Clearly annoyed isn’t the way you want to spend your spare time. And yet, the narrow FOV didn’t annoy me at all. Was this because I played it on the 360 and didn’t have the expectations for mouselook and a wider FOV that go along with PC FPS? (I played Bioshock on the PC).
You raise an interesting point about how to build tension in horror games - many of them have restricted the field of view. Early games (Silent Hill, RE etc) tended to have fixed camera angles, some of which were quite bizarre. This led to the problem of being in situations where the character could see something that the player couldn’t. Then you had a first person view (say in the Shocks) with a fairly generous FOV.
Fatal Frame had a somewhat restricted 3rd person view for most of the game, with a fairly narrow 1st person view for combat, which worked fairly well. This was helped by the fact that most of the ghosts were able to do some sort of spooky quantum tunnelling, so they would vanish and reappear in different spots. This kept the environment and the combat more unpredictable, and well, scary. Eternal Darkness had a generous third person view, but it relied on other tactics to be scary.
Dead Space does a nice job in never breaking you out of the game environment - all of the HUD elements are present in the game world, and the vast majority of the game is spent from the same view. In that setting the narrow FOV works, as I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder to make sure some beastie wasn’t OMG RIGHT THERE RAWR.
How did you feel about RE4? I would say a trade off between control/perspective tightness in the name of horror is usually in order for these titles, counter to your assertion. I much prefer games that opt for a more restricted field of view but don’t cripple your character.
Oh, I get that. My complaint isn’t that it’s not balanced. In fact, so far it’s been pretty easy. Wander a bit, beasties pop out of monster closet, shoot off their arms and call it good. Hopefully it gets a little more dangerous, because so far the scary aliens don’t seem to be much of a threat.
I think it gets significantly harder later on.
It is a mess. I don’t have the Windows adapter for my 360 controllers, and I purchased it for the PC specifically because I prefer to use mouse and keyboard in this sort of game, anyway.
That’s too bad that it isn’t working out for you. I find the 360 controls precise and the game a perfect way to make the most of my entertainment system at night. Did you play RE4 on PC? Fatal Frame?
Geez Ben, I can appreciate that you’re having a poor experience but this is crazy talk. Less atmosphere? I’ll take nothing away from Doom 3 because I enjoyed the time I spent with it, but it’s a run and gun shooter without too much depth. For what it’s worth, I can buy the universe that Dead Space presents as a believable location, and the mood the game carries is tense and the mechanic of dismembering enemies is novel enough (for me) to keep combat interesting. It seems the pc port is poor enough to keep you from getting into the main content of the game, and that would be quite a drag.
To be fair, the first half of Doom 3 was very scary. Once you got the powerful guns it got a lot easier. In Dead Space, the whole game is not scary, though I guess it is tense.
I have to disagree that Doom 3 was ever scary, but in fairness to the game I will add that it’s completely my own hangup. I played so much Doom and Doom 2 that even though as I said, I enjoyed the game, it really was a case of familiarity breeding contempt. Maybe contempt it too strong a word, but really – a demon with rocket launchers on his shoulders? Just goofy. And a depiction of hell as a subterranean burning pit with lots of pentagrams? Just seems like your average 13 year old’s idea of atmosphere.
I enjoyed DOOM 3, too, and maybe I remember it better than you, because in a whole lot of non-trivial ways, Dead Space is really similar. And honestly, Dead Space doesn’t have much depth, either. It has exactly the same sorts of objectives, exactly the same sorts of challenges (right down to the monster closets–pretty much every fight in Dead Space boils down to “walk into area, hit trigger, monsters jump out”), and a general premise and story that is almost identical. I say “almost” because, to be fair, the story doesn’t spend all of its time ripping off DOOM; it also spends a good deal of time ripping off Event Horizon, and Aliens, and a host of other horror films. DOOM wasn’t exactly Citizen Kane, but I think it pulled off the creepy abandoned base atmosphere a whole lot better. As gordon said, Dead Space just ain’t that scary. And as far as monster closets go, DOOM had better ones.
