Time to put the Dead Space hate to bed.

ThriKreen

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Ed130 said:
Its the Microtransactions in singleplayer, the co-op (becuase it worked in RE5! /sarcasm), the various PR statements form Visceral, the whole 5 million copies or it gets shafted deal...
So the microtransactions are optional, like boosters in LoL, to ease and speed up the grindy aspects of the game. Or enable New Game+ mode off the bat with an existing finished game save slot or something, for what seems like retaining extra resources and such for the upgrades and all that.

And playing in coop is optional as well, if you play in single player you don't get an AI partner like in Gears of War, so you retain the solo feel.

I seem to have missed the memo where "optional" means "forced".
 

Brainwreck

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Well, it's their right to put monetization into Single Player, and my right to never play the game.
That aside, I only played the first. Got bored about halfway through, dropped it promptly. It's not a horror game, and it's not interesting and fun enough for a proper action game.
 

SecondPrize

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ThriKreen said:
Ed130 said:
Its the Microtransactions in singleplayer, the co-op (becuase it worked in RE5! /sarcasm), the various PR statements form Visceral, the whole 5 million copies or it gets shafted deal...
So the microtransactions are optional, like boosters in LoL, to ease and speed up the grindy aspects of the game. Or enable New Game+ mode off the bat with an existing finished game save slot or something, for what seems like retaining extra resources and such for the upgrades and all that.

And playing in coop is optional as well, if you play in single player you don't get an AI partner like in Gears of War, so you retain the solo feel.

I seem to have missed the memo where "optional" means "forced".
If given the option to play a game where more grind is a plus for the publishers because they get paid for "easing" it, or playing a game where developers designed the pacing with the sole variable of player enjoyment in mind, i'll pick the latter every time.
The inclusion of micro transactions in this game most definitely DOES affect the game I get, whether I partake in them or not.
 

FoolKiller

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Ed130 said:
Its not that its a sequel that is getting people into a tailspin over it.

Its the Microtransactions in singleplayer, the co-op (becuase it worked in RE5! /sarcasm), the various PR statements form Visceral, the whole 5 million copies or it gets shafted deal...

Some would call Dead Space 3 to be a microcosm of all that is wrong in AAA game development.

I would rather wait until the game gets released before condemning it.

It's just that EA/Visceral appear to be trying to piss people off on purpose with some of their PR.
Actually many people did enjoy the co-op of Resident Evil 5. The problem with Dead Space is that its eliminated the bro-friendly split screen option. Now to play it co-op you have to go online (online pass). I've played through RE5 and Gears with a teammate and I like it much better when I have a friend in the room. I like having the person right there.

I'm a couple of hours in. I haven't found any gamebreaking need to buy stuff but haven't gone that far either. They did minimize the harassment to do the microtransactions but its still there and annoying that it exists. There are other stupid parts to the game. You start in a blizzard limping but if you hold down the aim button, you stop limping. What the hell is up with that?

Its okay but it does seem less horrorish and more actiony than the others.
 

mrhateful

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Even if what you say is true, then its still a dick move to call something dead space and then not make a dead space game...
 

Tomaius

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TBH, the single player of DS 1 & 2 I thought were pretty great. Not brilliant, and I wish 2 had explored the survival horror concept more but never mind.

What I objected to in Dead Space 2 was the tacked in multiplayer which was as well balanced as an OAP vs the Terminator, and its entire assistance seemed to be as a way to discredit used copies of the game. Other than that it was a pretty good game.

Whats even worse is this micro transaction system in DS3 and how the game is more geared towards money making and cramming features such as kinect utility with the end goal of selling more than 5 million units. Dead Space 3 might be a great game, but its mired in EA's profit mongering to the point where the game is starting to suffer because of it.
 

Gunner 51

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Personally, I won't be buying Dead Space 3. I played the first two - but wasn't terribly impressed with all the jump scares they kept doing. (Though I have to concede that the school part of Dead Space 2 was well done.) But I digress...

The whole idea of putting micro-transactions in a game - while it is nothing new, I do think it's a pretty sneaky way of ripping people off who have already paid in full up-front. When I pay full price for my game, I demand a good game - and I also don't want to be advertised to - while in venatus. It's a dick move, which not only breaks the mood of the game - but also shoves under your nose the fact that you haven't got the full game which you'd paid for. (Especially with Day 1 DLC.)

