Okay, that’s just going for the fancy pun-based headline as is RPS’ wont – it’s not dead, dead. But I’ve been thinking about EA’s recently released Dead Space’s chances, and this post was prompted by Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation annihilation of it – which I’ll embed beneath the cut. He takes it apart – which is his wont, obviously – but it’s a game that seems to be slipping past everyone’s attention. Which seems somewhat odd. I mean, big-budget, hyper-slick action/horror game. It’s not exactly Dwarf Fortress.
I’m saying “wont” a lot in this post.
Anyway, here’s Yahtzee having a little ramble.
In passing, there’s a name for people who move from England to Australia: Criminals. We’ve got our eyes on you, Croshaw.
Where was I? Dead Space. Well, it’s too early to really talk about sales, but looking at the English weekly charts doesn’t show a game that’s dominating in the way which you expect a EA-backed game to do. It’s managed to hit Top 10 in all single formats, but now by its second week is already out of the all-format charts. Reviews have been favourable across all formats - currently 86% on the PC over at Metacritics – and that’s very close to its user-ratings. In other words, it’s out, people like it and… well, is that enough?
I admit, I haven’t played it yet. Jim has, and dug it. Why haven’t I played it? Well, it’s the reason why I suspect that it hasn’t done the business you presume EA thought it would do. It’s a ludicrously busy time of year. When I’m struggling to fit in Far Cry 2, Fall Out 3 and Left 4 Dead, do I really have time for a space-horror game that’s getting really good but not great reviews? Well, I wish I did, but I don’t.
And I think that’s what’s the problem – Dead Space seems to be hypercompetent and slick. But what it doesn’t seem to be is innovative. And at this time of year, selling a new creation without some obvious big hook to attract people’s attention… well, that’s hard. You suspect it may have done better in February, which is a traditional time to debut new IPs you don’t want lost in the Christmas melee.
Which leads me to the real point of the post. I’d had a few people mail us and ask us if we could do something about Dead Space, because they really liked it and thought it worth hyping up. I wanted to provide a place both for people who’ve played the game to have a little chat and for those who didn’t take the dive to say why.
I mean, is it the fact it uses the EA standard DRM? The lack of a PC Demo? Or just too busy?
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What gets me is this happens EVERY year. There’s a massive landslide of generally good to excellent games, and most people just can’t afford to buy them all (ESPECIALLY in our current economic climate). Of course, the suits take a look at the sales figures and nothing else, and declare the genre dead because it didn’t sell in droves.
Short story: the pre-Christmas period is not necessarily the best time of year to sell your game.
As a retailer I’ve found that the glut of games plus university exams have slowed sales of otherwise solid titles. Though it’s yet to be seen I think all of these games will have a long sale period even past xmas, particularly ones like Dead Space which seem to be being passed over initially.
Lovefilm! I didn’t know they rented games!
12.99 to rent 4 games that I can give back whenever I like.
This is a REVELATION.
I’m definitely going to pick Dead Space up then.
This is one of those games with ZERO longevity once it’s over [no multi player component basically]; I just didn’t want to buy it, finish it and then get stuck with it. I’ll stick it in the queue for next week.
Thanks mate I didn’t know they rented games!
I mean I still have Prey ffs.
It’s exactly as you said. I just blew $150 on Fallout 3, Dar Cry 2, and Left 4 Dead (which, so far, appears to be a fabulous investment). I really don’t have the time or money for mediocre games.
I don’t want to add to the queue of people trying not to ruin the conversation with DRM babble, but I really have no choice as Dead Space was struck immediately off my ‘looks interesting’ list purely because of the DRM, and joins Spore and Red Alert 3 in the ‘Not Even From A Bargain Bin’ list.
I wouldn’t consider a console version either, as that merely encourages them to be dicks to honest people.
If they think about re-releasing these games later on without the anti piracy measures, I will give their titles due consideration as I would any other purchase and part with cash accordingly.
EA cost themselves $250 right there from an honest gamer, and pirates don’t pay for anything anyway so they don’t count and never will.
In other news:
> cmd_buysLeft4Dead = true
It’s not probably a big consolation :), but in Czech republic is still 3rd (PC version, of course) in an all platforms chart in the biggest online shop.
