Now Playing: Dead Space

If there haven’t been many blog updates in the last week, you can lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of Dead Space. In times when I normally write my posts or work on BBelief2008, I have been playing Dead Space instead. When I should have been going to bed around midnight, I kept playing Dead Space instead. It’s one of the best games I’ve experienced this year.

(The following text won’t contain any story spoilers, and no major game spoilers. But if you prefer to not know anything about the game, you might want to stop reading right here.)

Dead Space is a case study in focus and execution. There are a few novel touches (like the 3D inventory and 3D UI screens), but when you get to the bottom of it, there’s a preexisting example for every one of Dead Space’s game elements. Dismembering enemies? Soldier of Fortune 2. In-game economics and stores? System Shock 2 (and, more recently, Bioshock). Node upgrade system: Final Fantasy X/2. Resurrection monsters: Archvile from Doom 2. Zero gravity sections: Prey. And of course Doom 3 paved the way, by the way of Event Horizon.

So Dead Space doesn’t do many new things. But it does everything incredibly well. The individual elements come together perfectly, all gameplay systems are polished from beginning to end, and I applaud the designers (and EA) for seeing through the horror theme much more consequently than Doom 3 did. Dismembering the monsters is satisfying, there’s a reasonable amount of shock situations, and the player is never swimming in super weapons and other resources. The harder Dead Space gets, the more satisfying the experience becomes. I know several people who went for the “Plasma Cutter only” achievement on their first playthrough, and while I’m not quite as hardcore, I have only been using two weapons myself (the plasma cutter and pulse rifle). I might be missing some additional content by not buying additional weapons – but the game doesn’t need them! Even after 10+ hours, and with just a couple of weapons, the shooting doesn’t get stale. That’s a real testament to Dead Space’s core gameplay design.

On top of all that, Dead Space’s environments look gorgeous, with most impressively designed real time lighting. At the core, Dead Space uses a different lighting approach than Doom 3, but the results are similar. (If I wanted to nitpick, I could complain about the low resolution of some shadow maps. But everybody has to deal with limited texture memory.)

My major complaint about Dead Space is that it actually feels too long. That’s not a criticism of the game’s actual playing time, but points out problematic MO design. From the moment we arrive on the USG Ishimura, player character Isaac Clarke (Get it? Isaac Asimov + Arthur C. Clarke) gets his mission objectives from non-player characters. “Do this. Do that. Bend over backwards. Good, now we need to find these key cards and power up this piece of machinery.” At no point in the game do we get the feeling that we are actually driving the action of the game. It’s always reactive, and the entire game becomes an exercise in fetch quests. That isn’t very empowering, but at least it’s standard fare. The much bigger problem is that we don’t believe in any of the quests! Imagine a mission commander who tells the player at the beginning of chapter 2 that “hey, if we just do this and that, we can refire the engines of this ship and get out of here!” Of course we won’t believe that! It’s like reading a 400 page book in which the characters supposedly find the solution to all problems on page 80 – as the reader, we just look at the remaining 320 pages and go “Uhm… no.”
Dead Space is like that, with the added problem of the player not knowing how many pages of the book are left. When the fetch quests just keep on coming towards the end of the game, the game feels aimless and starts dragging out.

But never mind these minor quibbles with the story. I absolutely love this game! Part of that might be my sensibilities – Dead Space feels like a “level designer’s game”. I don’t know how well this perception aligns with the actual development realities, but Dead Space just screams of this design approach: give the design power to a group of experienced, hardcore level designers, let them do what’s best for the game, cut all the marketing crap, and you get an awesome game. The end result will feel as tight, focused and right as Dead Space does. Maybe you won’t end up with a game that captures the mass market. But you do get a 90% game, and you get hardcore players (and the industry) raving.

As for me, I’ll stop raving now. I think I’m getting close to the end of the game