Why is the Dead Space setting so cool?

The setting at large didn't seem that great honestly, it's the atmosphere that made it great.

>>49657443
It's atmosphere that really makes a good setting more than anything else.

>>49656757
> Why is Dead Space cool?

Do you know the old Klinger proverb that says revenge is a dish that is best served cold?

It is very cold in space....

>>49657466
Mfw my spellchecker turns all Klingons into tannins from the Korean war...

>>49657486
My give up...

>>49657443
>alien
>with markers
>and cults
>and neat power armor with a unique aesthetic
good enough for me

>>49657507
>a yellowish or brownish bitter-tasting organic substance present in some galls, barks, and other plant tissues, consisting of derivatives of gallic acid, used in leather production and ink manufacture.

>>49657465
As far as worldbuilding went though the setting didn't really come up with anything groundbreaking. Not to ramble about MUH ORIGINALITY as all the elements in the setting did click together rather nicely.

Dead Space is a cool setting for the same reason Pre-343 Halo was a cool setting.

People felt like people, technology felt realistic and the world at large felt developed.

It presents a future that you could actually live in, or apart from one or two extinction level events a future you'd WANT to live in.

>>49657517
You forget the fact that almost all weapons are repurposed tools. I loved that Isaac had to macgyver a weapon out of a torch and a plasma cutter took from a random table in 2.

>>49657593
Surgery table. He just yanked a bit out of a fucking autodoc and started blasting niggas.

>>49657593
Yep, high-tech mining/repair tools with their safeties sabotaged are not to be fucked with.

>>49656757
I love how the setting is pretty high power space opera with stasis, anti grav, and all sorts of crazy things, yet still manages to feel lived in and grimy.

Also, is the reason that workspaces have almost zero safety features because power armor is apparently the default work outfit for engineers?

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>>49657845
>safety features

Those make for terrible map design in games anon. Not to mention that they're expensive as fuck.

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>>49656757
>Hard scifi+eldritch shit+ayy lmaos 2

Gotta coop the 3 dlc some day...

>>49657908
The DLC was really quite a let down gameplay-wise, and that's coming from someone that enjoyed the whole series including 3 (coop with my brother was a blast). We didn't complain much about it as we got the game for 1 buck, but considering that the DLC was at something like 7 while on discount...not really worth it. Still, that's the last content we got so might as well get it.

>>49656757
They have "planet crackers" which can fit in ships barely a mile long and rend planets asunder. Why aren't they using this technology to kill necromorph moons?

>>49658182
The memetic, insanity inducing, turbo-space-zombie making properties of said moons

>>49657537
I'm sorry, I don't really get your point. It wasn't groundbreaking, sure, but you agree that everything worked out well, and that originality isn't necessarily the best thing. So what's wrong with it?

>>49658200
Why don't they just build a marker that broadcasts something like the plane scene into people's minds

>>49657845
The reason there was no OSHA compliance (in-lore) in Dead Space was because most people were required to wear condensed EVA suits, and also cloning technology was so advanced it was just easier to replace limbs you lost in work accidents.

That's why your girlfriend gets her eye back in 3 after getting it gouged out in 2. Also why there's like a million babies on the Ishimura, they're not real babies, they're organ farm embryos.

>>49657677
best part of DS2 was right at the beginning when someone mentions a plasma cutter and Isaac goes "A PLASMA CUTTER?!"

This is a man who has gone through hell, he witnessed a holocaust's worth of bodies, was deceived by his psychotic girlfriend ghost imagination figment, and murdered a shitload of Cronenburg beasties. He's been institutionalized, pumped full of drugs, been allowed to stay inside a metal suit since that's probably the only thing that lets him sleep at night without screaming constantly. Necromorphs chased him down and attack his facility. A man's face literally explodes into gore 2 inches from his face. Isaac escapes from exploded face man, running through a nightmare of gore in a straightjacket and finds a man with an open chest cavity crying for help. And the only goddamn thing that makes sense in this nightmare reality is a goddamn plasma cutter.

that's my favorite part of DS2

>>49657941
Eh,it was alright, IMO. Way too damn short, though.

>>49658214
I think he's saying that you don't get much info on the setting outside of the stuff that Isaac does.

>>49656757

I would play in this setting as a half crazed space station engineer. He'd wander around the bloody landscape looking around and saying "Well that's why this room is falling apart! They removed all the load-baring spikes and metal plating! All this blood is messing with the cold, souless scientific motif I designed! Fools, the lot of them!"

>>49658406
don't forget that anything under his boots explodes

>>49658421

"NO, you IDIOT, you weren't supposed to AVOID the malfunctioning giant drill mechanism, I was making an ARTISTIC STATEMENT about the DANGERS of INDUSTRIALISM"

>>49658286
Never played three, but that does explain why she wasn't that distraught about the loss of an eye.

>>49658713

It gave her an actual personality and then with the boost of confidence she got a much better dick man for all her crazy dicking needs.

Problem was, for me, the plot made absolutely zero sense. I've gone through the wiki and talked about it with people and I still have no idea what the fuck was going on.

>indians are savaged by plagues by whites just giving them blankets
>humans are savaged by plagues from alien cell towers

Life's rough man.

>>49659368
Giant monoliths attract intelligent civilizations to them so they they can start making them go crazy and kill each other, and also make more copies of the monoliths.

Once enough people die, monoliths start bringing corpses back as crazy-ass zombies. Monoliths also start mind-raping survivors.

Once everyone's zombies, monoliths turn all the biomass into a meat moon, summons the other meat moons from the last times this shit happened, everyone goes on buffet, and then go back to sleep and wait.

You're a lonely engineer. Stop the zombies.

>>49657845
>Also, is the reason that workspaces have almost zero safety features because power armor is apparently the default work outfit for engineers?

>Designed to hack and slice through solid rock, the RC-DS Remote Control Disc Ripper is an extremely dangerous tool. In less skilled hands, it's an accident waiting to happen, ejecting incredibly sharp diamond-coated tungsten blades at up to 17,000 RPM to cut through anything in front of it.
I don't think people in the Dead Space universe give two shits about OHSA rules.

>>49658182
Isn't pretty much the whole plot of the first game trying to do that but you're being shutdown by giant space worm tentacle hive mind thing while simultaneously being insane

>>49658297
>I'm having a "/tg/ is my favorite board" moment
Thanks guy.

>>49659894
There's too many people for the resources and living space. Cloning tech for replacement limbs is fucking everywhere.

Why do you think that Meatfucker Cult is the dominant religion in the franchise? People just don't give a shit about living anymore, even with telekinesis.

>>49657593
>>49657677
>>49658297
I've been wanting to write a Dead Space inspired custom science fiction weapon tool system (DSICSFWTS for short) for a while now. Except make the players actually have to modify parts themselves, and if they don't invest time and effort into it they can just overload the heat sinks and melt their hands.


Isaac in DS2 is a damn great protagonist and Ellie makes the game. Two generic dudes who hold up under insane levels of pressure and do things even they didn't know they could.

>>49659549
>Once everyone's zombies, monoliths turn all the biomass into a meat moon, summons the other meat moons from the last times this shit happened, everyone goes on buffet, and then go back to sleep and wait.

but why

>>49665137
Because it's basically a memetic mind-virus thing that's only goal is to replicate itself.

I suspect the first one was made as some sort of doomsday bio-weapon.

>>49665137
There's no overriding intelligence to it, it's a virus.

>>49665137
It is form of procreation. Also moons create new monoliths and then sends them through space, so they will one day impact some planet.

In book, they explained, that the monolith by itself can create life. So when monolith hits the barren planet, it will slowly introduce life. Then waits, until new civilization tries to control powers of monolith. It switch from malign, to benign, induce madness and cause killing and shit. It will starts Convergence Event, creating new moon from biomass. New moon will create new monoliths and send them to outer space. The cycle will be repeated again.

>>49656757
I did not like, in fact I haven't even finished the first game.

>>49658214
To elaborate on this, since the thread is still alive, I mean that you remember the games because of the atmosphere, as it was said, not because of some way above average thing in the plot or setting. Not really a drawback and there's nothing wrong with it.

>>49657593
>You forget the fact that almost all weapons are repurposed tools.
Until 3.

But then again, you can't shoot a moon down with a welder, can you?

>>49666024
3's system is just Isaac having elevated scrounging for dangerous tools and combining them into weapons into a form of art

>>49666064

I think it'd be better put that it's the first time in the series Isaac is forced to use the right tool for the job.

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>>49666064
I reckon it was a cool and fun system but didn't fit with the feeling of Dead Space. I mean, having my kickass stasis shotgun/flamethrower combo for dealing with necromorphs getting in my face was fun, but it didn't really click for me in the game.

I preferred 2's weapons since they had a lot more personality and power behind them.

>>49666064
>>Isaac having elevated scrounging for dangerous tools and combining them into weapons into a form of art
>This repurposed magnetic bolt-gun is a statement on the brevity and fragility of life, and also happens to launch metal bolts at high enough speeds to pass through an armored breastplate and nail a guy's kidney to the back of his power armor.

>>49666286
>but didn't fit with the feeling of Dead Space

I'd say it's quite the opposite. Obvious mentions of grind aside (and it's not that bad if you just send the little robot thingies around all the time while you play), it made sense that Isaac actually got better in what he could do through the games, that's another way to show how he developed from being a random guy in 1 to the hardened dude in 2, he being more cold and efficient about it in 3 wasn't that much of a stretch.

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Because the final boss is an entire race of this guy.

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>>49657486
Best girl passing through.

>>49656757
Presentation. The plot of the setting itself becomes rubbish after the first game.

>>49657845

And the corrupt corps that run things don't give a fuck about safety features, and they have the leeway to get away with it because EarthGOV is too resource strapped to dead with them.

Plus, technology seems to have an inherently unstable base. Gravity plates fucking kill people when they go bad, rather than just shutting down. Like just beneath the surface of this setting, everything is one accident away from turning grizzly.

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>>49666024
This is Isaac fukken Clarke we're talking about, I bet you he could just take a spanner to a planet cracker and build a massive plasma cutter to chop it with

>>49656757

The setting itself is not much different from our own, it's designed all future-y but largely mirrors our own world while introducing elements of its own horrific flavor.

It's that way to evoke a feeling of familiarity, and the feelings that that evokes when things are familiar but turn horrible. Dead Space has always cemented itself in the uncanny. Uncanny enemies, uncanny locations, uncanny atmosphere... It's the feeling you get when things are weird and not quite right but still familiar, combined with the shock elements of horror and casual gore with the visceral fear of being pursued by monsters.

Also, the art team designed shit for a year before they started programming. Their initial concepts look generic or bizarre, not things that's normally have people a connection to. Later they started going macabre and gothic, and added in these elements subtly. The plates on Isaac's suit looking like ribs, and the structure of the Ishimura looking like the ribcage of a massive whale. After that, they gave each location its own feeling as well. The medical bays look spartan and clinical, the science areas look advanced and bizarre, the industrial areas look tough and barebones, and even flight decks look like the inside of a C130. Subtly in presentation by taking familiar design elements we know and combining them with the bizarre, horrific, and visceral to create the uncanny.

Dead Space 2 gives us even more new locations like spooky Cathedrals and train stations. DS3 had its moments, and overall I like the game, but it did have an element or two of "should have had 6-12 months more concept, playtesting, and refining."

>>49670166
Agreed, the third game just wasn't as... polished as the rest

But man, the mental fortitude of that guy. I wonder if he has some kind of mutation or something to be able to handle the massive amount of shit that felled thousands of hardcore career soldiers

>>49671090
A psychotic break can do wonders for mental health.
Can't break a guy that's already schizo

>>49671090

Isaac really just got lucky. The circumstances that saved him from madness were nothing innate about him.