I’m yet to buy it, I’ve heard a lot of complains concerning the hero’s head restricting the view and 4:3 monitors. And I have a 4:3 monitor. What’s your experience? Thanks
Yep, too busy playing Far Cry 2 and Little Big Planet in time for L4D.
Sigh…
This one of the few times where I find myself disagreeing quite strongly with Yahtzee.
Now, I do agree with some of his points. Dead Space is definitely an obvious pastiche of many iconic science-fiction pop culture properties. It liberally rips off The Thing, Event Horizon, Alien, System Shock 2, Resident Evil, and more. But the end result is so well done, I can’t really find fault with it. I know subconsciously that I shouldn’t be enjoying the game so much. But I do!
I’m about halfway through the game and I’m finding it’s not actually scary. As opposed to System Shock 2, which filled me with dread when I played it. But Dead Space is eerie and unsettling. And all the attention to detail: like seeing atmosphere venting into space, the muffled sound in a vacuum, seeing liquid and debris floating in Zero-G, the aformentioned moment where asteroid particles can rip you to pieces . . . the Dead Space team deserves some kind of award for this.
The PC version does unfortunately suffer a bit from “console port” syndrome. (The VSync issue, no in-game menu option to disable any joystick/gamepad so it doesn’t override the mouse, save game checkpoints, some hard-mapped keyboard controls.) For checkpoints, I can overlook that because it may actually have been an intentional design decision. Not being able to save whenever you like, does make the game more tense.
But the hard-mapped keys are inexcusable. Being able to completely customize keyboard controls has been a staple of PC gaming since, well, forever. This needs a patch, yesterday. On the other hand, I find the mouse control to be just fine as long as you turn VSync off. The game also runs extremely well on my setup. Dead Space was definitely optimized well for the PC. The load times are almost non-existent.
It’s funny, because early on when I was keeping my eye on Dead Space, the early previews didn’t look that compelling. I had written this off as a poor System Shock clone. Then, as I saw more previews, my interest grew. I waited until I heard from some fellow like-minded gamers before I bought it. Since their response was generally favorable, I bit the bullet.
Dracko said that Dead Space is more of a spiritual successor to SS2 than Bioshock, and I tend to agree. I’m having way more fun in Dead Space than I did in Bioshock. With the difficulty set to hard, I’m often running out of ammo and other resources and getting my ass kicked. Compared to Bioshock’s joke of a hard difficulty setting, where I had to make sure I hadn’t somehow accidentally enabled god mode.
It did piss me off to buy the game, in the sense that it means I’m supporting EA and their brain-dead customer and DRM policies. But what’s an honest gamer to do? Your options are: don’t buy it, pirate it, buy it, or buy it and pirate it. I chose the last option, and installed my DRM-free copy of Dead Space.
I most certainly take Yahtzee seriously. He hasn’t so far said a thing in any review which I wouldn’t have agreed with. The universal truth is that 90% of everything is crap. And that goes double for video games.
Two basic issues – it’s competing with Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3 for my overall time, especially on the PC (where the shitty DRM is also a problem), but if we move to console territory, it runs up against the latest Silent Hill game, which is a horror series I know and love and which consistently creeps me out in a way I don’t really expect Dead Space to manage. I want to play it, but it’s not going to be until after Christmas, I strongly suspect.
Sorry, but ‘optimisation’ and ‘loads quick off a HDD – a device that spins several hundred times faster than an optical disc drive’ are not one and the same. In a nutshell, any game that takes longer than 15-20 seconds to load a level/map these days is doing something wrong, especially in systems with > 1GB RAM.
(NB – Online games don’t count – it’s often the syncing with the server that takes time, not the map loading)
If it’s not getting the sales it should blame the marketing department’s usual lack of guts. It seems the received wisdom is that games should all be released in the few months before Christmas. Well there’s bound to be a few blockbusters in the deluge which doubtless reinforces the view, but a good(ish) game can get overlooked as everyone’s focusing on the headliners. If they had confidence in the game they’d punt it out at a quieter time when it would attract more attention.
