Dead Space Ending

[Hithel]

-- spoilers a-plenty --
-- Here be spoilers --
-- spoilers ahead --
-- Read this to spoil the game --
-- Wikipedia entry for spoilers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_(media)] --

*sigh*

I finished Dead Space a short while ago, and I feel that a fair 12 hours of my life and a sizable amount of cash has been stolen from me. When I finish a game I want some semblance of closure and the ending not to put the rest off the game on its head.

Let's do this from the start.

Nicole is dead. Period.
That we know for certain. The fairly well-known Chapter letter "puzzle" confirms this.
Put the first letter of each mission together.
Mission 1: New Arrivals
Mission 2: Intensive Care
Mission 3: Course Correction
Mission 4: Obliteration Imminent
Mission 5: Lethal Devotion
Mission 6: Environmental Hazard
Mission 7: Into the Void
Mission 8: Search and Rescue
Mission 9: Dead on Arrival
Mission 10: End of Days
Mission 11: Alternate Solutions
Mission 12: Dead Space

Now, knowing this leaves the game with some gaping plot holes. The part where you're protecting Nicole from necromorphs makes no sense at all with this revelation. For the addition off one cheap scare the ending makes even less sense. Not to mention why necromorphs are attacking Isaac in the first place all the time if Isaac is just a tool for it to return the marker.

Dead Space which was largely a good game up to this brings forth an echoin "meh" from me.

 

[Aardvark]

The necromorphs didn't want him to return the marker. Returning it would have caused the Hive Mind to go dormant again, thus stopping the necromorphs. It was something else, possibly the marker itself, that was driving old Issac along by way of his wifely hallucinations.

There's going to be a sequel and they're hoping to make it a trilogy, so they'll probably have the third one explain it.

 

[MercurySteam]

First off all i wanted to mention how cool the "first letter of each misssion together" is.

Second, the reson the necromorphs attack Issac is for the same reason they attacked anyone else. To make bodies.

Third, according to wikipedia when Issac looks to the right of where he's sitting in the shuttle at the very end, they say they is a necromorph of Nicloe.

Can anyone confirm this or post a detailed pic?

 

[Aproxx]

I also think that Dead Space was a great game, and the ending was hilarious. Mostly because i've seen it before and allowed my little brother to watch (it brings up laughter ).

The thing with chapter i dident notice either, its auctally pretty cool. About the whole Nicole helping you thourgh the game thing, i think his mind made him other things he dident see, therfore someone else could had helped him, like a random surviver or Hammond or the lady (dont remember her name )

 

[Jumplion]

I also finished Dead Space, and I didn't trust Nicole from the start. There was obviously something up with her.

I only noticed the chapter message because of Wikipedia.

When you're protecting Nicole from the Necromorphs, you have to remember that the Marker was manipulating Issac to get it back to the planet. Most likely the necromorphs were ordered to go there. Or atleast, that's my theory.

 

[hypothetical fact]

My theory is that none of it ever happened and Isaac is just locked up in some ward. The game made no sense since we saw that the necromorphs make corpses while the bat versions made necromorphs. If we are to believe that Isaac wasn't insane from the begining then how did one necromorph manage to necro an entire military ship without a bat thing?

 

[John Stalvern]

My theory is that none of it ever happened and Isaac is just locked up in some ward. The game made no sense since we saw that the necromorphs make corpses while the bat versions made necromorphs. If we are to believe that Isaac wasn't insane from the begining then how did one necromorph manage to necro an entire military ship without a bat thing?

Can you elaborate a little bit? I don't really get what you're driving at. But the Ishimura is definitely not a military vessel and it's safe to say that more than one necromorph was active on the ship.
There's actually a comic that deals with the backstory on youtube.

 

[hypothetical fact]

My theory is that none of it ever happened and Isaac is just locked up in some ward. The game made no sense since we saw that the necromorphs make corpses while the bat versions made necromorphs. If we are to believe that Isaac wasn't insane from the begining then how did one necromorph manage to necro an entire military ship without a bat thing?

Can you elaborate a little bit? I don't really get what you're driving at. But the Ishimura is definitely not a military vessel and it's safe to say that more than one necromorph was active on the ship.
There's actually a comic that deals with the backstory on youtube.

You ask for spoilers and that is what you get.
During the game your captain ejects a necromorph into space in an escape pod, this pod is picked up by a military vessel where its occupant kills everyone. The ship crashes into the Ishimura andyou board it to find super necromorphs everywhere. Either that single necromorph managed to turn everyone else into necros without a bat or the bats managed to immediately board the ship despite that there was no way in because of the radioactive material. Either way it makes no sense.

 

[Fenring]

There's going to be a sequel and they're hoping to make it a trilogy, so they'll probably have the third one explain it.

Cool. I'd be willing to buy them if there good.

 

[PirateKing]

Well thanks for ruining it for me. I'm not serious. I played Dead Space and thought it was pretty fun. Though I honestly had more fun playing Silent Hill 5. Ummm...yeah. Those sound like gaping plot holes to me. Maybe we would feel sorry for Nicole if Isaac actually talked. What is the fascination with not letting the main character speak? Are we supposed to be its mind? Maybe that's why we never hear Gordon Freeman say, "Damn it! No! You guys do it! I am sick of all this crap!"
Anyway, I didn't really plan on finishing that game and I just read the synopsis on Wikipedia...yup. That's pretty lame.