I’m finding the combat to be… well, it’s okay. The blowing limbs off thing is fun, but it doesn’t really add any depth; it just means that you have to aim. But shooters have been doing locational damage for a long time now, so that just doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. The weapons are mostly pretty average, and some of them are quite lame. The mundane ones seem to be (by far) the most useful. The more exotic weapons like the Ripper are harder to use, and not all that effective. I can dismember a foe with the Pulse Rifle in about a fifth the time it takes me to do it with the Ripper, and Pulse Rifle ammo is cheap and easy to carry. The Flamethrower is fun, but uses up ammo way too fast, and seems to do less damage than the Pulse rifle (though it may even out with its DoT), and it lacks the Pulse Rifle’s knockback. It’s not even that good at things that you’d think it would excel at, like–hopefully this isn’t a spoiler–taking out those little swarming guys. The Pulse Rifle is better at that, too. The Line Cutter (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t do nearly enough damage for its slow rate of fire and low ammo capacity. In other words, it’s no Pulse Rifle. At this point, the only time I switch from the Pulse Rifle is when I am out of ammo. I die very rarely.
When I do die, it’s often because of the clunky controls. In one fight, I died because my character was unable to clear a one-inch tall obstacle (the bottom edge of a ramp, coming at it from the side). Moving is so slow and slushy, and yes, I get that this is supposed to make the game tense, but man, it sure doesn’t for me. I hate feeling like I’m fighting the controls more than the monsters. I agree that it’s not a run and gun shooter. It’s more of a stand and gun shooter. DOOM 3 had much better combat.
So far, I’ve found the zero G stuff to be pretty meh. It’s all very restricted and scripted, and I find that it’s not always obvious where you can and can’t jump. Fighting all takes place on surfaces, since jumping is a scripted animation that can’t be interrupted. Mostly it seems like jumping around isn’t good for much other than losing track of where the monsters are. As with other Dead Space combat situations, the winning tactic is to stand in place and shoot.
And the UI is definitely a mess. Some menus (like the store) let me scroll around with the WASD keys; others (like my inventory) only recognize the arrow keys. None of them recognize mouse input, which is pretty annoying. Well, they do recognize the wheel (sometimes!), but you can never click to select (a pretty universal UI standard) or use the mouse to move the cursor around. I also hate how the save points put your newest save at the bottom of the list. I so enjoy having to scroll down through all my old saves every time I want to save or load a game!
For what it’s worth, I can buy the universe that Dead Space presents as a believable location, and the mood the game carries is tense and the mechanic of dismembering enemies is novel enough (for me) to keep combat interesting. It seems the pc port is poor enough to keep you from getting into the main content of the game, and that would be quite a drag.
The setting is okay. It pretty unoriginal, and the story has been intensely predictable so far (at least as of chapter 5). And it’s not just the PC port that is getting int he way of my enjoyment (though I grant you, it’s a pretty shoddy port). I just think that the game in general is pretty mediocre.
Good luck with that. I will go on regarding it as one of the best releases this year, and a suitable heir to RE4 (meaning it’s a good warmup for when RE5 likely ups the ante with coop).
All of the weapons seem to work rather well when upgraded, and conversely every new weapon seems like crap compared to the upgraded weapons you’ve been using.
That was my experience with the Flamethrower as well - it runs through ammo very very quickly relative to the damage done. I thought that perhaps it would be much better fully upgraded, but even after restarting (on Medium!) a fully upgraded flamethrower still takes a lot of ammo to kill a beastie. This is even with lighting them on fire, backing off, and just giving them a little dose of the cleansing flame when they burn out. Despite having credits to spare, I’m still running out. Perhaps this is because it doesn’t have much in the way of dismembering ability, and this is related to how Dead Space models damage.
I didn’t much care for RE4. I love the Fatal Frame games, though–and horror games in general, though I guess it’s fair to say that I’m pretty picky when it comes to this genre. There are some really popular horror game staples that I think are highly overrated, both in terms of their horror appeal and their gameplay (like RE4).
RE4 had some similar view problems, but I’m pretty sure that neither RE4 nor Fatal Frame had as restrictive field of view that Dead Space has (Fatal Frame had fixed camera angles, IIRC, so it’s not really even a relevant comparison). Dead Space has lots of small rooms and tight corridors, and that’s a bad pairing for a small FOV, on-screen avatar game. RE4 fared poorly in tight spaces, too, and it sometimes suffered from the same “avatar in the way of stuff I’m trying to look at” syndrome. But it also featured a lot more open, outdoor environments than Dead Space does, and I think that helped mitigate the problem a bit.