Dead Space is something I’d have gone for if it had come out some other time, it may be a bit generic but seems to be well enough implemented. But it was obvious I’d have enough mercenaries/mutants/infected on my hands for the next few months so the space monsters will have to wait their turn. The turn into budget space monsters to be precise.
i’ve played it, it was brilliant but i will never buy it (DRM)
BTW England != Britain, behavior like that tells me you’ve spent to long in New England (New England Washington, whats the differance ay?) GRRRRR!
In a way, I think the games industry, its surrounding industries (Reviewers, et al) and most importantly the people who buy games (Consumers I suppose), should be wary of getting too hung up on innovation.
For one thing, there are plenty of films that aren’t exactly innovative in terms of cinematography or any of the technologies used to tell the story, but the story itself is so compelling that this doesn’t and shouldn’t matter. Kind of like how Anachronox used a rendering engine that even at release was a bit on the old side, but the masterful story telling more than made up for that imho.
Then again, I can play Deus Ex with no issues with the visuals, yet a fellow student on my course couldn’t get past the games old graphics.
Wiiiich makes me wonder why there isn’t a unified Rendering AND Gameplay Engine which can be updated incrementally even after a game has been released. (A system implemented in modules so that within the usual limits, you could unplug rendering module A23 V1.2 and plug in V1.4 with minimal effort, as opposed to the Unreal Engine way of doing things, which is to just develop a whole new graphics engine from scratch every few years, seems a bit wasteful to me).
@Optimaximal:
That’s not what I meant. What I meant to say is that it’s optimized and load times are quick.
On my Athlon X2 6400+, Radeon 3870, 2GB RAM, Vista x64 SP1 system: the game runs smoothly at 1680×1050 with all graphics options maxed out, and with 4xAA and 8xAF applied. I’ve only encountered one noticeable slowdown, which was when I entered the hydroponics sections, which are massively open spaces filled with many structures and plants.
Now, having said that, why does a game like Thief: Deadly Shadows still take bloody forever to load each level? The game was designed to fit in 64MB on the Xbox, for crying out loud. It should absolutely scream on my current system with the faster processor and ample memory. Yet, it doesn’t. So having an HDD doesn’t automatically mean fast loading times.
Now, having said that, why does a game like Thief: Deadly Shadows still take bloody forever to load each level?
New hardware is faster, but also provide new ways to do things. Old software will not use that new features, so can’t use the 100% of the new hardware.
Theres also sofware poorly coded. If you read one byte at a time, your app will be slow even on a cray. If you read 4096 bytes, it will be much faster. Is also about how something is programmed.
Theres also sofware poorly coded.
Bingo. Thief: Deadly Shadows was poorly coded for the PC, leading to excessively long loading times. Even on a system built three years after its release, the game still runs like shit.
Therefore, optimizing the code of your port actually can and does make a difference.
When your finished working out what’s wrong with this we also need someone to fix the Large Hadron Collider.
I should hope it does!
How fast do you want your PC?
I mean what else are you planning to do with it?
But seriously reviews, the same as how ’smooth’ something runs on your End Boss Level pc, are purely subjective.
It’s remarkable how people will attach themselves to a review because it agrees with their particular point of view rather then actually playing the game for themselves.
@ Larrington
There are game engines that are periodically upgraded in an ongoing fashion. Just look at Source. I know people are increasingly saying that it is looking tired, but Valve have managed to keep up with the pack in all but gigantic levels (FC2, Crysis) and destructible scenery.
TF2 i think is more impressive than Left 4 Dead in this respect, and that game is now just over a year old.
Valve released Source in a world of single cores and have bolted on all manner of gubbins to take advantage of multi’s. Problem is, it’ll need a root and branch. It only takes a look at FC2 to show what truly dedicated multicore engines can do.
@Radiant:
If you’re trying to say that my setup is some kind of uber-rig and I’m trying to brag . . . hardly. The whole reason for pointing out the specs of my system, was precisely because it’s not top of the line any more. It wasn’t even cutting edge when I built it last year. A dual core Athlon and 3870 are considered middle of the road by today’s standards. I might have a better system than most, but there are also plenty of people with better systems than me.