Mind you, I have strong feelings about DLC being used to extort people into paying over the odds for what should have been on disk to start with. While the publishers can be excused for their attitudes toward the pirates, it doesn't give them an excuse to pirate from the second hand buyer with the in the form of their online passes. Punish pirates by all means, but to take it out on the second hand gamer is strethcing it. But advertising extra content for those who paid in full from day 1 is the greediest profiteering and perhaps even extortion I've seen in a long time.

If EA were serious about giving new players extra ammo - just include a cheat mode at the beginning of the game which locks achievements as a price for activation. Everyone's happy, the newbs get their ammo/invunerability et al while everyone else gets their achievements.

Perhaps the folks at EA want Dead Space and it's developer to die, after all, it's in some dire financial straits and is trying to slim down. If Dead Space and Visceral went down the tubes, EA not only gets to retain the rights to Dead Space - but it gets to sack Visceral games. (Remember the "if it's not getting 5 million sales, we're pulling the plug" spiel EA done a while back?)

However, after all that - there's hope. I think EA have bitten off more than they can chew - when they get rid of Visceral Games - public relations won't just hit a new low, they'd go through the floor. Maybe that will be enough to topple the gigantic EA and end it's stranglehold over a lot of games while putting the fear of God into Activision. This should allow smaller studios to flourish in EA's absence.

At the end of the seventh era of gaming, we will be experiencing a new kind of business practice. Whether or not this change will be a good or a bad one, is yet to be seen. But I do know that the way games are being sold now has to change.
 

ThriKreen

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SecondPrize said:
If given the option to play a game where more grind is a plus for the publishers because they get paid for "easing" it, or playing a game where developers designed the pacing with the sole variable of player enjoyment in mind, i'll pick the latter every time.
The inclusion of micro transactions in this game most definitely DOES affect the game I get, whether I partake in them or not.
Well, it's most likely already is designed for standard play without the boosters, paced out so you're relatively weak in the beginning, have to search around for money, materials, a workbench, then get tons of upgrades by the end to feel like a bad ass. And balanced so you can only upgrade a handful of weapons, not all of them.

You know, much like the difficulty design for Dead Space 1, 2, or any other game out there.

Again, the boosters are like cheats, but in this case it's pay. Or unlocking New Game+ mode with a L30 guy right off the bat. Just because it's available, whether in-game, pay, trainers, whatever, it is optional, and the game is not designed to forced you to.

Or should I bring up games with intentional grindy aspects WITHOUT any sort of boost option? Any RPG: western, Japanese, or MMO? Diablo, Dungeon Defenders are also good examples, as are many Rogue-likes. Disgaea comes to mind for a strategy game. Borderlands. You can still play the game without grinding, but admittedly beating the last boss at L50 instead of L30 does make things easier, if you want to grind for the XP and equipment.

So I still fail to see why people are complaining that it affects your game since it doesn't - YOU are the one letting it affect you, not the game's design.
 

mad825

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ThriKreen said:
shrekfan246 said:
Generally speaking, any time a developer says "EA didn't tell us to do this" it means, "EA said this would be a good idea so we went along with it because we wanted to keep our jobs".
It really saddens me that any time a studio says the head didn't decide for them, a large majority of the audience believes they're lying. Of course, we never hear of any praise for good ideas, since it's quite easy to vilify bad decisions on the publisher, as the darling studio can't be the one to make said bad decision, but only responsible for the good decisions. Nope, never.
So who you want to blame for all this mistrust? The audience? Right now, the audience feels betrayed and exploited.
 

Fenra

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Eh, I made up my mind about Dead Space 3 the moment it was announced, simply put I'll buy it because I like the series and want to see where the story goes. Yeah I don't like some of the ideas flowing around and yes some things like the micro-transactions shop is sickening levels of money grabbing but if I hated every time any business made any sort of idiotic move and decided to boycott them all... hell I'd never get my weekly grocery shopping done for a start!

Besides in the grander scheme of things, whether I buy it or not isn't going to change the game they've made or the fact that they've put those micro-transactions in. The way I see a lot of this is... well look at call of duty, how much hate that gets online each year and yet it still tops charts with each release. Online communities represent only the tiniest sliver of the mass gaming market, most of which (if my time working at GAME is anything to go on) don't give a damn and just buy and play whats popular and what they want to.

I'm not going try and protect and "white knight" these decisions by EA, that's absurd but to deprive myself of more of a franchise I like over some gripes (big ones admittedly) that if I did isn't going to make a lick of difference is equally as absurd

I will buy it (or in this case open it once my pre-order arrives on Friday), play it, enjoy it (hopefully) then move on to the next game.
 