Both RE4 and the Fatal Frame games narrowed your view when you were in aiming mode (the Fatal Frame games really narrowed it when you were using the camera–and I was actually fine with that), but I never had difficulty surveying my surroundings in any of those games. Dead Space feels a bit like playing RE4 locked in the weapon zoom mode all the time. I often find myself having trouble just seeing the layout of the damn room I’m in. It’s better in larger rooms, but so much of the game is set in tight corridors and small rooms where I can’t even see the floor without pivoting the camera 90 degrees down. In the zero G rooms, the fact that the game won’t let you look straight up also starts to get in the way of seeing the room around you.
Also, speaking of surveying the environment, I’d just like to say that this game has the worst minimap ever. It’s really excruciatingly awful, difficult to read, difficult to manipulate, and whoever thought that pairing a 3D map showing multiple floors with solid, non-transparent renderings of those floors ought to be dragged out and shot. Trying to rotate the map so that you can try to see the floor that you are on through gaps in the floor above you is incredibly unfun. Fortunately, there seems to be little in the way of alternate routes to objectives in the game, and the breadcrumb feature always shows you which way to go, so the map is relatively optional. I don’t think I’ve even bothered to open it in the past chapter or two.
Yeah, and I think that takes some of the tension out of the resource conservation aspect of the game. There’s never really a need to use any specific weapon, so you rarely find yourself thinking “Man, I wish I had ammo for X.” Additionally, item drops seem to be weighted towards what you need, and toward what weapon you are currently using. So when you pull out the Ripper, you’ll suddenly start finding all the supply lockers stocked with Ripper ammo, and when you are low on health, monsters suddenly start dropping health packs. So I almost never find myself in situations where I need to get by with a non-optimal weapon (i.e. anything that isn’t the Pulse Rifle) for very long.
Fair enough. I think that it is pretty RE4-like, at least in terms of the controls. If I had to describe it to someone, I’d say that it’s an almost exact clone of DOOM 3 premise and gameplay, with RE4’s combat grafted on. I wish someone would have described it that way to me before I purchased it, because if they had, then I would have given it a pass. I was really expecting something more shooter-y, even after reading a number of previews for the game (as well as this thread).
Can’t argue that point, the minimap is just weird. Sometimes I open it up and it appears that the floorplan is off the edge of the display, so I find myself playing with the thumbsticks trying to figure out how to center the map so I can even see where it is I’m standing. It actually seems that the direction the character is pointed alters the position the display takes, or at least it appears that way to me.
I guess I need to reinstall Doom 3, because I just don’t remember it grabbing me. I played all the way through (though to be honest, I cheated through the last boss) so I don’t think I missed anything. I guess ‘I liked the weapons’ would be my highest praise. But I’ll try to expand on my point, I never really stopped to take in Doom 3. I rushed through killing things and trying not to be killed. But I like wandering through Dead Space’s areas, I can imagine them being filled with workers. I enjoyed watching the meteor shower on the bridge of the Ishimura. Little things, granted, and if you can’t get past the gameplay I can see where this wouldn’t sway you. But it’s the little touches I enjoy.
And Ben - we brought it up earlier in the thread and you’ve quite likely found out for yourself, but in my opinion you can’t abuse stasis enough. It’ll get you some breathing space in those occasions where you’re surrounded or surprised.
This is what it comes down to. I think RE 4 is one of the best games I’ve ever played, and I don’t mind different twists on that formula. That is exactly what I expected, and I’ve been pleased overall. Every shooter element they described, from the laser pointer to the targeted limbs to the field of view sounded RE4 style to me, and I never had much reason to think otherwise. And I like the way they modified it to accommodate the setting and the enemies, by adding strafe and movement while aiming. In that vein, the zero g/vacuum levels really add a nice claustrophobic edge to it.
I can’t use D3 as a point of reference since I never played it and don’t plan to (FPSes that rely on monster closets are an automatic no for me, especially if they don’t have a ridiculously compelling setting like CoD4, which has that problem but compensates in other ways).
I did find the interface awkward at first, but I got into it and now I like how it’s worked into the game world. I can’t imagine what people on smaller tv’s are doing, though…my 52" is just adequate.
So I guess I’m not surprised that it’s not for everyone, I’m just surprised that you didn’t see it coming a mile away with the RE4 comparisons/Event Horizon/Thing connections everyone kept going on about. To each their own.