First off, he had the engineering and mathematical knowledge for this brain to subconsciously interpret the marker code. So instead off going batshit crazy immediately, he just started to slowly go marker-maker crazy instead.

On top of that, the organization that kidnapped him between 1 and 2 wiped his brain periodically to roll back the effect of the marker signal on him. This went on for months or years. That gave his brain a chance to slowly build up a resistance to the marker signal, however small.

That resistance wouldn't have saved him in the long run on its own, but it bought him enough time and wiggle room to make it to the manmade black marker and interface with it, purging himself of the marker signal and basically blowing up the marker in psychic dream battle... somehow.

Which made him immunized to the signal going forward. He had already gone through that shit and come out the other side. If you co-op 3, the second dude no one cares about is seeing hallucinations and shit, but Isaac is a fucking rock in the storm.

Don't get me wrong, dude is a machine. But without a lot of outside help and special circumstance, he never would have made it.

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>>49671322

Anyone else remember those Dead Space/Mass Effect crossover threads we had a while back?

That was some good shit.

>>49671331
Yeah but he wasn't the only one with high intelligence exposed to the marker signal, dosed up and mind-wiped. Other people went through the same shit he did, faced the same horrors he did, but none of them came even near of being as awesome as he became.

I'm telling you, there's gotta be something different about him

>>49671376
Best time I've ever had on 4chan, brother

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>>49671376
Remember all the shit we came up with around this picture?

>>49671699
>>49671414
>>49671376

Archive link?

>>49670424

I noticed it when playing and watching Markiplier's Lets's Play; directions aren't as intuitive as they aught to be, not like DS1 and 2. You can get lost or frustrated in 3 because there's not really an explicit direction or goal, and things might not be as polished as they need to be to have the game flow to keep you in the horror frame of mind. When you have to stop and figure something out that's not some kind of in-game obstacle or puzzle, it takes you out of the game.

Dead Space 1 and 2 performed this excellently. And while 3 stumbled in a few places and is generally a less polished product, it still did a lot of things well. The ice planet is actually pretty amazing as an environment, as are the bases, excavations, and ultimately the alien city buried underneath. That shit is straight Lovecraft in a good way right there. Space feels lonely but allows great freedom of movement, and the derelicts offer some great claustrophobic environments to wander, but even between ships there's not a lot of diversity in their interiors which would be much appreciated, and little to do outside save for a few mission tasks and some hidden goodies.

>>49672291
The original Dead Space in many ways seemed to me like a sci-fi revamp of Resident Evil 4, in terms of gameplay. Darker atmosphere, bigger inventory, and more original combat, but very similar besides.

>>49672679

You wouldn't exactly be wrong. Also they did fun things to represent in-game information, like the RIG and holograms showing your health bar and other information on your body, so the player is always playing. Also they occasionally have enemies come up behind you while doing this, maybe even just once, to keep you off balance for the rest of the game, which is unnerving and unsettling and more so than just being attacked with your back turned all the time.

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>>49671376
Those were some good times.

On the note of what sets Isaac apart is he has some damn good fight or flight instincts. At no point does he freeze up it's just gogogo time for him.

>>49672111

https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/29531073/

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>>49656757
Traveller General isn't up and since this thread is relevant to what I'm bout to say I guess i'll just post here..

So tomorrow I'm doing a session in a custom setting and I want to emulate that aesthetic(?) that Dead Space has.

Any ideas?
Advice?
Stories?

>>49671376
That was great, I'm gonna have to reread those sometime.

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>>49669565
>>49671699
>>49674115

>>49675084
A crossbow that shoots horizontal blades?

>>49674496

Everything is high tech but seems heavy and crude instead of sleek and shiny. Safety features are largely nonexistent or easily ignored because overpopulation is huge (and thus life is cheap) and easy organ cloning/grafting means that losing an eye and and arm to an accident is little more than a week of bedrest before you are fully functional again.

Earth and the sol colonies are cracking entire planets to feed their resource fix. The Ishimura alone cracked HUNDREDS during its operational lifetime. And the solar system is still slowly choking to death on itself.

So despite their high tech, and the vast numbers of resources available, everything still feels like shortages are everywhere and lots of stuff can't afford to be replaced to it gets grungy. This also encourages them to build shit to last, because that plasma cutter needs to last the next 75 years.

>>49675891
Also note that while everything's durable, clunky, and dangerous, it's not like 40k aesthetics where it's all baroque. Everything's built for efficiency, and there's still technological innovation. Armor is segmented smoothly even on industrial RIGs, and holo-displays are compact and common.

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>>49676115
we see in the animated movies that non-industrial sectors tend to be sleeker and cleaner. There is a definite division between classes.

Religious areas also tend to be very baroque with the inner sanctums of the unitiologists being full of fucked up monster frescoes.

>>49672942
>>49672679

Dead Space has its flaws, but atmosphere and aesthetics are not them.

>>49675891

Not sure if it's hundreds of planets, more like half a dozen, because the officer area has a rock taken from every planet they cracked, and there's not that many.

>>49676263

Well, scientologists in Dead Space operate like scientologists in real life, where they get people to give all their money to their creepy, abusive cult. So they spend it all on fancy decorations, and take advantage of people living in the resource-starved now who hope for a better place.

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>>49657517
>visual elements
>mattering in a Advanced Pretend

You need lore. The markers and cults are a start, but you need more. Dead Space is mainly necromorphs and certain humans. It's no better than Resident Evil in this regard. If you want to run a sci-fi horror dungeon crawl that culminates in a few boss fightswhich is what those franchises are then they work. But not otherwise.

Especially when the most common enemy is just brainless monstrosities.

You need more lore. Atmosphere only translates so far mainly based on GM narration skill and gameplay doesn't translate at all. You need factions, because factions give you NPCs and personalities. You either have aliens a la Star Wars space fantasy, or nations a la BattleTech, or even businesses a la Shadowrun/cyberpunk in general. Or individual people if the game is small enough.

Either way, any entity you have needs to exist as a character, and have a personality other than "we want the maguffin for reasons"
TTRPGs are closest to theater as a medium. Theater is reliant on narrative to work The action you can do in theater is never going to be equivalent to what you can do in a movie, just as video games and wargaming will always have better combat than TTRPGs.
Narrative must come first and foremost, and in an open-ended medium like this, you --must-- have lore and characters rather than scenes.
Lore and characters are the bread and butter of a setting.

I cannot stress how important writing is to TTRPGs. Writing covers the lore, the characters, etc. The greatest giveaway about the important of written information is how big some of these rulebooks get, and how lite systems tend to be based around an existing event/setting (GRUNT falls back on Vietnam, for example).
Most of that is building up things like deities, how magic or technology works, if not outright setting lore.

Visuals and gameplay hardly exist in the medium. They don't matter.

>>49675891
>>49676115
Nobody seems to give a shit about health and safety regulations. There's a general sense of "life is cheap" around, at least in the military and industrial sectors.

The Ishimura keeps cloned body parts on-ice en-masse, because people losing limbs was that common and the tech is that advanced.

Some of the military grade, limb-removing weapons are designated as "riot control" in universe.

In the prologue to Dead Space 3, the soldiers are all expected to kill themselves- not with a cyanide pill, but legitimately by shooting themselves in the head.

There's no alien life in the setting and humans just have no respect for anything that isn't Earth. Discovered a new exoplanet? Awesome, time to destroy it for resources.

I'd expect having a wooden desk would be on-par with someone in the modern day having a solid gold desk.

>>49676263
The dominant religion (dominant enough to stage a coup) worships things called Markers- ancient artifacts that produce incredible quantities of energy. They, essentially, worship the space zombies. It seems that most members who understand what that actually entails are cool with being ground into paste and assimilated.
The ending of the third game basically proves that the Unitologists were right all along, to some degree.

In contrast with the minimalist functional aesthetic of most things, the church of Unitology has fancy uniforms, massive cathedrals, etc. People abandoning everything from their daily lives to join the church is common. People (such as Vandal from the mobile game) betraying the government or their employers to serve the church seems to be EXPECTED.

It's like nobody in the Dead Space setting gives a shit anymore.

>>49657558
It's a setting as written by Asimov.

>>49677445

Character is generally left to the players and the GM, and usually assumed to be supplied. I suppose we do talk about what great characters a setting has, but mostly because they are part of the setting's lore, and might as well be a part of the aesthetic. Of course, they are potentially interactive and give you an idea of the kinds of things that can populate a setting.

Still, atmosphere is actually pretty important. A system that works well to represent the atmosphere, or works out the kinds of narrative interactions that are a staple of it can be a great component of a game. It's why people get so fucking pissed about people trying to run a political intrigue game in Pathfinder; it's so much work you might as well have used another system, or even start from scratch, because Pathfinder's main interactive element is combat.

Systems can create their interactions in many ways mechanically. An explicit example is Dread, which uses a Jenga tower. Other systems let you use metacurrency to influence interaction and plot, and when you run out things can get bad, or you can cash out a win now for things to get worse later. There's better ways than pass or fail attribute checks and overly crunch combat that grinds things down. Visuals are just narrative flavor, expressed as descriptions in the GM's and player's mind theater, but gameplay is very real in the medium, just in a different capacity.

>>49677564
Let me be clear about a few things. It sounds like we're on the same page, but I think I was vague in a few areas.

By characters, I mean NPCs. I suppose that's what you meant by leaving that to the GM, but "usually assumed to be supplied" goes too far. Or at least, goes too far if we're approaching this from the standpoint of a GM looking to run a game within the Dead Space setting, or any setting at all. Having NPCs active is the best way for the GM to drive events. They're the quest givers and information brokers, who either give the PCs a path, or support the PCs in a self-chosen path.

Visual atmosphere is what I was specifically meaning with the term. The atmosphere of a book and of a movie serves the same purpose, but is generated in different ways, and one medium attempting to copy the other falls flat. Each must create atmosphere in their own way. This is why I objected to "neat power armor with a unique aesthetic," because that will hardly be relevant in TTRPGs.

I'm not sure what you mean by "a system that works well to represent the atmosphere." Do you mean how Shadowrun has quality of life based on living situation and similar, where particularly poor housing is cheap but inflicts negative modifiers? Or 1e AD&D with a chart of how races get along and modifiers for interacting with each other?

>>49666319
>A videogame where you play as a heavily armed performance artist who yells out explanations of their creations while shooting monsters with them.

>>49659549
That's after the retcon of what the Markers did in the first one.
First one was clearly a "no sequel intended" plot, and then they had to remake the storyline after sequels got greenlit.

>>49671090
He discovered that the most cathartic way of excising his madness is by putting his boot through it's ribcage to get that four dollars hiding inside it's chest cavity.
No seriously, in 2 and 3 if you keep hitting the stomping button he starts swearing his ass off.

>"GODDAMN! MOTHER! FUCK!"

>>49677564
Mechanics alter the feel of a game and the best games account for this.

It's why high-lethality systems like Dark Heresy put so much detail into gruesome critical hits: you don't just die, you're torn apart, or your bone marrow boils, or your blood pools so thickly on the floor that your ally slips on it.

4e's easy access to healing put an emphasis on persistence, finding a second wind.

A system like Dread or CoC with a timer counting down to failure (the tower, or the SAN score) has the stakes raise over time until failure is inevitable.

An adventure, even if the characters setting and background are identical, would play incredibly differently in these systems.

>>49677641

>I'm not sure what you mean by "a system that works well to represent the atmosphere." Do you mean how Shadowrun has quality of life based on living situation and similar, where particularly poor housing is cheap but inflicts negative modifiers? Or 1e AD&D with a chart of how races get along and modifiers for interacting with each other?