And when I say it runs smoothly, I’m not exaggerating. I’m talking consistently solid framerates. (Except for the slowdown I mentioned in hydroponics.) Dial down the resolution to 1280×1024, and any relatively recent PC should be able to handle Dead Space with ease.
Just too busy.
Very busy this month plus I’m waiting for game to be cheaper which will happen soon.
i didn’t like it and have to agree with yahtzee, that’s my reason. the game is just meh.
fO3 is meh. FC2 is average. L4D is awesome. the witcher is awesome and I even enjoyed ClearSky. DeadSpace annoyed me with its constant “look scary” and for me “tame” gore and forced 3rd person.
@redrain85
Apart from the absolutely crappy ‘antialiasing’ that you can turn on in the options, antialiasing is not working in Dead Space. You can’t even force it, so no 4xAA.
Thats my main concern with the game the edge flickering is horrible.
Been playing it on the 360 and I’m really enjoying it so far. Yes it’s pretty derivative of the genre, but what it does it does very well. It might be a bit repetative but fortunately the shoot’em up action is very enjoyable, so I’m not too bothered by the repetition as it’s great fun blasting off monsters limbs with a variety of smart weapons. Besides that’s what I bought the game for, and I think it’s a bit unfair to deride a game that’s all about blasting monsters, as being repetative because all you do is blast monsters. It’s a bit like saying you’re finding a racing sim repetative because all you do is drive cars around a track over and over again.
The graphics are bloody nice and I think it’s got a great atmosphere. The only annoying part I’ve encountered thus far is a scene where you have to man a turret and shoot some asteriods. It was very frustrating to do on a console pad, would be a doddle with a mouse though I expect.
One of the reasons I bought Dead Space over some of the other AAA releases all vying for my cash, is that strange as it may seem, sci-fi horror shooters don’t come around that often, and I like a good monster blaster. Doom3 and Resi4 were the last games that came close to resembling this, and they came out years ago. The shoot’em up genre is awash with contemporary military sims and the like, so it’s nice to have a good sci-fi setting and some otherworldly things to shoot at for a change.
The main reason I haven’t played it is, yes, there are just too many good games out atm. But now you’ve mentioned the EA security thing, it may as well be that as well. They screwed up my Spore purchase royally.
@Rain:
Crap, you’re right. When I took a close look in the game, I noticed that AA wasn’t being applied. And I have AA forced on. I’ve seen sitting further back from the screen using a wireless keyboard and mouse, so I couldn’t tell from a distance. I hope either EA or ATI/Nvidia comes up with some kind of fix.
I took a couple of shots from the start of the game to show how it looks, and what kind of framerate I’m getting. I took the shots while I had other junk running in the background, so it probably wasn’t performing quite as well as it could have been. Still, I was getting framerates consistently in the 40-50 FPS range.
Screenshot 1 @ 1680×1050
Screenshot 2 @ 1680×1050
Does that mean video games are 180% crap?
It’s just bad timing in my book. This is the sort of thing I would have snapped up a couple of months ago but now I’m too busy on RA3, Fallout 3 and soon Left4Dead and CoD:WaW.
Dead Space seems like a good game to me but not a stellar game and that, in this cluttered period for FPS’s, makes a vital difference.
It is no antialiasing they just blur everything, awful.
Opening with AA
Opening without AA
Main Lab with AA Look at the description above the door.
Main Lab without AA
I really thought ZP needlessly stuck the boot in to a game that if anything deserves a bit more praise and attention.
Clearly the guy places a higher importance on storytelling than the vast majority of us would (for instance, the silly plot and characters of Resident Evil 4 in no way reduced my enjoyment of the game, so he gets very hung up on things that just aren’t such a problem.
Dead Space is fantastic, but it came out at the wrong time of year probably.
For me it’s the DRM of this title that’s preventing me from playing it. I really, really want to give it a try (I’ve always liked survival/horror game but don’t really have any since I’m a PC gamer first and foremost) but since there’s a “Five irrevokable installs and that’s it” config, I’m sadly going to have to pass. Very few games stay on my hard drive for long periods of time since I’m not exactly a gamer who has an incredible abundance of hard drive space who can install a game, play it through once or twice and then leave it on there for a long time before I pick it up again. I also upgrade/format mostly every year, so to have a game with such a limited life span isn’t in my best interest.
