dead Space 1 and made me sprint through waves of enemies in Dead Space 2, is just a minor nuisance in his Dead Space 3 version.

Versions. There's two of them now and they're still not scary. And while old enemies like the pregnant and the guardian, which is this creepy zombie who has fused with a wall, do show up, they're just something slightly different to mow down. For the most part, the game settles for shooting lots of basic enemies in very simple combat situations. One of the only bits I found unnerving took place inside the belly of some long-dead alien, where hordes of beady eye monsters sprint through a windy maze of dark corridors.

That was pretty tense! But you can make anything less scary by bringing a friend along for the ride. Dead Space 3 also adds a cooperative mode where Isaac is joined by a bloke called John Carver, and the two team-up to blast away at necromorphs and unitology soldiers alike - with, almost, double the fire power. This mode adds some co-op friendly stuff like now, when one player is solving a puzzle, the other needs to defend their pal from attack. And some of the puzzles have been rejiggered to need two people.

It's also supposed to have this thing called asymmetric dementia - because, every game mechanic needs a pithy, marketing friendly name - where the two players will see two different things - but it's hardly in the final product and I didn't notice anything of the sorts when playing through the first six chapters online. Maybe we were too busy laughing at my character's inconsistent appearance in the cutscenes. I think, if nothing else, we can be thankful that the co-op mode has hardly any impact on the singleplayer campaign - other than some oddities like having two of everything in the environment, and Carver randomly popping up in cutscenes before disappearing again.

In terms of structure, Dead Space 3 feels closer to the first game than the second. Especially in the back half where you're exploring and backtracking and starting to understand this cohesive research station, which feels more like a real place than anything in Dead Space 2. You can even do objectives out of order, just like the first game. And beyond optional rooms, there are entirely optional missions to take on - involving some of the more interesting bits of story in the series.

But the game has pacing issues, just like Dead Space 1. Where the first part is interesting and changeable, as you explore different spaceships, glide through a debris field, and set foot on an icy planet, the second half feels like the entire game takes place in the same three research rooms for about five solid hours, and then the same three temple rooms for another four. This sort of pacing was... serviceable in a survival horror game, where the endless corridors add to the oppressive feel of the game and the backtracking is used for some good scares. But it really grates in an overpowered shooter and, ultimately, Dead Space 2 proves to be a much better template for level design in an action-heavy blast 'em up.

Dead Space 3 does find some ways to shake up its pacing, though. You've got a bunch of different and imaginative puzzles like these alien language locks, a bit of Tetris-style cargo manipulation, and a section where you're shifting around alien body bits. And there are plenty of story beats, too. I shouldn't even talk about the stories in these videos. It's just not my bag and, turns out, people are very passionate about Dead Space lore. But, man, this one goes off the rials. There's a love triangle, a thing where Isaac is smooching Ellie like 20 minutes after executing her boyfriend, and then it starts going on about evil moons, leading to this bonkers final boss fight that I don't even know how to explain...

Perhaps it was inevitable that Dead Space would become more epic and absurd as it went on. Original Dead Space writer Antony Johnston, who had no involvement with part three, said as much. "Otherwise you’d just have the same game on a different ship each time, and that’s pretty dull." But I'm not convinced because there's this, like, 20 minute long section that shows what Dead Space 3 could have been, if the franchise followed the survival horror path, instead of action.

So we've just crash landed a spaceship on an icy planet and we have no objective marker, and no connection to other characters. Your body temperature is constantly dropping, forcing you to move between heat sources to stay alive, and track down buildings where you can raise your temperature back to normal. It's a nice spin on the oxygen management from throughout the series. You're also being stalked by a giant monster, enemies pop out of the snow without notice, and when the blizzard sets in you can't see enemies in front of your nose - you can just hear them.

This would have been an amazing setting for a survival horror game, riffing on John Carpenter's The Thing. But, this is Dead Space 3. So when one of those stalkers bursts through the fog you just... Yeah. Soon after that you get a warm suit and it's back to basics. See zombies, shoot zombies. Outside of a few moments like that, Dead Space had truly finished its transition from a balanced horror-and-action game, to a more action-oriented horror experience, to a full-on action game, just, with a horror theme.

And it feels like a game that is lugging around the baggage of a completely different genre, because despite all the changes made to ammo and weapon crafting, the game still holds onto things like an inventory system, level pacing, and monster designs, that were obviously made for a much slower, more methodical game. Meaning that, even if you take it on its own merits, just as a silly co-op action game completely divorced from the Dead Space legacy, it's not a particularly great one, and can't hold up to something that was built from the ground up to be about shooting a million enemies with overpowered guns.

Which wouldn't be hard to find because, while survival horror games are relatively rare - third person action games are everywhere. It's no secret that the shift in design focus, from horror to action, was less of an intentional creative choice from the team at Visceral - and more of a publisher and marketing-led decision from EA to win the game more mainstream fans. "It's a hard thing to do, to make a horror game have mass appeal. They're two diametrically opposed things," said Ben Wanat, previously of Visceral Games. And so, "it was a deliberate decision in each of those instalments to make it faster, more relevant to a broader audience."

That decision also led to the co-op campaign - listen to Eurogamer's interview with Wanat for more on that - and the goofy microtransactions, plus the competitive multiplayer mode in Dead Space 2. All there, to get this series to that fabled five million mark. But... it didn't actually work. "In Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it", admits Wanat. Dead Space 3 didn't just receive the worst review scores of the series but it was also a big flop - not even selling a million copies at launch, let alone five.

And, so, we haven't seen a new Dead Space since. And I feel like we keep seeing this happen. A new game comes along with a bold vision and innovative gameplay. And then, the franchise starts to lose what made it special, making it more simple and action-heavy, for supposed "mass appeal". But there's no guarantee that it will increase sales - the only thing you can be sure of is that it will piss of the most hardcore fans of the original vision.

If we're lucky, we'll get a franchise reboot that will take the series back to its roots. Will that happen with Dead Space? Probably not. Most of the key creative minds behind Dead Space have left the company, and as for Visceral Games itself? Well, after a slow trickle of new IPs, EA has since gone back to its old business model with sports games, movie tie-ins, and sequels to its most popular properties - and that's what Visceral Games is doing, having since made a sequel, with the Battlefield spin-off Hardline, and is now working on movie-tie ins, with the Star Wars license.

But, hey. Maybe this Dead Space saga will shine a light on something important. That instead of making a game that you hope many people will like - it's sometimes better to create a game that you know a few people will love.

Hi. This has been Mark Brown with Game Maker's Toolkit. Thanks for watching! GMTK is powered by Patreon, and these are my top-tier supporters. This three-part episode was a bit different for me. Bit of an experiment. So, do let me know what you thought in the comments below. But for now, it's back to my normal style of analysis.