Probably both, though also a little bit of neither. Dread is used as an example because it actually causes the player to feel, well, dread. The way a setting's atmosphere can be shaped is through how the players interact with it. A game system with highly crunchy combat and not much to make skill checks interesting is generally going to trend towards combat, and despite how on-board the players and GM are with trying to make that system work without a combat focus, hacking someone apart or firing off spells is usually the best way to go about it because it's how the system is designed. What I mean is that a system can be built around and for mechanics that ultimately serve its purpose. Call of Cthulhu makes use of investigation as its primary focus, and combat is pretty much always in desperation or against suicidal odds.

>>49677753

Yes, that's what I'm getting at. The way a player interacts with a system alters the way a player plays a system. So to create an "atmosphere" for a setting, it's most useful to use a system that hammers this kind of feeling into the players. It's an "atmosphere" that you get a feeling for when interacting with the game, one that's mentally and not visually perceived.

>>49657465
The opposite actually.
A good setting makes a good atmosphere.
You can have a good atmosphere without doing anything special in world building.

>>49672291
Unpolished is putting it lightly. The multiplayer was downright hobbled together in some areas. Especially the Snow Beast boss, which my brother and I couldn't even finish due to a bug that caused the damned thing to spawn multiple copies of itself during the fight essentially making it unwinnable in co-op. That really shouldn't happen, and EA's customer service was no help in the matter.

>>49677851

>Especially the Snow Beast boss, which my brother and I couldn't even finish due to a bug that caused the damned thing to spawn multiple copies of itself during the fight essentially making it unwinnable in co-op

Apologies if that actually sounds pretty awesome. Yeah, multiplayer was not its strong suit. They did much the same with ME3. EA just sort of gives an IP some leeway in doing what it wants because it's focusing on other avenues it thinks will be more profitable. When that game does well, they sort of pay some attention to it and give it a sequel with a bigger budget. Then when that does great, they decide to milk it for all it's worth and push deadlines that can't be met while slashing budgets and heaping on unreasonable expectations because they want their money fix and they're so scared that it might be a flop and lose them all this money. Then it flops and gets bad reviews and EA shuts it down and forgets about it.

Not sure if EA has changed, but from the all the IPs I've seen, they make a solid first game, polish it in the second, and fuck it all up in the third with bullshit and drop it.

>>49677892
EA gave them unrealistic expectations for a sales goal. I mean they seriously expected DS3 to sell several million copies to further justify any other games in the franchise. Lets be honest here, Dead Space is a great atmospheric Horror game, but it's kind of a niche thing. Expecting it to compete with the likes of CoD or Battlefield or several other large blockbuster games just isn't going to happen. EA just doesn't know how to let the developers they devour just do their own thing and make the games they want on a modest budget. Pandemic is gone; Bullfrog is gone, Westwood, even Bioware to a certain extent. It's just what they do.

>>49658276
>Bigguymorphs
>the specter of CIA taunts you, asking about the next step of your master plan derisively after your every success

>>49677783
My (prospective) Dead Space system has stats for mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and software engineering.

Since a focus of the background (but not the gameplay) of the Dead Space games is improvising weapons out of everyday tools, I figured the mechanics would revolve around that.

Since stat investment in engineering skills takes points you could use in piloting, or combat, engineers will have poor combat stats and must rely on guile and planning.

The idea is to make "skill monkey" characters be relevant in both combat and non-combat play. Combat themed characters aren't as good by comparison, but I figure anyone with combat traits gets a combat backstory, and therefore combat gear.

The other part of the mechanics is that there are no stats or premade tables for custom weapons. Players actually need to innovate ways to alter the tools they're given, and more dramatic modifications aren't necessarily more powerful ones.

>>49678119

Which system is that, may I ask?

>>49678157
It's one I've been writing. Thing is I'm tied up on a modular mech combat game AND a silent hill inspired horror game AND a dark fantasy exploration game.

>>49678233

Could use Cold and Dark for it as well. Save some homebrew work by using an existing game built for this kind of setting.

Dead Space inspired me to run a game where-in the party is the engineering team of a salvaging corporation who go out to these big derelict ships and get them just functional enough that they can get it back to HQ to be either refurbished or broken down for scrap, or if that isn't feasible, stripping out the particularly valuable components. Each ship would have a gimmick like

>hydroponics overgrown - entire ship jungle-like
>orbit is rapidly decaying
>crew still here, went feral

And, of course,

>space zombies

>>49678245
What system did you use?

>>49658182
Uh, because they don't? The planet cracking is a years-long process that amounts to "colonists use selective mining to loosen up a huge plug of soil, big-ass ship comes along and uses gravity tether to rip said plug out of the planet, planet falls apart with a continent-sized mass of its super-structure missing, all the planet-kibble is mined into oblivion over a period of decades".

That's why there was a colony on the planet in the first place; setting it up over a course of years to be ripped into chunks and super-stripmined.

Hardly a military-grade weapon. On a scale of 1-10 in terms of combat effectiveness against the Brethren Moons... that's pretty much a 0.

>>49678582
Traveler. As often as the problem was "it's really dangerous" it was also "it might not be profitable." Sure, they could systematically vent the sections of the ship they needed to work in so whatever fresh Hell was on board couldn't hassle them, but doing that took time, and time is money. Traveler is already a game about juggling operating costs and cargo by the tons, so it was a perfect fit.

The Not!Dead Space one they didn't even fuck with, they "accidentally" caused the reactor to go then scraped up whatever survived the blast. Was pretty funny to see them respond to writing on the wall in blood with "We're not paid enough to deal with this."

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>>49677727
Yeah I know, and it was gloriously awesome

I wondered what the in-universe (not gameplay) reason that Isaacs boots were so effective is. Considering regular bullets/laser bullets or whatever, do fuckall to Necromorphs, why is it that one grav-plated boot can go right through them? I'm sure those boots weigh a lot but Isaac just rips through these toughened monsters with exoskeletons and stuff like nobodies business.

>>49678945
It's assumed that he does the same thing with his grav-boots as the malfunctioning gravplates does, so that when he stomps on something they emit a localized grav-pulse that delivers a TON more force than it would otherwise and since it's one-way he himself doesn't explode as well

>>49678705
It has potential though, in DS 2 Isaac uses a gravity tether to keep Titan Station together long enough to get a tram from one end of the station to the other....and then the tether promptly rips the station apart. I'd imagine a Brother Moon grabbed by a gravity tether would get ripped apart pretty damn violently without any of the precision a colony usually affords them. So much like everything else Isaac touches, it would be a gross misuse of mining/engineering equipment.

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>>49678705
May I inquire where you got that information ? Was it in the game or some book ? It sounds like a cool read.

>>49679083
I recall hearing familiar things in DS1. Might've just been PA things, or even pre-release game material stuff. But there're ingame images of mining vessels (not necessarily the Ishimura) ripping giant chunks out of worlds. The base of the ship extends these spiderlike arms that tether to the world and rip a part of it up.

>>49679083
There's an official Anime Prequel to the first game, also books IIRC

>>49679081
Yeah, manipulating gravity should have all kinds of awesome potential uses. Stuff like creating localized gravity pulses to push or pull things at a greater range and finer control than the TK in the games, and if you shoved enough gravitons into one place you'd get a singularity effect.

Suck everything in for easy blasting!

>>49658182

I am 99% sure this was exactly what they were GOING to do if there had been a fourth game. You'd get a pair of them and you'd just Wishbone a Blood Moon in two.

As it is, Dead Space is gone, and it's team spread across the four corners of the industry.

>>49679121
The best part is that larger Necromorph organisms seem to function like living creatures so don't have quite the same ridiculous amount of durability that your "average" Necromorph does. SO, ripping out a large section of it is liable to straight up kill it.

>>49657941
>The DLC was really quite a let down
The entire series was a let down.

>>49679132
As I recall originally the Necromorphs were supposed to be completely unkillable, and removing their arms/legs/head/etc simply left them "alive" but unable to harm you.

>>49679248
I think that was the idea yeah, that you just left them inanimate. This may just be headcanon and stuff, but I always thought it'd be cool if you had to separate the bodies after you killed them. If you just slaughtered and dismembered a group of Necromorphs, you couldn't just leave the parts in close proximity of oneanother or they'd form into some awful abomination. I thought that could be cool, maybe something to consider in an RPG?

>>49679274
i remember reading some guy's headcannon went like this:
the necros never die, they are puppets, preprogrammed to kill everything living and infect it, so when a pupped cant work, loss of important limbs, killing or infection capacity and such things, the hive mind of the marker just drops them
you cant kill a corpse, innit?

also apparently the IP is on "stand by" EA wait that horror is a thing again

>>49677366
They also bought a lot of military hardware and training with it.

>>49679453
on DS3 they actually coup d'etat the entire earth gov, didnt they?

>>49657558
>technology felt realistic
Except for the part where time and gravity manipulation are clearly very, very advanced. A culture with time and gravity manipulation technologies on the level depicted could never be both internally consistent and relatable. You literally need writer's fiat to justify them operating in any way remotely comprehensible to modern day humans. The applications of those technologies are simply just too far reaching. Realistically, they'd change EVERYTHING.

I made a generic d6 tabletop system and run it now and again. Still fleshing out some minor problems, but the sheer difficulty of it has my players constantly on edge.

I get asked to host it constantly. I love it.

http://wicked-world.se/?page_id=60

There, enjoy.

>>49679516
Is that even used anywhere aside from the player?

Like, I know you get to use it to solve some puzzles and combat and shit, but as far as I could tell, the writing mostly ignored its existence.

I mean, it's a man portable time-stop machine. Why the fuck aren't all the guards armed with it?

It's more useful to think about it as a gameplay aid so you can line up your shots perfectly, and not something that actually exists in-universe.

>>49679620
Problem is it definitely does exist in-universe. It's referred to and all. The Twitchers are supposedly the result of the necromorph infestation (somehow) reversing the function of the IMPLANTED stasis modules the marines on the Valor had.

And like you said, it makes not the slightest bit of sense that they aren't EVERYWHERE.

>>49679650
Which, BTW, implies that stasis modules are standard equipment for marines...

And they're still never used anywhere nearly as often as one should think. I get it that the point of the marines was to show "this ain't that kind of sci-fi horror story" by pulling the rug underneath the player and showing the heavily armed, well-trained marines are woefully unprepared to face the necromorphs because they don't have Isaac's kind of experience (News flash: Aliens did it before), but that's still hardly a justification.

Well, the twitchers, before they became Necromorphs had built-in stasis units with their suits. When they became Necromorphs it reversed the time slow effect so that they perceived the world as being slower, and making them much faster.

I fucking hated twitchers.

>>49679670
In the game's defense, they did actually arrange for the theme to be expressed logically in that case. Notice what the most common weapon on the Valor appears to be?

It's the Pulse Rifle. That was probably the marines' standard issue gun. And it does seem like it'd be a very good gun to use against human targets... but against necromorphs? It's literally the worst in the game. It can't dismember for shit, and the necromorphs laugh at bullets. Whatsmore: unlike Isaac, who seems to have pretty much taught himself combat as he went along, with necromorphs as his only source of "training", the marines probably have years worth of experience FIRING TO THE CENTER OF MASS, the worst thing you can try on a necromorph.

The marines were set to fail from the get go. The very things that made them so effective against (presumably) human opponents doomed them against a foe that requires the opposite mindset to fight.

Quite possible they might've ended up in a better shape if they'd used all those nuclear missiles you later find to just blow up the Ishimura from a thousand kilometers away.

Of course, they didn't really have an option.

>>49665818
>I was too much of a pussy

>>49679710
the valor commander was a markerhead too, right?

>>49679766
Something like that, I don't remember exactly. I remember for some reason that the government/corporation specifically asked them to recover the marker rather than nuke from orbit, but it could be I'm just confusing my scifihorror flicks.

