Sudden slamming on Dead Space 3, hilarious?

[Xeogred]

I'm not seeing it here at all so I'm not mad at any of you dudes, but I just randomly gotta get this rant out.

Can someone seriously tell me when Dead Space was ever legitimately horror? From the very start, this series' main gameplay mechanic was SHOOT THE LIMBS. You are equipped with mechanic/engineer devices that end up being far more brutal and destructive than normal weaponry. Your suit is on par with the Master Chief's tank armor. The first game has like twice as many BOSS BATTLES as the two that followed. I beat the original on Impossible and never had inventory management or ammo concerns in any of these games. None of the games ever had mind boggling puzzles, or deep psychological elements other than Isaac yelling profanities in the second game. Dead Space 3 has the best use of co-op utilization I've seen in awhile, play it alone and you're not crippled or losing out on anything. If Dead Space keeps you up at night, do you sleep with a night light?

My roommate and I were just kind of laughing about all the backlash the gaming blogs are suddenly slamming Dead Space 3 with, in which most of these reviewed the game with quite favorably a simple month ago. Oh but once people talk, it suddenly sucks? Another really bad case of gamer entitlement? Definitely something I hate about the blog sites at times like this. I also can't say I favor micro transactions, but both my roommate and I ran through the game without touching those and didn't miss out on anything nor does the game shove it in your face, so I'm not sure what the point of attacking that is either.

Throughout the story of the game, especially with the second, we knew a cult was involved. YOU KNEW these guys were coming and were placed for essential progress in the story and still, they took up like 5% of the game? Not a big deal to me at all either, especially considering they did jack damage to you and were barely a threat (Tank Armor coming in handy?) Were they as fun to fight as the necromorphs? You kidding? But it makes sense how they were added in here and they obviously weren't a huge gameplay focus at all, not to mention the campaigns length was pretty nice, so they were just a brief instance or two throughout the later bits.

So this just all blows my mind. If the entire medium is panning on Dead Space as the revival of horror, then there's obviously a huge void there that needs to be filled with true horror games. From the start Dead Space has mostly been action/sci-fi to me. It's ALIENS. It was never once Alien.

It's not like they gave necromorphs AK-47's.

But because Isaac can now crouch and roll, the dynamics and direction of Dead Space 3 have taken the series into and entirely, radically insane and different, crazy new direction.

[Ack]

The first game is pretty much the horror one. And most folks compared it to The Thing, what with the mutations of dead humans. Less so Alien, unless you could argue the other way around, that you are the monster hunting down the only recently born and still infantile necromorphs using a massive wielding torch as your weapon... Anyway, walking through quiet, gore-soaked sectiosn of the ship only to have something hideous leap out in front of you which you could only defeat by sawing it to pieces while it kept coming...that was the idea. I never played the second, so I can't speak for it, but the first was meant to be a horror game. Sure, it really wasn't scary, and fighting enemies quickly became extremely methodical, and ammunition was plentiful, especially if you stuck to one weapon the whole time. But it had its aspirations.

[Gamerforlife]

Gamers are fickle. Someone the other day pointed out how people bashed Prince of Persia 2008 for it's Elika system that made it impossible to die, even though Sands of Time had essentially the same thing with the time rewind feature.

Love it one moment, hate it the next. That's gamers for you, inconsistent.

[MrEco]

It's not like they gave necromorphs AK-47's.

Because EA is the publisher, not Activision.

[Xeogred]

The first game is pretty much the horror one. And most folks compared it to The Thing, what with the mutations of dead humans. Less so Alien, unless you could argue the other way around, that you are the monster hunting down the only recently born and still infantile necromorphs using a massive wielding torch as your weapon... Anyway, walking through quiet, gore-soaked sectiosn of the ship only to have something hideous leap out in front of you which you could only defeat by sawing it to pieces while it kept coming...that was the idea. I never played the second, so I can't speak for it, but the first was meant to be a horror game. Sure, it really wasn't scary, and fighting enemies quickly became extremely methodical, and ammunition was plentiful, especially if you stuck to one weapon the whole time. But it had its aspirations.

Always wanted to play The Thing, definitely looked pretty cool.

I see where you're getting at though. I guess it's just me when it comes to the "horror" tag. Maybe "scary" should mean something totally different, when horror can apply to grotesque and more in your face violence and shocks. I dunno. Doom 3, FEAR, Resident Evil, etc, and the likes I don't really view as horror at all, they've just got some dark undertones with the atmosphere and the shocking violence. Stuff like Fatal Frame, now that's the only series I've played that's legit made me "think" after putting the controller down and was truly haunting at times. Silent Hill seems to fit that bill too from the things I've heard, I only played a portion of 2 awhile back (hope to remedy that someday).