IamLEAM1983

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Having played the demo, my opinion is as follows:

1. Dead Space is being perceived by the public as being a horror title. For reasons unknown, Visceral Games considers it as Action Horror. Either that or they've fallen in the old trap whereby having freaky creature designs supposedly automatically makes your game qualify as "horror".

2. Several small aesthetic touches that were present in the first two games are gone, and I have the rather strong feeling that the dev team went on an Uncharted binge before conceptualizing certain levels. That's not a bad thing, but it does prove that the industry is cannibalizing itself. That always worries me to a degree.

3. The foundation for the micro-transaction system is a flimsy one at best. I'm fairly sure we'll start to see save file editors pop up. Anyone with a formatted USB stick can use a few homebrew program to open up game saves and fiddle around with them. Before long, you'll find hacked saves on CheatHappens where the various counters for the construction materials are all stuck on 999.

If you're on PC? Awesome. Editors and trainers, away!

A game of this nature will be exploited to death by people who want to take the easy and understandable way out without giving an extra dime to EA. If anything, this makes me wonder when the nickel-and-diming will become so egregious and offensive that EA will essentially step in its own dung and be stuck with a massive PR spill-over to deal with. No matter which way you slice it, EA can't hope to win that much sympathy capital with this system.

4. The Co-Op segment comes with a few cute effects in which the guy playing Carver is still being messed up by the raw effects of the Marker. If you're playing Isaac, who's grown more used to the hallucinations, you'll get to see your partner shooting at nothing every so often.

I really don't know what this brings to the table if you can't just snap Carver out of it. Not to mention, having friends over entirely kills the few remaining horror aspects of the game. Try playing "Amnesia: The Dark Descent" alone, and then play it with friends. You'll see.

This really just feels like a trite addition to me. Some sort of grudging admission that they would've added multiplayer elements but ended up realizing his the second game's offering was barely even touched by gamers. Dead Space looked to have a lot of promise back in the first game, but now, this just feels like the clearest case of "design by committee" I could think of.

If there's a Dead Space 4, it'll complete its metamorphosis by using Dubstep and some sort of renamed Prestige system, used in the context of a half-baked, unlock-based multiplayer system.
 

SecondPrize

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mad825 said:
ThriKreen said:
shrekfan246 said:
Generally speaking, any time a developer says "EA didn't tell us to do this" it means, "EA said this would be a good idea so we went along with it because we wanted to keep our jobs".
It really saddens me that any time a studio says the head didn't decide for them, a large majority of the audience believes they're lying. Of course, we never hear of any praise for good ideas, since it's quite easy to vilify bad decisions on the publisher, as the darling studio can't be the one to make said bad decision, but only responsible for the good decisions. Nope, never.
So who you want to blame for all this mistrust? The audience? Right now, the audience feels betrayed and exploited.
ThriKreen said:
SecondPrize said:
If given the option to play a game where more grind is a plus for the publishers because they get paid for "easing" it, or playing a game where developers designed the pacing with the sole variable of player enjoyment in mind, i'll pick the latter every time.
The inclusion of micro transactions in this game most definitely DOES affect the game I get, whether I partake in them or not.
Well, it's most likely already is designed for standard play without the boosters, paced out so you're relatively weak in the beginning, have to search around for money, materials, a workbench, then get tons of upgrades by the end to feel like a bad ass. And balanced so you can only upgrade a handful of weapons, not all of them.

You know, much like the difficulty design for Dead Space 1, 2, or any other game out there.

Again, the boosters are like cheats, but in this case it's pay. Or unlocking New Game+ mode with a L30 guy right off the bat. Just because it's available, whether in-game, pay, trainers, whatever, it is optional, and the game is not designed to forced you to.

Or should I bring up games with intentional grindy aspects WITHOUT any sort of boost option? Any RPG: western, Japanese, or MMO? Diablo, Dungeon Defenders are also good examples, as are many Rogue-likes. Disgaea comes to mind for a strategy game. Borderlands. You can still play the game without grinding, but admittedly beating the last boss at L50 instead of L30 does make things easier, if you want to grind for the XP and equipment.

So I still fail to see why people are complaining that it affects your game since it doesn't - YOU are the one letting it affect you, not the game's design.
As we seem to be starting with conjecture, I feel it is far more likely that the addition of a way to pay money to increase your power level will indeed have an effect on the their spacing of money and materials.
What you describe certainly was the difficulty design for Dead Space 1 & 2, two games which lacked the ability to purchase these cheats. Thinking that the addition of another variable will have no effect at all on their design is not a good assumption, in my book.