>>49679878
the gov wanted it because INFINTE POWAAAA in a universe that is fucking dry
the markerheads wanted it because DUDERELIGIONLMAO

little fact in the concet art isaac wasnt "born whole"

>>49679620
I figured that the stasis stuff wasn't really a sustainable gimmick. Isaac jury-rigs it from the workings of a tram loader (IIRC), since the machine operates at such a speed that it's not possible for a mechanic to interface with it in any way without getting crushed. Woeful safety standards aside, that seems to be its only purpose. It could well cause turbo-cancer when used on a human being, and we only fire it at Necromancers and Unitoligsts (who aren't real people anyway). Perhaps the Marines on the Valor weren't regular marines, they could well have been the ship-boarding variety who are fully trained to deal with malfunctioning hardware, hence the stasis suits.

>>49679516
If nothing else, they seem to have facilitated a godawful lack of health and safety, since the only way you can do anything mechanical in this universe is to wear a powered suit of armour (essentially) and use time science to stop things because you can't turn them off.

Are the animated movies any good?

>>49677892
>>49677959
From what insiders say, EA is one of the best companies to work for until you miss one of those arbitrary sales goals.
Up until that point they will give you as much money and support as you want since they bought you for a reason, but as soon as you flop they more or less move you to the "mopping up shit" department.

That said, a rushed deadline would explain a lot about DS3 on launch, and why the DLC, which in itself feels like it should have been an epilogue for getting 100% complete, was DLC instead of part of the core..

>>49679979
Can we all just appreciate that when there's a problem in the grav system it stays on and any accidental smooshing is up to you to avoid.

>>49679989
The prequel is god awful.
The movie that bridges DS1 and DS2 has some serious animation/budget issues, but at least it feels like a (cheap) DS style story.

>>49680052
Dead Space suffers a bit from logical issues with the Markers, and frankly the brother moon shit didn't help.

Frankly the Markers always felt almost schizophrenic. Genetic sequences to create a form of life that feeds off of death and creates monsters, but the signal inhibited it and killed them. They couldn't even get close. The Marker sends out delusions to Clarke to make him return it despite having a ship to spread the infection and the necromorphs can even kill you while basically doing the Marker's bidding. The first animated film runs with this. But then it turns out it wrote itself into Clarke's brain so he creates a bunch of them and it needs a shit ton of Necromorphs to get close to it now in order to enact Convergence. The Dead Space 2 prequel movie runs with this take on the Markers given the people involved race to destroy the fragments. And it's clear they have no fucking clue what to do with Lexine Murdoch's powers and the magical men in white who are out to capture her.

Hell, the whole premise is just mind-bogglingly weird. Humans want the monster-making Markers...to solve their energy crisis. What the fuck kind of advanced FTL using future where humans happily rip planets apart for resources has a goddamn ENERGY CRISIS? How the hell is that even possible? They're not just using dyson arrays of solar energy collecting satellites or mining hydrogen and helium-3. I swear to god if they continue the story and it turns out it's just because humanity over-expanded and is ridiculously inefficient and wasteful and the moons are the universes means of "culling the herd" and actually protecting creation...

Still not as bad as Mass Effect's own ancient eldritch aliens. "Hi, we're the Reapers. We're machines who are here to save organics from creating machines that will wipe organics out, and we're doing that by wiping out organics." Video games aren't vehicles vehicles for story telling, they're just just excuse plots for shooting shit.

>>49680576

The energy crisis struck me as a situation where Humanity's consumption of resources is outstripping their enormous supply, the Planet Crackers were created because of the huge increase in resource consumption.

Which doesn't make sense for an entirely different reason; how are the Markers supposed to produce infinite resources?

>>49680622
not resources, energy
with it thy could cut down on nuclear or whatever they needed to mine for energy, and focus on necesary minerals and organic compounds

>>49680576
Supposedly, the original plot for Mass Effect 3 had the Reapers be a race who has gone full postorganic and was planning to survive the heat death of the universe as dysonian intellects. It would have turned out that Mass Effect technology, with its apparent ability to break the laws of thermodynamics, actually doesn't entirely and massively increases entropy throughout the universe (remember Tali investigating a sun that got old unnaturally fast in ME2?), so the Reapers want to limit its development so they can have longer to prepare for the big cold.

>>49680653
>>49680576

Even without the storykiller that was ME3's ending, the game sucked, and Andromeda is likely to suck for much the same reasons.

>>49680622
If they had more energy they could rip apart more planets. Duh!

Frankly it makes no sense given that it's clear the Earth authorities are a bunch of dick waving asshole villains so correcting overusage of resources is as simple as enacting draconian population control and engineering some "accidents" in space wiping out colonies and colony ships. Or just do what humanity has always done when it decides it's time to pump up business and drive down populations: war.

Presumably the Markers influence on our history has rendered humanity more insane and stupid than usual.

Honestly given that the Red Marker was supposedly an imperfect copy of the Black Marker (they thought it was purely cosmetic but frankly they don't know how the damn thing works anyway) I was happy to believe it was just malfunctioning and/or insane until the Brethren Moons were introduced.

>>49680666
Hey, you can't condemn an entire galaxy just because a video game made on Earth at one point had a bad story.

>>49680666
fuck galaxy killing godmachines
i want a game where i explore a complely unkown galaxy
inb4 ME:A is full of weird ass social crap and geth/reapers part deux

>>49680653
I know they had a scifi writer working on the project and then shitcanned him. Video games COULD be legitimate vehicles for story telling allowing a unique, interactive influence of the player on the plot, a level of immersion not typically found in most other forms of human expression, but instead the companies are the real villains and just want excuse plots for shooting shit up.

>>49680680

Fuck Andromeda, all it's going to do in the near future is immigrate into our borders and turn this beautiful spiral galaxy into a disgusting, featureless elliptical.

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>>49680694

>That spoiler

Oh boy...

>>49680679
>Frankly it makes no sense given that it's clear the Earth authorities are a bunch of dick waving asshole villains so correcting overusage of resources is as simple as enacting draconian population control and engineering some "accidents" in space wiping out colonies and colony ships. Or just do what humanity has always done when it decides it's time to pump up business and drive down populations: war.

Isn't that exactly what the Markers are doing? Last I checked the Brother Moons have done a damn good job wiping out Humanity on a galactic scale.

>>49680710
yeah, also the gameplay trailer does not fill me with confidence

>>49680710
that's like, beyond caricature

>Montréal
jesus fuck get out of my city

>>49680719
There's a fairly vast difference between enacting population control, even through destructive means, and outright extinction level threats.

I loved ds1. It presented a really fun exploration of a giant fucking space ship. The whole thing felt massive and claustrophobic at the same time.

2 was alright. It relied a bit too much on obvious jump scares. I played it for a feeling of dread, not loud noises.

Never played three.

I love the setting because of how industrial everything is. You walk through these massive ships and stations, each a remnant of massive industrial capability. Everything is huge around you, but your feel contained anyways. It almost feels contradictory, but they did a good enough job putting everything together that it works. The games also leave you wanting to see what the society could do when it wasn't under constant assault from mind virus zombies.

>>49680841

Dead Space 2 was not only the best game in the series, it is perhaps the greatest game ever created.

It works as a survival-horror, it works as a third-person shooter, it runs just long enough to leave you satisfied yet doesn't pad out the game with encounters that make you feel it overstayed it's welcome. The sound effects are crisp, the graphics hold up, the gunplay is smooth and every shot feels satisfyingly meaty.

>>49680841
>Never played three.

It's not as bad as all that. The developer did try to push it out of the horror genre to make it more "accessible" and other BS, but the atmosphere is still suitably creepy and it does some decent things. I actually kind of enjoyed the weapon customization just for the ability to mix and match. It can be argued that there are some ridiculously overpowered combinations, but even then there's variety for when you get bored of those combinations. All kinds of fun ways to make the Necromorphs sorry they bothered to reanimate.

I wasn't 100% happy with the story, but it could have been much, much worse. But then we're back to talking about ME3.

>>49680710
>I am angry. Angry about white people
>"But wait a minute, this guy looks pretty damn white in that pic."
>Curry Thunder
And suddenly everything makes sense. Fucking Indians.

>>49679404
>>49679274
The actual canon is that the infection is at a cellular/genetic level, but it takes some time to grow.

However there's a whole fuck ton of evidence suggesting the necromorphs are not real at all, and it's just the marker making everyone crazy. The Wii rail-shooter goes into this a lot more- where you play different characters who all go through an Isaac phase, and then get 'saved' and find out they just murdered a bunch of their friends and family because they were too close to the marker.

I mean look at Dead Space 1, the only people Isaac actually meets are a woman that looks sorta like his wife, the already dead, and a couple he's always just slightly behind(specifically, a man whose trying to save -his- wife.) and people he 'knows' to be alive.

>>49680884
I think you've been standing next to markers a bit too much m8.

>>49680933
I haven't played three, because since time after playing two I decided to remove video games from my life. I still like discussing settings though.

>>49680933
I'm honestly not sure how to handle that last DLC. Like, on one hand, the cosmic horror actually roflstomping life as we know it isn't a bad end to a horror series, in theory. On the other hand, "Everything you did was pointless and extinction was inevitable from the start" is a bit spiteful and anticlimatic. It also smacks of ME3's "Fuck it, burn the franchise and run before we get stuck on a sequel mill" mindset to me.

>>49680726
>>49680748

Bioware should have died after the release of Mass Effect 3.

The entire company is an example of how a company can fall without any outside corporate dickery. Mass Effect 2 was good at the time but doesn't hold up when dissected, Dragon Age 2 was a disaster both narrative and mechanical, and the entire handling of Mass Effect 3 from execution to reaction towards fans was a joke.

Seriously, any faith you should have had in Bioware should have died when they outright mocked and insulted players who felt cheated about the ending (which was far from the only thing bad about the game.) This is a company that hated you, they *hated* you, and only grudgingly gave you a "better" ending after mumbling insults about "fucking white males" under their breath.

Dragon Age: Inquisition was not a disaster but it was not good either, however the handling of that game was a clear example that Bioware not only still hates you, the consumer, they are not-so-subtly fucking the media which gives them attention, reviews and support. Do you think DA: I got "Game of the Year" two weeks after release because it was just that good? Do you think they didn't have a narrative of "Bioware is still good! Trust Bioware! Do it, love Bioware again!" After you are bombarded with review after journalistic review of the game that said how great Bioware was and they still have the touch?

And you want them to do this again? Give me a break. Anyone who still loves Bioware is suffering from the same sort of complexes that a battered housewife suffers when their abuser coos out some apologies about hurting you.

>>49680984
I wouldn't say inevitable. A bunch of hungry hungry moonhippos think they can steamroll humanity. Unfortunately humanity has equipped itself to ripping things like it to pieces.

Time for Isaac to reclaim the Ishimura - again - and get to work.

>>49680994
>Bioware should have died after the release of Mass Effect 3.
Bioware died the moment EA bought them. What you consider Bioware is just the necromorphed host.

>>49680622
Don't the only reason the government wants the markers is because they're subverted super-cultists.

IIRC the government wants them to keep them away from the cultists-or are cultists themselves. Otherwise they couldn't give a fuck about them except to figure out why they seem to induce murder-hobo rage in people like Isaac.

I always read it as a material crisis, not energy. They need more metal and ore.

>>49680884

Just wanted to say I respect you for saying "I like this thing" on 4chan. Most people are afraid to do that, because it's always easy to point out flaws and yell about shit taste. It's easy to be all "oh, you hate it? Uh, I hate it too. I hate everything!" like an awkward teenager.

You like a game. Good on ya, mate.

>>49681016
Partly but they're also legitimately crazy in their own right. If they weren't then they certainly were once they got into Marker research and acquisition.

>>49681034
Isn't that just hte Marker's influence then though?

IIRC in the lore there was a Marker found by the founder of Unitology, but the government freaks out and tries to shut it down, leading to their own men going religious on them. I'd be shitting my pants too. That and heavy amounts of implications that the government is corrupt as fuck AND hiding the massive resource shortages the average person is facing.