What mostly gets me about this debacle though is simply a lot of people acting like the third game is leaps and bounds different from the first, when ... I just can't fathom how that's the case. All the main mechanics and gameplay elements that made up the first game, are still there in the third. Nothing dramatically changed at all other than a few minor things under the hood. Many fans refusing to outright even play the game is just hilarious.

Definitely some silly beans around all this.

[Lodestar]

Having played the first two, I found the third to be incredibly boring--even as an action game. The writing was trite and predictable and I was pretty much calling things as they were about to happen. The game somehow found a way to make me care very little about what was going on. If it weren't for me streaming the game, I would have shelved it indefinitely/uninstalled. Even the people watching it (who liked the first two) thought it was incredibly boring.

From what I've been hearing, it shines in co-op mode, but that's it.

[Menegrothx]

Love it one moment, hate it the next. That's gamers for you, inconsistent.

Because gamers make up a homogeneous mass with a hivemind

[Lodestar]

Love it one moment, hate it the next. That's gamers for you, inconsistent.

Because gamers make up a homogeneous mass with a hivemind

Hindsight and time do have an effect on these ever-changing opinions; over time when we see gimmicks abused and overdone, we go back to older games, see those very same mechanics we've grown accustomed to and scoff. Think about RE4 and its QTEs; at the time, pretty damn innovative and well-done, now, one might look back and see RE4's over-the-shoulder camera and QTEs and think, wow, what was so special about that?

And for that matter, I thought Dead Space's QTEs were a hindrance. I dislike the idea of being put into a long sequence of mashing from basic enemies. Tomb Raider 2013 has this same type of mechanic (fighting wolves, for example) and it is not fun to me, doesn't make me feel on edge or anything like that...even when the penalty for losing is death, I just see it as a major annoyance distracting me from the rest of the game. Some things just don't age well, and when the industry moves on from QTEs, we'll all just laugh and criticize this era for having used them...much like how we look back at a limited save point systems (or games having no saves/checkpoint systems) and wondering how that was considered acceptable.

[Lodestar]

Gamers are fickle. Someone the other day pointed out how people bashed Prince of Persia 2008 for it's Elika system that made it impossible to die, even though Sands of Time had essentially the same thing with the time rewind feature.

Not quite the same, while you could rewind 10 seconds into the past, you had limited uses with sand tanks--if I recall. I remember situations where I couldn't rewind back to a safe place, so it wasn't guaranteed.

PoP 2008 was geared so much for the casual gamer that you could revive pretty much 5 feet back from where you were whenever you made the slightest mistake. Fell off a cliff? Died? Jumped into some black goo? No problem, and it did it all for you--its complete inability to pose a challenge was why it was criticized so much. At least in the original there were some challenging parts here and there. 2008 was shameless in how much it held your hand, I finished it once and never had any urge to go back to it. It's like the Epic Yarn of the PoP series.

[isiolia]

PoP 2008 was geared so much for the casual gamer that you could revive pretty much 5 feet back from where you were whenever you made the slightest mistake. Fell off a cliff? Died? Jumped into some black goo? No problem, and it did it all for you--its complete inability to pose a challenge was why it was criticized so much. At least in the original there were some challenging parts here and there. 2008 was shameless in how much it held your hand, I finished it once and never had any urge to go back to it. It's like the Epic Yarn of the PoP series.

I saw it a lot more as a way to minimize the delay between a failed attempt at something and retrying it. It's been a while, but I remember it still dropping you back to the beginning of a lot of sequences. Being saved from death in combat also saw your enemy get regenerated a little.

Not that it was hard, but most games now don't expect the player to repeat large sections over and over anyway. Most of what that game did just a more organic way of doing the same thing as a death/loading screen with very frequent checkpoints. You can have significantly more difficult games that do similar things - Super Meat Boy wastes zero time setting you back up to try again, with most levels being very short, for example.

Tomb Raider 2013 has this same type of mechanic (fighting wolves, for example) and it is not fun to me, doesn't make me feel on edge or anything like that...even when the penalty for losing is death, I just see it as a major annoyance distracting me from the rest of the game.

In nearly all cases I can remember, QTEs fighting wolves are your chance to not die after failing to dodge and/or kill them before they get close. Not that the game doesn't use mandatory QTEs on occasion, but they aren't a standard part of combat until/unless you unlock the counterattack options in the hand-to-hand tier.