 

[John Stalvern]

You ask for spoilers and that is what you get.
During the game your captain ejects a necromorph into space in an escape pod, this pod is picked up by a military vessel where its occupant kills everyone. The ship crashes into the Ishimura andyou board it to find super necromorphs everywhere. Either that single necromorph managed to turn everyone else into necros without a bat or the bats managed to immediately board the ship despite that there was no way in because of the radioactive material. Either way it makes no sense.

All of this is based on the assumption that the bats are the only way to change a human into a necromorph. The game's backstory shows that the original necromorphs came from the bodies of deranged colonists who were infected by other means on the planet. Not to mention that the very existence of the necromorphs is at this point quasi-spiritual and unexplained. I don't see why the plot needs to be bundled into a nice little package allowing no speculation in a game that was planned to have a sequel that would expand on the story from the get go.

 

[Gregorus Prime]

It is explicitly stated that the Marker was communicating with Isaac, not the Hive Mind. The Marker itself is a sapient entity. The bit where "Nicole" needed protection while she opened the door is easily explained: the door was never locked in the first place. The whole thing was just the Marker manipulating poor Isaac.

As for the military ship: in the intro to the game, a single necromorph is able to take down the two marines accompanying the crew in a matter of seconds. They don't have Isaac's plot armor. The majority of the necros infesting that ship came in from the Ishimura after the first one slaughtered the marines who opened the escape pod (or it opened on its own after docking; kind of stupid, but plausible) and then went through the ventilation ducts to get to the bridge. Cliff racer things come in and start humping corpses left and right.

It's not Shakespeare, but it's a solid (if uninspired) plot with no real holes in it.

 

[mokes310]

Dead Space which was largely a good game up to this brings forth an echoin "meh" from me.

I've heard that same thing from a bunch of friends. They enjoyed the game to a certain extent, but felt a bit shafted.

 

[Hithel]

The Marker being the one manipulating Isaac makes more sense but that still doesn't explain the ending where an alleged necromorph Nicole attacks him. This particular necromorph looks to be little more than a banged up corpse, which completely messes with the game's own continuity as EVERY OTHER necromorph in the game is a grotesque mess. While this isn't a plot hole per se I hate it when a game throws out it's own logic only to make some kind of point.

Just to make it clear, I didn't totally dislike Dead Space. The game has extraordinary production values for start. For the first half of the game when you were still encountering new weapons and locations it was a thrill. Then the set pieces started repeating themselves and the surprise "boo!" moments never worked anymore because you could pretty much anticipate at what key moments the baddies would suddenly spawn.

I believe Condemned worked very well in this regard. That game had very little actual fighting. But the fights you were involved with was always so brutal that I was wincing. Also you were always hurting for ammo, a better weapon or a weapon in better condition. You were on your toes for the entire trip in Condemned. Oddly enough these two games endings are very similar, but the one in DS did nothing for me were Condemned raised a lot of questions about the main characters sanity. With Dead Space, as mentioned, it was just a cheap scare that didn't make sense.

Oh, and anyone in this thread complaining about spoilers should probably not have skipped the very first line of my original post: -- spoilers a-plenty --

 

[Sensenmann]

Me thinks the spoiler warning needs to be over several lines....

To be honest I dont really care if she dies, I care more that I complete storyline.

I still have to wait at least to saturday, since on christmas I realised my Dead Space disk was scratched, dented and even had a crack in it... Damn it EA. Looks like I may not play it before getting back to school... dunno.

 

[Hithel]

Me thinks the spoiler warning needs to be over several lines....

Fixed.
Call me crazy for thinking that a thread title that includes "ending" would by itself keep away those not wanting spoilers.

 

[Rocksa]

Haven't actually had the joy of playing the game since I'm limited to mostly just having to buy games at this point (interesting bit of wisdom, don't let other people rent games on your accounts, it will not end well) but I did watch the ending on youtube, as well as the movie that was supposed to be a prequel type deal that showed how the Ishimura went to hell in the first place. After seeing both, well, I don't think that was Nicole on the ship at the end, looked more like it was the woman who first discovered the marker on the planet before it was cracked.

Basically, and there's spoilers here...





The woman was part of the team that first saw the marker, first reported it and whatnot. Her husband was also a sort of scout/miner. The colony planetside goes to hell, she's in the colony, the husband is out in a shuttle with his buddy when this happens and the two rush back. They run into a colony full of necromorphs, husband finds wife, wife kills self in front of him, he carries lifeless corpse back to shuttle and jets off for the Ishimura, but not before one of the bat things slips into the shuttle and necromorphs her. Husband crashes shuttle into Ishimura shuttle bay, necromorph wife kills him, he gets necroed, she runs off and climbs into the marker somehow. Husband and bat thing go to the ship's morgue where all of the other poor saps that've already killed themselves or been killed as a result of the (I'm guessing) hive mind driving them to produce bodies in preparation. Bat thing goes to work, whole mess of necromorphs make quick work of the ship with what would seem to be only the one bat thing flying around to produce more necromorphs. Doesn't take long for entire ship to be overrun, since by the time they know what's going on, well, it's too late to stop it.

At the end of it all the wife from the begining just stays a banged up looking corpse. Looks a lot like the creature from the end movie of the game.

 

[JaymesFogarty]

SPOILER **************************** SPOILERS ***********************
Did anyone else notice that in the video in which Nicole kills herself, the room she is in looks very similar to the ship you end up on in the last chapter?

 

[squid5580]

Still doesn't answer how SHE OPENED THE DAMN DOOR!!!!!!!!