>>49657537
It's not original (since it's basically The Thing on the Event Horizon with a dash of Lovecraft) but the presentation is good enough to where it's a lot of fun. A shame the 3rd game gets shat on so much, since the story and setting are so good that time around it excuses the gameplay being the most generic in the franchise, at least for me.

We are coming. We are hungry. We are here.

>>49680994
im not gonna play andromeda, dont have a newgen and dont want them, games are piss poor exept 2 or 3

but good god i actually want to it to be good, ots the clostest thing of a space/planet exploration game and unbound by being on our galaxy, i only seen this kind of game in a roguelike ONCE
but seening how the team is and with ea spurning them its gonna be a mass effect again: we cant make original stuff
and whatever social bollock its now popular to be

>>49681093
the original ending of DS3 felt good
everyone dies, but the universe is saved

not that the dlc is bad or anything but its a goddamn cliffhanger, who ends a game ina a cliffhanger and does not continue? interest is growing colder and colder on the series

>>49681166
>who ends a game ina a cliffhanger and does not continue?

>What is Assassin's Creed

Always loved the bit in 2 where Isaac has to go back on the Ishimura. You see his animations subtly change... It really made the character feel real.

>>49681175
Wait, did it stop?

>>49680994
ME3 was when we started noticing a huge disconnect between vidya journalists/certain devs and their audiences wasn't it? Because the only other thing that stands out like that is Braid got fellated, and how DMC4 got thrashed despite having the best technical gameplay in the franchise.

>>49681093
It's the tacked on weapon crafting system that killed it for me.

>>49681185
>the best technical gameplay

While that is true I don't think anyone ever complained about gameplay, just the game being so half finished that they literally made you play the half part twice.

>>49680994
>Bioware should have died after the release of Dragon Age: Origins
FTFY. Though Inquisition was in some ways a return to form.

>>49681166
>its a goddamn cliffhanger

It's pretty clear humanity is fucked, since The brethren moons have already begun feeding, and we don't have any giant super weapons lying around we can use to pick on Moons still suffering from hibernation sickness.

>>49681183

They dropped the "ancient aliens and world extinction event" plotline almost entirely by killing Desmond and *never* addressing it again.

The game's a quirky historical-action simulator created by the setting's version of an Augmented Reality gaming company.

>>49681175
thats ubisoft, they gone ass backwards for some time

>copypaste the gamplay gor 10 or more games

>>49681185
I thought DMC4 was rubbish because -in addition to being half a game- the environments and enemies looked straight out of modern Final Fantasy. Also, the story and dadjoke Dante sucked.

>>49681226
The metaplot of Assassin's Creed was probably the worst aspect of the story, though.

To get back to setting, I was always baffled by just how Unitology spread. It's worship of the Markers right? The Markers that drive anyone who goes near them incurably insane, they start murdering people and anything that dies near the Marker is turned into a super zombie. How the fuck did this religion catch on? What's its crux to the regular person? How does it get these people so fanatical that they're wrapping plastic bags around their heads and just waiting in an apartment because Convergence/the Rapture is coming?

>>49681312
People will do some pretty stupid things to belong and to be part of the elite groups of society.

>>49681342
>People will do some pretty stupid things to belong
see also: homegrown terrorists

>>49681226
The "real world" parts were the least interesting and were completelly unnecessary.

>>49671090
When the Dead Space general was still a thing on here, we reckoned that Issac managed to reverse-mind-rape the Marker in DS2, which ended up sorta fortifying his brain against any future attacks.

>>49681342
But what got those people into it? Altman found the first Marker, and I seem to recall him being the only survivor. What would anyone see in a deranged maniac to think "Yeah, this might just work"?

>"Check out these robes? Snazzy eh, where's Micheal? We need to get our founders picture done!
>"He's in the loo, give him a bit"
>Half an hour passes, Michael Altman has built an eight inch tall Marker on the sink out of shit.

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>Dead Space 3

>>49681135

Its kind of amazing how much resistance there is in the upper echelons of the video game industry to the idea that better graphics no longer mean better sales.

Video games have sort of capped out, technologically speaking, and while there are still advances to be made in graphics technology they are largely so incremental that the average gamer only knows about them if you rub their face in it and TELL them its better.

This is why the last couple console generations have felt so flat and gimmicky: they have to rely on gimmicks because there hasn't been a huge tech leap forward like what used to define the older game generations.

Since we have effectively capped out on great graphics, the way forward should be focusing less on yet more improvements to the graphics and instead focus on making the games themselves better. Take the fact that the graphics are good for granted, and work on the rest.

So far that isn't happening. The only thing that has distracted them from slapping the 'better graphix!' button as many times as they can is the jingly boondoggle that is 'huger maps! entire universe!' which is technically impressive but almost always super dull. If your world is 200 trillion miles across, that usually means most of it is kind of boring because its entire very sparsely populated by human designed things, or it is filled with procedulary generated garbage that can't help but feel the same after you have walked around for more than an hour.

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>>49671376
Hell yeah, those threads were the shit. Wish that crossover fic had gotten finished, though.

>>49681308
>>49681377

Which is why I have not shed a single tear for Desmond's departure and I'm actually quite happy they turned it into a comfy "you're a guy playing a guy" game.

>>49681404
>Since we have effectively capped out on great graphics, the way forward should be focusing less on yet more improvements to the graphics and instead focus on making the games themselves better. Take the fact that the graphics are good for granted, and work on the rest.

Except whenever someone says "make a better story", nine times out of ten that will be interpreted as "I want my tribe to get representation in the game."

>>49669565
That would have been a way better final boss fight, holy shit

>>49681431
The real-world aspects were hyped up as some kind of massive mindblowing twist in the very, very, very, VERY earliest days of Assassin's Creed one, back when all you had was cryptic instances in the trailers where SUDDENLY COMPUTER CODE...

Then they liked it so much they just made the whole thing a big part of the advertisement, the plot, the start of the game, the UI, and just about anything.

It's like the laughable attempt at making a plot twist in Haze (remember Haze? The one the devs kept bragging about was going to make people forget about Halo back in the early days of the Xbox? No? Thought so?) they got so excited about it ended up ON THE BACK OF THE BOX.

>>49681390
I dunno. Abraham formed Judaism. He was a guy that decided to use a knife on his dick and voices told him to kill his son.

People are ready to accept flawed things as long as they resonate with the spiritual part.

>>49681416

>Isaac Clarke built a fully functional microwave cannon and a vacuum-sealed helmet with HUD out of an old rusty bucket and spare tubes

>>49681404
tell me about it, i remember passing from ps1 to ps2, i remember saying that looked so good

now unless they are going very stilyzed its rather hard to see a improbement of grafix

if thre was a time to see good or interesting games it would be now but, its all money in marketing
nothing on, neat maps, interesting gamplay, replayability, extra modes and so

its pretty sad

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>>49681416
Maybe it can...

>>49681476
Actually, all the money nowadays is on mobile games. Unless something changes real soon, we may be living through the death throes of "serious" video gaming, on the cusp of a future full of touchscreen based, microtransaction fueled non-gameplay aimed at little children and grandmas.

>>49681471
im gonna go and say that is actually a radiation cannon

imagine what he could cobble together with mass effect tech and his own graviton tech

>>49680884
Heh, I still remember when I finished 2. Ran out of ammunition for everything, so I basically just sprinted through the last level or two with every necromorph and its mother trying to take a bite out of my arse.

My hands were shaking when I finished. That's never, ever happened to me playing a game before, or since.

2 was something special, no arguments there.

>>49681390
Also, while Altman lead the team that found the Marker, he was appalled with what he found. But earth elites thought he'd be useful as a martyr for a religion, so they killed him and said he was killed for his religious beliefs.

>>49681508
a new crash? i can see it
could be good, could be bad

>>49681390

Based on the lore, Altman and his team were send to investigate the first marker. They found a lot of cool shit, people got infected by the marker madness, a couple of low level necromorphs happened and the whole thing got blown up to prevent things from getting even worse. Because that's logically what happens when Unitology isn't already a thing.

Altman was actually terrified of the markers and wanted to destroy them, but his accounts of the power of the markers got twisted into making them sound so powerful as to be nigh-divine. Infinite energy, the ability to bring back the dead/ensure a life that exists beyond the reach of death. And then, before Altman can try and take control of the movement and clear up all this shit, he gets murdered. Which makes him a martyr and seemingly legitimizes 'his' claims as well in the minds of people on the fence as to whether or not any of this was real.

Its pretty clear that the marker signal somehow persisted from the time that Altman discovered that on on Earth. Warping peoples minds, making them want the markers and convergence. After all, what does the marker signal do to those that can decipher it? Make them build markers.

Like how mankind made the red marker that started DS1.

Whatever was left over from Altman's marker was enough to push mankind in the unitologist direction and make them want to build and harness markers, but not strong enough for them to know how to do it right. It took decades for them to build up enough momentum, and the events of DS1 and 2 for them to get their marker tech right enough for convergence to be possible.

But even so, that signal probably influenced the rise of unitology. Its a symptom of the larger disease, not just a religion.

>>49681449

>Isaac Clarke blasts apart a Brother Moon with the Ishimura

>>49681520
>My hands were shaking when I finished. That's never, ever happened to me playing a game before, or since.

The only time those have happened to me were Drakengard 1 and 3's true final bosses. I still have nightmares with the former's wretched church bells playing as music.

>>49675346
It's like a Mad Max style crossbow that shoots buzzsaws.

>>49681549
Link me that shit, bruv, I loves me some creepy church bells.

>>49681520
>>49680884

"Fuck you! And fuck your Marker!" Was one of the greatest moments in video-game history.

>>49681448

I don't care about tribe representation. Its not a bad thing on its own, I guess, but only so long as the characters are well written and the story is well told. These are things that are almost trivial to fix, a couple of good writers can make all the difference here. But only if you give enough of a shit to invest in them and let them do their thing.

>>49681566
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg84FdoBJ5M

It's almost 10/10 copy of the game.

>>49681566

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qaB8xEik488

>>49681586
I think what he's going for is when you write characters to fill out quotas, you're defining them by what ought to be their most superficial traits.

Diversity isn't bad, but too often it's treated like boxes to be crossed out.

>>49681537
ishimura blew up with the sprawl

still i can see a ds4 being a tense rebuild and inprobe a standard planetcracker up to blow up a moon
then you pilot it againts several moons
with a father planet final bossit pretty stupid but it would be cool

>>49681572
That, and when Isaac decides to take the direct route across the Sprawl.

https://youtu.be/XHfw0LNtxic

I am a monster truck that walks like a man.

>>49681593
Finally found the track from the game proper.

http://downloads.khinsider.com/game-soundtracks/album/drag-on-dragoon-original-soundtrack-vol.-2/18-thirteenth-chapter-final.mp3

>>49681622
Fucking hero. I really loved DS2, it felt like the Aliens to 1's Alien (even if 1 and 2 you killed just as many Necromorphs etc), but it got none of the hate that sequels normally get.

The entirety of 4chan is transported to a Sprawl-like structure the day before a Necromorph outbreak, everyone is sorted by the board they use the most. Wat do?

>>49681593
I'd rock out to those xylophone-ass beats.

>>49681657
DS3 felt like the real Aliens to DS1's Alien. With 2 as the transitory phase.

I've just liked to pretend that the speeding up of the gameplay was just Isaac getting more and more used to combat.

>>49681692
I imagine /tg/ gets the fuck out of dodge. We tell /v/ and /vg/ that there's room on the three shuttles, but us fatguys know how to pilot the shuttles, so we'll get on first and then we leave. A day later we get /k/ screaming down radio lines that it's bullshit that the Necromorphs aren't dying after being shot with .45 calibre rounds. We hold a silent ceremony that nobody will ever speak of cor /d/ and /aco/.