We already know that Visceral and EA are aware of the effects of adding early power to their games because of the deal with the free DLC on Dead Space 2 for the PC. People complained they weren't getting it, so they dumped all the high-powered DLC suits into the store, allowing them as purchasable items from the very start. They then had to go and patch this out because it trivialized the difficulty of the game to have such early access to these things.
I sincerely doubt they will have approached their current attempt at giving the players access micro transaction stuff without either making sure players felt they needed it to avoid grinding the gear, or by keeping the power levels low so as to not flatten the difficulty curve, which probably wouldn't be as good for sales.

Yes, grindy games are gindy. Why are we discussing them in a thread about Dead Space 3? Funny you mentioned Diablo, though, as I feel it to be a good example of how the mere addition of an optional auction house tweaked the loot drop and designs and most certainly affected the experience of everyone who played Diablo 3, whether they used the auction house or not.

If it turns out that the micro transactions don't affect my game play at all, I wouldn't give two shits about them. However, saying it won't affect me doesn't make it so, and until we know either way, it's perfectly acceptable to discuss them in this thread.
 

ThriKreen

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mad825 said:
So who you want to blame for all this mistrust? The audience? Right now, the audience feels betrayed and exploited.
Yes.

Because the player base are the ones putting the studio on a pedestal.

And lack being objective and doing any sort of research for the actual reasons. There's a huge disconnect between what you see and what goes on behind the scenes during development.

I mean, how would you view a studio if you found out all the bad design decisions for a game, ideally a sequel since you'd be comparing that to the first one, were not forced by the publisher at all?

Ideas the studio was not able to implement due to time or budget constraints for the first game. And now that the publisher with their funding stepped in, has allowed them to incorporate all these extra elements, that end up turning the game into crap?

Or the dev team changed internally? People join, leave or move to other projects all the time for a variety of reasons. I loved StarControl 2, but StarControl 3 was made by a different team. While I can still point a finger at the publisher for wanting a sequel and not getting the original devs on board, the bulk of the game design still lies on the SC3 dev team - not the publisher.

And ultimately thinking the game is designed for YOU specifically in mind.

They will take feedback from the forums, but you'll always get people saying the game should be more of X instead of Y, but you prefer Y over X. Do you blame the studio for listening to that one group, or to you? What if they made it more like Y like you wanted, and others complained it's not good? Who should they listen to? You? Them? Ignore everyone?

Obviously it's a mix, with the main decisions still on the studio to balance what they think would be fun.

The game will be what it is.

Judge it based on that, not what you think it should be.

Players need to learn to temper their expectations, it'll never be exactly like what they want. And that's where the problem lies, they create this image of the perfect game in their mind, and when the game doesn't live up to that image, they feel they were lied to*. But the studio is their darling, so it must be that evil publisher doing market research and forcing the studio to do these things and designing it by committee!



* ME3 Ending aside - I just started playing it so I'll eventually see what the hoopla is about. But the thing is, I'm going into this with low expectations. And it's not because I already knowing what the endings are, it's how I view and play every game - hence why I can still enjoy a great many EA published games, and really looking forward to SimCity and Dead Space 3 - cuz hey, I actually enjoyed them, without ever spending anything on DLC! *gasp*
 

ThriKreen

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IamLEAM1983 said:
4. The Co-Op segment comes with a few cute effects in which the guy playing Carver is still being messed up by the raw effects of the Marker. If you're playing Isaac, who's grown more used to the hallucinations, you'll get to see your partner shooting at nothing every so often.
OK, I have to admit that's awesome and a really good effect for coop - making things subjective based on who's playing who.
 

Silvanus

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I agree, I must say.


I loved Dead Space 1 & 2, and also feel that the direction that #3 seems to be heading in isn't what I'd prefer.


But I really don't let it bother me too much; the atmosphere still be brilliant, the gameplay will still be enjoyable.
 

Patrick Buck

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Why? People are perfectly allowed to hate a game if they want to, for a clear reason. Don't get me wrong, if they were saying they hated a game "Just because it's different" or "EA made it" they're talking out of their arse... but if they change a game from the way it used to be, they're still allowed to not like it.
Although going on the internet and whining like a ***** is annoying, so try and make it an actual valid complaint, rather than the kind of stuff I just said.

But EA are bad though. Don't buy from them kids!
(/Sarcasm)