Oh, I use stasis. And I don’t want to give the impression that I’m having trouble staying alive–on the contrary, I’m finding the combat in the game to be pretty easy, and I’m pretty sure that as of chapter five, the number of times I’ve died is still in the single digits. I sort of wonder if they tweaked the difficulty at all for mouse and keyboard users, because a number of fights that seem like they are supposed to be difficult have been pretty easy for me. The few boss-like encounters that I’ve encountered so far, I’ve beaten pretty quickly on my first try, and I beat the thing that Lizard King was complaining about in the other thread without ever missing a single rock.
The main thing that the tight view and cumbersome controls hamper, for me, is exploration. It’s often hard to get a feel for the environment, because you just can’t see very much through your tunnel-vision window on the game world.
FWIW, I thought’s DOOM’s Mars base was a really well-realized environment. Dead Space does have it’s moments, though–some of the areas are very cool (I won’t say which ones outside of the spoiler thread).
Does it bother you that pretty much every single encounter in Dead Space is a monster closet, in almost exactly the same manner as DOOM 3? Because they really, really are. Or do you just have different criteria for judging this sort of game? Honest question–I’m genuinely curious. I didn’t mind DOOM’s monster closets, and I don’t mind them here. It just seems weird to me that someone could find them a turnoff in DOOM, but not have a problem with them in Dead Space.
Monster closets are areas that open on a trigger to reveal that there had been monsters inside patiently waiting to kill you all along. I think it dilutes the term too much to apply it to any method of introducing enemies into the environment, be it teleporting enemies, spawning them around a corner or having them climbing in through vents (and then back into those vents so they can climb out of closer vents if you try to run away).
Doom 3 relied on actual monster closets using monsters that had no business being in them and open on completely arbitrary terms using a mechanism that I’m pretty sure is based on wizard magic. Monsters in Deep Space just climb through vents, I wouldn’t call those monster closets.
There were some monsters that literally came out of closets in DOOM 3, but there were also a lot that popped out of vents, or dropped from the ceiling through broken grates or pipes, or pounded their way through locked doors, and so on. As I recall, the primary complaint was not the specifics of their entry, but the way all the encounters were so heavily scripted and contrived. The game flow was pretty much a process of “Walk into area and hit trigger, monsters pop out from somewhere, fight them and move on.” Which is exactly the same as Dead Space. It’s functionally identical, and in many cases literally identical.
Here’s some DOOM 3 gameplay, to illustrate what I’m talking about. Note the variety of ways that the game injects monsters into the environment. A few pop out of “closets,” but many also drop down from the air ducts in the ceiling, or appear from unexplored or inaccessible areas of the level (like the Pinky that drops down off the catwalk). A couple break through doors, some are corpses that are lying on the floor and then animate when you hit a trigger. If anything, it actually feels a little less scripted than Dead Space, because DOOM doesn’t always release monsters right in front of you, or right behind you (as Dead Space often does).
DOOM often used its closets to quietly let a monster loose somewhere else in the level–often somewhere that you thought was clear. You’ll be waking around quietly, and then somewhere far behind you, you hear a noise. And then you have to go looking for what made it. I think DOOM was actually a bit better at building tension in that manner than Dead Space is; that’s what I’m talking about when I say that I think that DOOM was the better game at creating a tense and creepy atmosphere.
That’s actually a shame, because honesty, I suspect that you’d dig it. It was really more of a shooter/survival horror hybrid than a straight run-and-gun shooter, and I think that threw a lot of people for a loop, sort of in the same way that my expectations about Dead Space threw me for a bit of a loop. I think DOOM 3 would appeal to survivor horror fans. I enjoyed it.
Man, call me a 30 year old little girl, but I cant play this game for longer then a hour, It gets me on edge…Probably the closest thing I’ve seen to system shock 2
I am playing it and it is a very good game, a nice surprise. The flaw of the game is how generic it is, it’s like Doom3 + System Shock 2 + Resident Evil + Event Horizon + Aliens. But it is a very well realized game.
About Doom 3 vs Dead Space. The difference is that Doom 3 was a 85% shooter (and an old school shooter, strafing and shooting, evading fireball from imps, good variety of weapons and monsters, etc) and 15% survival horror game, while Dead Space is a 60% action game and 40% survial horror game. It’s still more an action game, but it is more focused in the scary moments and the suspense, in the ammo count, in the plot of what happened in the ship, etc.