>>49681692
/pol/ attempts to gas everyone else, /k/ blows themselves up on accident, /m/ makes a fucking gundam, and /tg/ is just sitting there playing our shitty board games as always

>>49681708
>xylophone-ass beats

Yeah, Taro likes his rhythm battles to have them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axT_RojfaRs&index=20&list=PLbjXFbywb2MSozU1zJNqX4FRV31Oi5sM_

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>>49681471

>>49681692
/diy/ basically becomes Isaac.

>>49681722
>shuttles

Let's spice that up. Only 4chan Pass users can get on board the shuttles, but you can murder the owner for his pass. Or loot it off one who became a necromorph.

Also, what happens to /x/? Are they all Unitologist cultists?

>>49681756
inb4 this actually a plot point in ds4

>>49681657
>but it got none of the hate that sequels normally get.
That's because it was the Empire Strikes Back, the Wrath of Khan, the Saint's Row 2, the Arkham City. It was one of those rare creations that manages to build off of what the first work achieved and further improve the formula.

>>49681773
In that case, /tg/ is doomed. I've no idea of the demographic of people who own a 4chan pass. /x/ is mostly Unitologists. Do all the boards know what's coming? I'd imagine if that's the case then /x/'s sector is mysteriously empty, and every other board gains 5 or so new members who sure love that board they've definitely been a part of for years. /tg/ tries to sort this out and filter out the /x/ users from our midst. Everyone forgets about the 4chan pass issue as we pass from person to person and ask important questions like;
"Was Old Man Henderson jusitifed?"
"Is Sir Bearingston still funny?"
"Which is better, 3.5 or PF?" and
"nWoD or cWoD?"

>>49681822
>cultists trying to infiltrate other boards

Sounds more like /pol/, senpai.

>>49681692

/tg/ quickly sets up a command center dedicated to surviving this shitshow. We have a higher than average concentration of nerds with useful degrees like the sciences while also a bunch of scifi buffs. These people have the all-important task of figuring out the technology of the sprawl with the goal of finding us some way off of this goddamn station. If this group fails, we have no escape plan because even if we find a shuttle we don't know how to pilot it. Guarding these anons becomes our top priority.

Thankfully, we also have a higher than normal number of anons who are familiar with melee combat. Give these anons some goddamn swords, or the closest equivalent we can find. Chopping off limbs is going to be important in the future.

The rest of us will have to serve as best as we can filling in all the other roles. Thankfully /tg/ has few enemies among the other boards, so we can reach out to other places and try and consolidate manpower and resources. Get /sci/, /g/ and /diy/ over here so we can add them to our thinktank and offer them protections. Get /k/ and /fit/ here to help offer that protection with the promise of offering them a way out of this hell as soon as we figure it out.

We are the coordinators and the game planners, but we can't survive this alone. Our time spent theorycrafting how to deal with various enemies alien and fantastical gives us a chance to come up with a viable plan, but we still need the able minds and bodies to carry out that plan.

If all else fails, we might be better off identifying what parts of the sprawl are vital to our survival and find ways to perform a controlled demolition and separate ourselves from the rest of the sprawl with those resources coming along with us for the ride. We can't hold the entire sprawl, that's a pipe dream. If we can cut down on the number of bodies we are surrounded by, that means fewer zombies we have to fight later.

>>49681864
It's all good, anyone can be a Unitologist. Pretty much every board falls apart in rapid succession, /k/ kickstarts it by blowing itself up. /g/ goes full >>49679516 and falls into a singularity after someone cracked open a floor plate to see how it worked, /diy/ puts up a good fight and only /m/ survives in a giant mecha thing. They fly into space with someone who claims he's from /tg/ and knows how to solve the problem.

>>49681924
Yeah, I think having Unitologists scattered among all for 4chan is best. Especially since I want to see /pol/ purge itself, Night of Long Knives style before proceeding to gas everyone. And /x/ trying to use esoteric knowledge and horror movie savvy to survive.

The more chaos, the more entertaining this scenario becomes.

>>49681966
that god damned sun! i didnt hit the roof by a miracle the first time

>>49681090
If you go back even further it's postulated that the Marker is the reason humanity was elevated in the first place to sentience. The idea was to create a source of food able to spread itself to multiple worlds. Humanity owes its existence to the very thing that always intended to wipe them out.

Which frankly is about the only way Dead Space makes sense at all given the Brethren Moons sure as shit don't need Markers to fuck up a planet. Between their "fuck you" message directly into your brain let alone their ability to generate Necromorphs on their own and they're bigger than any ship in existence. Markers would make sense not just as a means of ringing the dinner bell but if they can create a plentiful food source first that's something the moons don't seem capable of on their own.

But the whole thing really falls apart anyway because the Brethren Moons can just domesticate a species with their mind powers and Markers. Just let it grow under their watchful gaze and cull 90% of the herd now and then before letting it restock itself. For some reason they prefer extravagantly wasteful feeding frenzies.

>>49680653
The odd thing about that is given the Reapers already fart around outside the galaxy they can go anywhere. It's hard to believe that the gates are fucking shit up across the universe given what happens even in one pissy galaxy (and the Milky Way is a pretty small fish in the universal ocean) or that this is their only means to that end. Why beat the shit out of intelligent civilizations using the gateways instead of just fucking up the gateways or doing a much better job locking them down if those are the problem?

>>49681966
Undead space zombies; homicidal cultists, malicious figments of your mind, and a god damn sun from a child's play is what scared me the most.

>>49682673
the alarm clock got me the worst...

>>49682673
you face when you go the ishimura again

Judging from what i've heard happens in the third game, it seems to take a turn from good to just completely rage inducingly retarded.

>>49682813
I've just reinstalled the second game because of this thread, I'm halfway through Chapter 3. It still holds up, the only issue I have with it (and that I had back when it released) was that a lot of its scares are just sound spikes or Nicole screaming from the corner of a room. The gameplay and tone is fantastic aside from that. I never played 3, not sure I want to after hearing about all this.

>>49682813

Well, in the first Isaac is scared shitless and going crazy. In the second, Isaac is going crazy and he knows it, but he's also angry at everyone and everything that's contributed to it and is trying to fuck with him, while also trying to hold onto his sanity and his dead girlfriend. In the third, he does get angry and stupid in a few places, and seems to act out of character, but for the most part he's more in control and used to this kind of anarchy, driven by survival instincts and trying to save Ellie. Also humanity.

>>49682830

Dead Space 2 is infinitely more fun when you think of it as the Resident Evil 4 of the series; it's a character action game first and a survival-horror waaaaayyyyy second.

Does a fantastic job giving Isaac an amazing character arc, though.

>>49682813
Well no, not exactly. It just turned into a disappointment on many levels due to executive meddling and shelved a promising game series for a while. Kind of like what Superman 4 did, or Superman returns, or man of steel...

>>49682813
>>49682830
Don't play 3.
Do not play it.
It's... god, it's so fucking bad.
You're better off just watching The Thing.

Dead Space would be a pretty cool movie series if they ever gave it a good workover.

Balding dork engineer investigates dead planet cracker and goes crazy while fighting body horrors is pretty good as far as scary movies are concerned.

The real reason I want a movie is for the "FUCK YOU, AND FUCK YOUR MARKER" moment.

Tom Cruise would make a good Isaac.

>>49682863
I did think that when I first saw it. I was...probably 17 or so at the time, and (being a snob) looked at the snow and thought "Oh boy it'll be the Thing". Instead I heard it's just not as good a game. Which sucks, because co-op and weapon customisation sounded awesome.

>>49682854
Oh also, Quicktime events. That start with Isaacs shoulder and thus, the prompt, out of the screen. raaagh I didn't need to see that death scene game.

>>49682893
But anon, Tom Cruise is what would happen if Isaac had succumbed to the marker. He's already a unitologist for God's sake!

>>49682863
I think I played 3 hours after the prolouge before I got sick of it and I never bothered playing it again.

>>49682928
Can't be a unitologist. If all you need is kill is anything to go by, dude's got a sense of humor.

>>49682854

Well, they took a lot of inspiration from the Alien series, so they borrow the character arc as well. In Aliens, Ripley is just some crew person who has to deal with this alien bullshit and a murderous android.

In Aliens, she knows you have to fight this shit, and knows some of the ins and outs. She's seen some shit and made it through, and is the closest thing they have to an expert on the xenomorphs because she managed to survive and defeat one.

With a recurring character in horror, it's hard to have them keep going through the same shit and have them react the same way as before. You'd think they'd just break down completely. Instead, Isaac does break down, but he also knows he's seen this shit before and survived it, he just needs to get his suit, collect his armor, and get to work. Even his suits reflect this, as his first is his engineering suit, but he starts getting security and military suits afterwards.

>>49682928

That's exactly what would make him such a great Isaac! Tell him to put on a couple dozen pounds and thin his hair and Tom would be perfect!

He has the voice, at the very least.

>>49682917
>I did think that when I first saw it. I was...probably 17 or so at the time, and (being a snob) looked at the snow and thought "Oh boy it'll be the Thing". Instead I heard it's just not as good a game. Which sucks, because co-op and weapon customisation sounded awesome.

Nono, you were right, it's literally just The Thing for the first, like, 2/3rds of the game, but with a really, really uninteresting and incompetent cultist that's never been metioned before but is suddenly wildly important threatening the main character.

Also, Ellie, who was the sole survivor of 2 with Isaac, later tells him that she doesn't care about his PTSD and to just get over it already, idiot.

And then she dies, doesn't die, dies again, and Isaac uses an ancient alien superweapon that was made to fight the Necromorphs to throw markers into a giant eyeball until it dies.

Oh, and it didn't matter because humanity is doomed anyways.

>>49682930
I wish I had had your fortitude, anon.

>>49682930

I powered on through, and I think that if you're into the series it's worth the effort. Some scales in difficulty really set a barrier to continued play, plus barriers with tone and pacing. Dead Space 1 & 2 really kept you going forward, but DS3 somehow makes progress annoying.

Still, I think those parts might have been where they didn't smooth it over. If you can work past those spots you get to better places and more fun things. I can't say it'll be worth the effort for you personally, though.

>>49681463
>(remember Haze?
I still do..I still do..

I remember that in ACIII one of the ideas pitched around so that players could run around as Desmond even longer was to use a "time travel" thing, but they dropped it since a lot of players who didn't pay attention already thought that Desmond was already going back to the past and somehow controlling his ancestors. wut?

Eh, the Egypt leaks seem more and more legit as time goes on. Wonder what this "soft reboot" will change. Here's hoping for shields but I doubt it, devs said engine shits itself when they put it in but somehow Shadow of Mordor devs managed to do it.

>>49682948

Tom's probably the best guy in Hollywood right now, I've never heard anything but praise from people who worked with him, he's genuinely in love with acting and apart from his Scientology gig he's a swell guy off the set.

I don't know if I'd say he would make a good Isaac Clarke, but it wouldn't be from lack of trying on his part.

>>49682974
Say what. So...someone is a Unitologist in the NPC cast and you're left guessing as to who? And what, Ellie was one of the best supporting NPCs in a game in a long time. She has an arc, she grew and wasn't just someone lusting after Isaac because he was the protagonist.

>Isaac uses an ancient alien superweapon that was made to fight the Necromorphs to throw markers into a giant eyeball until it dies.
Wut.

I'm okay with the Humanity doomed thing, Unitologists believed that Humanity was made by Aliens anyway, I'd be fine if the story of Dead Space ended with Humanity being consumed by Necromorphs.

>>49682974
Finish what you stated, anon. At the end of the day finishing a thing is still better than leaving a trail of half completed projects.