If the DRM was something more akin to the iTunes model people have been suggesting (IE, you can easily de-authorize previous installs to get new ones), I’d definitely look at picking this title up.
I didn’t realise it had unmappaple controls. Being left handed I always use the cursor keys to move, so if you can’t remap the controls it’s a definite no-purchase for me even if they remove the DRM.
What on earth were EA thinking?
@redrain85
I’m just having some fun at your expense :)
But really your pc is the one my pc fights at the end of the dungeon.
It’s Ganon.
Your pc is Ganon.
I swear to god if someone posts about DRM again I’m going to personally #$#@$ them up.
DRM. It shouldn’t be an issue because you don’t find it so?
Fair enough, I am caught in a tangled web of logic.
@rain: nice examples, I never knew turning off AA would make things look so much better, not just improve performance.
David says:
Call of Duty 5? :)
I mean, is it the fact it uses the EA standard DRM?
Yep.
Although I probably wouldn’t have bought it straight away because of Fallout 3 anyway.
I dunno, a few people at work keep telling me about this. If it was akin to another System Shock 2, then potentially I would be interested. But SS2 had a certain kind of charm to it, and it’s visuals – this is something I’m finding more and more, which is that now that we can render real-time horrible gore and violence, I’m wanting it less. The concept of the game sounds interesting, but that’s about it.
Buy it guys – it will surprise you and is thoroughly enjoyable
I find it fun and even a wee bit scary. However I’m not really enamoured of “boss fights” (I tend to find them repetitive since I die until I adapt to the first change, then die until I adapt to the second change, then die unti I… you get the drift) and Fallout 3 has loomed large. Fun and scary though DeadSpace is it cannot really stack up to Fallout 3 for me.
I found the controls not quite unplayable but bad enough that I, err, won’t be playing it what with the current glut of good games. The graphics engine seems superb, the sound design possibly better than anything before it, so it’s all the more jarring that the PC controls seem to have been programmed by someone who’s only ever played on a console. Never mind the vsync bug, there’s no autorun toggle, the interface controls have separate bindings to your WASD for no reason and it takes literally, without exaggeration, over a metre of desk space movement to turn the guy around with the mouse on max sensitivity. You can apparently change a settings.txt somewhere in your hidden Local Settings folder to get higher sensitivity than the slider allows for, but man, I can’t believe it got through QA like this. Is it really that hard to realise a mouse is more accurate than the ham-fisted analogue sticks on console pads?
I’ve played it on the 360, and in short, as a horror it’s utterly terrible, but as an FPS it’s an unremarkable, but fun way to pass a few hours. It has some neat touches (particularly the weapons, which apart from the assault rifle are neatly varied and help set the game aside from the usual pistol-shotgun-sniper set), and some lousy ones (particularly the total lack of character or suspense and the clunky, slow and awkward controls), leaving it nestling around the ’slightly above average’ mark. 80% would be generous.
Worth a look come the budget release, I’d say, but still not a front runner even then, unless you’re really desperate for an FPS. Which nobody is.
What gets me is this happens EVERY year. There’s a massive landslide of generally good to excellent games, and most people just can’t afford to buy them all (ESPECIALLY in our current economic climate). Of course, the suits take a look at the sales figures and nothing else, and declare the genre dead because it didn’t sell in droves.
Short story: the pre-Christmas period is not necessarily the best time of year to sell your game.
This. Oh god, this. It’s bloody ridiculous. At the very least, you’d think someone would try releasing a big budget game early in the year, then re-releasing it for a tenner less around now – that way you’d have a big release out without all the competition, and when the competition did come, you’d cost significantly less, and the game would have a wider reputation.
@DigitalSignalX
It’s not a problem with antialiasing in general its just an issue with Dead Space cause that is not antialiasing that they apply there. Thats just a blur-filter they use that’s also why it isn’t limited to the edges.
I still say it’s a Unitology conspiracy, because of the game’s negative depiction of Scien-.. Unitology.
I loved, loved Dead Space. I had Far Cry 2 bought at the time as well.
It was Dead Space that had me hooked for the entire weekend though. Couldn’t stop playing it.