>>49683049
No, sorry, the Big Bad Unitologist is present from the very start of the game and you know who it is.
And yes, Ellie becomes much, much worse in 3.

I'd be fine with humanity being doomed if it didn't happen OFF SCREEN IN THE DLC!

>>49683050
But it's not worth it if the product just makes me angry and sad!

>>49682974
>I wish I had had your fortitude, anon.
I wish I didn't spend money on DS3.

>>49682988
I honestly didn't enjoy DS2 as much as DS1 anyway. It was too much nonstop action, melodramatic exposition for my taste and I just didn't like the Sprawl. So my expectations wasn't exactly high to begin with.

>>49683014
He's got too much passion and charisma to make a good isaac, I think.

You need an everyman.

>>49683173
Karl Urban, then?
I think he pulls off "gritty, desperate engineer" better than Cruise.

>>49683173
Get Bill Murray or Tom Hardy.

>>49683107

There'd be a few ways to have humanity not die off in 4, should they ever do it.

Maybe Isaac, with the Marker code still in his brain, could be used to make some kind of anti-Marker, like the odd White Marker in DS2. I mean, why not? If he's got the codes i his head, and he's an engineer with the right facilities, maybe he could build something to fuck with it? He'd probably need to also have it fuck with the Black Marker, because that one is apparently the source while the Red Markers are copies.

Marker facilities were mentioned in 3 as being on all colonies, and in 3 they say they've lost contact with all their colonies, but does that mean they've all gone full-Necro? Maybe the initial signal just knocked out their communication, and maybe the scientologists just failed to blow up or activate it and it's being contained by surviving EarthGov or police forces.

After that, I'm not sure what's going on with the Titan Sprawl, but it's possible the Ishimura is still there, and without a Marker in close proximity it should be relatively easy to captain it to start tearing the evil moons apart. Also consider humanity is probably not going to be hurting for resources after whole planets have been wiped out.

>>49682065
>>49682673
That's because you sense the coming future. That was foreshadowing, anons. The Brethren Moons have nothing on their Mother Sun!

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I actually thought about making a couple of Dead Space inspired void pirates.

I was going to use GS hybrid bodies, and DE Wrack heads. I was going to make sure I made at least one of them with just a Plasma Cutter pistol as well, standing in a pool of broken genestealer limbs.

>>49683195
He did that in Doom, and it sucked.

>>49683201
>Bill Murray
He's fucking ancient by this point, there's no way.

>>49683208
>Also consider humanity is probably not going to be hurting for resources after whole planets have been wiped out.

That's actually the entire subplot of the games, EarthGov and Planet Cracking can't provide for the sheer numbers of humanity. The whole point is that humanity IS hurting for resources, which is the intended appeal of the Markers, as their a source of free energy, but it's just a honeytrap to create Brother Moons.

Unitologists are everywhere, so there's no way they /aren't/ activating those Markers to cause convergence events on the colonies.

>>49683248

Tau Armor plates get pretty close. And some cut down parts of their battlesuit subsystems make good bits to build off of.

>>49683269
Doom sucked for other reasons.
Isaac, thankfully, couldn't be tied into having "angel" DNA to have a big, dumb superfight.

>>49683275
I still don't get how you run out of energy and resources in a setting where travel between solar systems is not a very big deal.

>>49683324

Everyone wants an upper-middle class Western lifestyle.

>>49683324
Demand outweighing supply.
Humans breed like motherfuckers and Planet Cracking isn't the most efficient thing in the world.
As populations grown and energy demands increase, it becomes harder to maintain space travel and society.

I actually like that part about Dead Space a lot. The implication that humanity is already on the cusp of collapsing, even without Unitology and The Markers.

>>49683275

Assume Earth is fucked, as the Moons are already there. But maybe a colony managed to survive, or maybe Earth is salvageable and the colonies are fucked. Earth is the location of the Black Marker, and they're probably going to need to fuck with the source to destroy them all since they're linked, so I can't imagine we're not going to see Isaac go back to Earth and fuck things up.

Well, if ever they do another Dead Space game, which is unlikely at this point.

>>49682893

Maybe, but pretty much every videogame movie ever has sucked. I can't name one that's good, and any that are at least passable are just action schlock. It'd be better if they just keep the franchise to its source material. Especially considering how horror movie trends are nowadays; everyone just copies paranormal activity in the most boring and stupid of ways, which in and of itself is a boring and stupid ripoff of the Blair Witch Project.

>>49683364
Prince of Persia was painfully mediocre. Not bad, but not good by any measure. Just okay.

>>49683352
Just saying that ey already have a retarded amount of energy avaliable. Hell, they can even rip chunks out of planets.

It sounds to me like people are just retarded and or spoiled.

>>49681166
It's a pretty good cosmic horror ending. The brother moons have come. Do what you must they have already won. You can not save humanity, you can not save future planets from them, you can't even save yourself. You can only accept their brotherhood and die, or struggle against it.

>>49683553
Can't we just not build more markers?

>>49683499

The issue isn't energy, it's resources like metal or minerals. The setting has mastered energy manipulation but has a serious problem with recycling and extraction.

That's the crisis, for every ton of metal getting pulled out of a planet the market demands 1.5 tons, it's adding up and people don't know how to deal with it.

>>49683352
That's what makes no sense. There are so many things they could do with the level of technology they have, up to and including Dyson Spheres. Hell, you can use the gravitational waves of the Earth's moon to generate electricity on Earth and they are masters of gravity manipulation in Dead Space. Given that any halfway intelligent yet also evil and corrupt government could handle population control through shit like engineered sterility plagues and seizing control over cloning tech, and Dead Space has more than a fair share of corrupt and evil dbags in charge, the only plausible solution is that the Markers are fostering uncontrolled growth while also suppressing the creation of things like efficient recycling tech and nanotech or gravitic assemblers.

>>49656757
Because it's just Alien in the first game, which was cool.

>>49683658
Sounds like humanity would be better off without a crazy cult wasting resources on giant cryocrypts.

>>49683658
The specific issue they keep bringing up is energy. The Markers are said to provide unlimited amounts. It's why EarthGov started installing them on every colony before Dead Space 3.

Even if it is resources that isn't a matter of a race against human extinction, it's just being pissy they can't maintain their lifestyle. At worse each colony world will just technologically regress back to a more primitive, sustainable level.

>>49683785

The setting says one thing but shows another, while they keep mentioning energy is the crunch the lore and implications of things like Planet Crackers and a thoroughly excavated Titan (an entire goddamn moon) says Humanity is chugging up ore like a fat man with a milkshake.

the markers and necromorphs in dead space are dumb as shit, the really cool part of the setting is how insanely non-osha compliant everything is, and the absurd industrial practices that must be going on

>>49683658
its literally the opposite, they can extract stuff just fine since they go around the largely empty universe and shred planets apart for minerals

but all that energy to drive space ships and manufacture steel and shit has to come from somewhere. even pre WWII germany's steel production had a hard limit on it based on the volume of birch grown in the country that year, because thats what most of the foundries used for fuel

>>49683838
you need a lot of energy to make usable metal from rocks m8

>>49683838
Do you have any idea how long it would take humanity to run out of planets to crack? We're just in one tiny spiral art of this motherfucker. A reasonable argument could be made about sustainable supplylines if humanity keeps having to spread outward for resources, but then it would make more sense that humanity would just give up on colony worlds period and become a locust species traveling the cosmos in planetcrackers and ripping shit apart as we need it.

>>49682813
Whether or not you enjoy Dead Space 3 all depends if you like the story and setting more than you hate the game itself. It's still worth playing in my opinion, if only so you aren't one of those retards who spouts opinions they've gotten from other people, without having touched the material prior. If you have someone who will co-op with you, do it, then it makes the game better because of certain events.

>>49683499
>>49683658
>>49683697
>>49683785
>>49683838
>>49683841
>>49683851
>>49683904
I think you're all overthinking this.
It seems like a pretty clear cut case of the writers not thinking through the implications of their setting.

>>49683851
You better not try calculating the logistics of space mining, because on earth, the process consumes tons and tons of liquid water as well.

>>49683632
>building more of things that just radiate insanity and Necromorphs

Brilliant idea, matey. Want a job at EarthGov?

>>49683924
>it's overthinking to say that, in a series where they strip mine whole planets at once, and explain it as possible because they have space zombie magic to make infinite energy, that maybe electricity is what's at a premium and not raw materials

>>49683851
>>49683904
>>49683841

Then what's the point of the Planet Cracker and it "saving" Humanity from a crisis if their issue isn't minerals, it's energy, which is shown to be generated through solar and fusion?

The issue is not "we don't have enough planets" it's "we aren't cracking planets fast enough." The game hammers you pretty damn hard on just how wasteful and common resource-heavy things are in the setting, otherwise the the CEC(?) wouldn't nearly be as big of a thing if the focus was energy.

>>49683975

The ships were built in response for a need for resources, the only thing in the lore that points at a critical energy crisis are the Markers.

Everything else says humanity is burning through rock faster than they can mine it.

>>49683995
>which is shown to be generated through solar and fusion?
it comes from the markers

the point of the markers is that they literally generate usable energy somehow.

>the Planet Cracker and it "saving" Humanity
by the time of DS1, this was like 100 years in the past

>>49683995
Dude, by DS2 CEC (the largest and most successful of the planet cracking corps) was on the verge of going tits up as planet cracking lost credibility after the Ishimura incident.

Don't swallow the corporate propaganda about saving humanity. If it were so essential it wouldn't have been largely abandoned after one (admittedly major) disgrace. And I'd remind you not even their first major whoopsie. They had a gravity tether failure over Wanat that cost them a cracker, three supply ships, and the colony itself 11 years prior to DS1.

>>49684091
>gravity tether failure

I'm guessing what happened is something akin to Char's Counterattack?

>>49684091

I guess I'm wrong then, it's just whenever I played the games the primary thing I got out of it wasn't "Humanity needs energy" it was "Humanity needs minerals."

>>49684142
Well, you misunderstood it. You should have got "Humanity has minerals now, so we need energy to make stuff out of them."

The boom caused by planetcrackers created a bottleneck of energy production, solved by markers.

>>49683499

All those new space stations and planets that they are building to house the growing population need even more resources and energy. In order to provide for all of this new territory and population, they have to keep investing more and more into resource gathering.

They are keeping ahead of the curve, but just barely. The issue isn't that the resources are not available, the issue is that they are reaching a point where they physically cannot gather and process it fast enough to meet the demand. Building shockpoint capable starships is EXPENSIVE.

Why did Isaac still have his authorization codes both at the start of and during the events of DS2?

>>49684142
Hell, who knows. DS did something of a shift between DS1 and DS2 anyway with the Markers suddenly being evil despite the original outbreak only being caused when the Marker was removed and putting it back stopped the outbreak until Kendra stole it again. Everyone it was influencing, including Clarke, was trying to put it back. Kendra, who otherwise resisted it, was the one trying to steal it to use - which is supposedly what it really wanted! Instead it wants to return to the one place that is about to be obliterated by a chunk of the planet falling back from whence it came. Pretty dumb for an otherwise intelligent artifact who supposedly only wants to spread the infection and only pretends to stop it.

>>49658276
>>49677965
If you made a marker that could turn people into big guys necromorphs wouldn't stand a chance.

>>49684216
People don't even install handrails on walkways in this universe all the time. Do you think HR really gives a shit about updating or deleting someone's credentials?

What would I need for a Dead Space Call of Cthulhu to work?

>>49684216
The computer system recognized him as a mining engineer. EarthGov obviously felt screwing with his records was a bad idea for their coverup so he's just still in the system. It's not like they expected to lose him during yet another Necromorph outbreak.

>>49684233

I imagine Tiedmann would have done it before deciding to destroy the habitat.

>>49684218
I think in DS3 they finally explain it but it's stupid.

>>49684179
I understand what you're saying. I just think it sounds like they must have fucked up along the way somehow to reach that point with that level of technology.

>>49684247
I don't think Tiedmann cared at that point. He had a lot on his mind and he had his override. Not like locking him out would have done much anyway. Clarke would just pop a nearby panel and enter a hacking minigame.

>>49684247
Why? He's EarthGov. He probably has no access to things like CEC employment records, and probably doesn't even know how they work.

It'd be like saying "Well, why doesn't the mayor just fire the striking factory workers?" like nigga they are different organizations with different chains of command and different labyrinthine personnel tracking software that probably cuts your arms off if you use it incorrectly

>>49684287
>like they must have fucked up along the way somehow
they did, humanity's overexpansion was considered an extinction-level event because they ran out of resources to feed these various colonies

really nigga this is some No Mutants Allowed "WHAT DO THEY EAT" levels of shit you'd know if you actually played the game and looked for the text/voice logs

>>49684247

Might be that CEC has so much pull that EarthGov can't touch it, and going over why they need to delete that guy's credentials in particular would raise questions about the Ishimura incident.

I mean, it's assumed gone with all hands lost, but suddenly we need to delete their credentials? Well, that assumes that there's a reason to, like someone's still alive. And if they're alive and need their credentials revoked, then it implies that there's a danger of them escaping. And if they're alive and trying to escape, what does this imply about what happened on Aegis VII? What does EarthGov not want you to know, and why are they trying to hide the only people who do know what happened?

>>49684297
im amazed that technology in DS is apparently simple enough that you can "hack" it by just wiggling wires around and shorting random terminals until it works

like, "well, time to hack this mainframe" *whips out some an analog electrical multimeter and a wad of steel wool*

>>49684323
I think it's much simpler to assume that, being an earthgov employee, tiedmann doesn't know where or how to change account info on CEC personnel. it's literally not his job so it's unlikely he'd be trained for it, even if training is as simple as "here's where the terminal to do it is"

Why are people having so many kids, anyway? Don't the developers know that with a Western lifestyle comes a stagnant or even negative population growth?

How is Humanity expanding this fast into the stars when they shouldn't be expanding at all?

>>49684283
I don't think they could do much. Hell, there is still a necromorph outbreak on Earth and has been since Altman's time! The outbreak started before he even got involved (during the course of the book Dead Space: Martyr) and all he did was drop the Marker and facility back underwater. That shouldn't have stopped a Marker or the Necromorphs, especially since there were Necromorph fish in the book, and there were still active Necromorphs since Altman is ultimately killed by one he was forced to face with just a spoon.

It's POSSIBLE that the SCAF recovered it. It's mentioned in DS3 as an artifact they feel they need to bury forever to keep humanity from ever using them again. So...yeah, who knows.

>>49684373
maybe it's the 60s all over again because there's good rock music, not a lot of jobs needing doing but an inexplicable lot of wealth, and shitloads of space drugs to do

>>49684334

The only way it makes sense to me is if Isaac is doing the majority of the work on his HUD while the arms are just interacting with ports on his RIG's fingertips.

This is kind of supported by the hacker outfit, which makes hacking easier through software bullshit.

>>49684334

I don't think it's as much hacking a mainframe as it is just opening a panel and removing some fuses. Still, if it were like hacking computers then Isaac would just have a tool to plug into it and run scripts until the door opens.

It makes some semblance of sense that Isaac would also know what to do because he works on this stuff all the time, and in lieu of a working OSHA organization he's probably had to deal with shitty machinery a few times.

The tech also seems pretty modular, as Isaac makes a Plasma Cutter from a medical cutter mount and a flashlight.

>>49684334
You, sir, are no MacGuyver. All you really need is a paperclip, a wad of chewed gum, and plucking out one of your own hairs.

>>49684397
I meant more the markers' plan, not how to stop them. they explain that there's alien markers and then the markers humans made and then a third category and they all demand different things because space turbo zombie magic.

but for demolishing markers, isn't that a thing you can totally do? people rip shit about how they keep going on about ISSAC CLARKE MARKER KILLER even though he never did it on screen, but can't we presume that the one on the station got blowed up with the rest of the station, and the one in DS1 is probably gone now that a large chunk of planet hit it? Most of them are man-made, if they could be manufactured, they can probably be disassembled

it seems like the real obstacle is that there's so many of the things, no one knows where they are because GUBMENT SEKRITS and CULT SEKRITS, and trying to break any will prompt whoever owns it to stop you. Even if you don't have to fight necromorphs, there'll be a unitologist or earthgov gunboat waiting for you in orbit instead

>>49684480
Markers do different things to different people according to a recording in DS2. The signal causes eventually headaches, visions, and eventually drives you into violent insanity. But if someone is intelligent enough it merely gives visions and ideas (and also eventual violent insanity). It is believed the Marker selects people for different influence over how useful they are. Most people are not good for anything but future corpses, and even making a few corpses before they are put down, but if you are smart enough to be of use it relays information or otherwise can even act through you. It's kind of a dick that way.

>>49684530
How smart do you have to be for it to decide you're useful enough to become a Marker-making mindslave? Bachelor's degree in STEM, and Master's for non-STEM degrees?

>>49684334
Maybe DS computers just suck because sci-fi Apple made it plebe tier?

>>49684480
The Markers are virtually indestructible since even reducing one to fragments leaves the fragments active. In one of the animated films they had to destroy the pieces using a shockpoint drive. This was the Aegis VII marker, parts of which survived and were recovered by the colony team. It still did visions and still caused Necromorphs. It implanted Nolan Stross with visions so he could make new one just like Isaac.

Curiously in Dead Space Martyr the Black Marker is believed to have been convinced that removing a core sample from its surface would harm it, as it drove one of the men murderously insane.

In DS2, of course, Isaac did kill the mega marker at the end by going "inside" it and killing the phantom Nicole. This rendered it completely inert, no longer producing any signal, so it was effectively dead.

>>49684406
but doesnt he always yank stuff out of the console at the end of the minigame? I always figured he literally is just shorting ports to trigger some kind of failsafe state or simulate inputs

>>49684570
It probably just gives everyone the same general sorts of disorders, but some people do different things with it than others. Isaac is focused on Nicole but also very mission-driven, so he sees visions of Nicole giving him objectives (to the point of DS1 having her use her infolink holographic route tracer thing in the endgame once you've run out of living characters to tell you what to do)

like in real life, some schizophrenics become violent hobos, some just have to remind themselves that they're not married anymore from time to time. Some people with dementia just forget things, some people have radical personality changes. brain problems get weird

>>49684604
I honestly kinda like it because I'm a horrible luddite. You don't need more than a couple of cold war era logic gate ICs to do a lot of things that people today do with whole project boards and compiled software

>>49684616
so wait are the markers alive or not, I've never been clear on this

is their effect measured and controlled by reason, or does it just kinda emanate crazy waves like radioactive materials give off particles and heat?

>>49684618
>I honestly kinda like it because I'm a horrible luddite


Why are you luddite? I'm genuinely curious.

So on a lark I recently reinstalled the first dead space. Holy hell I do not remember the controls being that shit.

>oh noes necromorphs you better run down this curvy hallway to escape
>btw while in motion your ability to change directions is basically zero, have fun stopping every time you need to turn

and then I ran into a door whose collision mesh failed to go away when it opened and I had to stop playing right after getting the plasma cutter.

>>49684570
It produces the urge to replicate it in anyone, apparently, but most people just copy symbols in blood/feces or make replicas using any materials at hand. Of course these are very primitive effigies with no real power. Nolan Stross and Clarke are both intelligent, and both achieved a degree of stability with the Marker. It was still going to kill them eventually, though. Apparently the Marker signal "writes" itself into the brain which eventually overwhelms the individual. EarthGov got around this using memory suppressing drugs. Even then they had to use their hilarious needle-through-the-eye machine to activate the Marker effected part of their brains, presumably to make copies until drugs shut them down again. When Isaac activated himself a few things happened. The goddamn Regenerator came after his ass (seriously, fuck those things) and Isaac was able to commune with the Marker directly at close proximity. This is when ghost Nicole tried to use him to "make us whole" but instead Isaac discovered the link works both ways and used it to defeat Marker!Nicole which destroyed the giant Marker.

>>49684629
They're intelligent artifacts so the difference between alive and dead is sketchy even when they're being governed by giant moons made from undead tissue.

>>49681166
It's not like everybody did die and I don't just mean Ellie. After she leaves we hear Isaac's message to her.

Of course HOW he and chumptard survived is another matter, or even whether they really had survived or not. Did the alien machine somehow rescue them? I actually wonder if those guys all really did die out or if some fragment of the species still exists somewhere.

>>49684700
Are you sure you weren't playing RE4? in Dead Space you can turn pretty quickly.

The only problem is no quickturn. Fuck that game would have been so much smoother with a quick turn.

>and then I ran into a door whose collision mesh failed to go away when it opened and I had to stop playing right after getting the plasma cutter.
that is a known issue on PC, yeah. im sorry for you're lots

>>49684696
i literally explained it in the next sentence
>You don't need more than a couple of cold war era logic gate ICs to do a lot of things that people today do with whole project boards and compiled software
i feel that a lot of modern solutions are overkill and are actually worse off for it since they're usually slower and/or more expensive. for a 120$ project board and weeks of learning Java and getting all kinds of proprietary connectors for your pencil-drawn meme resistance-based detector, you could have done one karnaugh map and used 2$ worth of chinese logic gate chips and a 1$ dimmer switch from Home Depot

like with 3d printing, 99% of 3d printed parts are things that would have been better made by machining (because they're not complex), moulding(because they're being mass produced), or being made in some other material that is more easily worked or more appropriate to the job (if i see one more 3d printed plastic .22 shitpistol "liberator" i am going to shoot them with an actual gun)

>>49684811
Maybe I was doing something wrong, but it seemed like if I was moving forward my ability to use the mouse to look around was fucked all to hell, and iirc you moved based on where the camera was looking. don't really feel like giving it another reinstall to check.

File: 1432850018327.gif (6KB, 200x200px) Image search: [Google]

6KB, 200x200px

>tfw you can have an argument about a video-game's lore and most if it isn't about plot holes or how some piece of technology doesn't make sense

>>49684980
WHAT DO THEY EAT

>>49684980
Why didn't Isaac speak in the first game? Is he autistic?

>>49685105

He was just beeing himself :^)

>>49685105
hes a STEM graduate so almost definitely

>>49685105
He was speaking all the time, but his helmet's transmitter was out and nobody told him. They thought it was hilarious.

>>49685105

Isaac is a nerdy middle-aged engineer and one of his partners was a really cute girl who could hear everything he said into that transmitter.

You think he was going to say anything beyond heavy breathing?

>>49685171
KENDRA IS A HUGE BITCH

>>49656757

I made en entire sci fi campaign with System Shock 2 plot mixed with other stuff, was great.

Instead of the Many I wanted something more like Necromorphs so I switched them, no player realized they were on the Von Braun. Never played it.
I hope Underworld does great so we can have a good system shock 3.

>>49685197
For what it's worth Isaac... you did a great job. See you around. Or maybe not.

>>49685197
has there ever been someone named kendra, real or fictional, who was not a huge bitch

>>49680965
I always got that feeling in DS2 that most of the necromorphs you saw were just people from the sprawl going batshit and looking like monsters because they were "carrying" and "broadcasting" the marker signal.

>>49680965
>>49685281

How does this make any sense when you factor in things like the exploding babies, huge goo squids, the razor-sharp organ claws and "invincible" necromorphs?

>>49684844
The point of 3D printed weapons is to prove a political point, nobody thinks they are going to directly compete with 'real' guns right now.

>>49656757
This is the best thread I've ever read in /tg/.
Please, someone make a new one when this one dies.
Or turn it into a necromorph