Sulphur on 27/2/2014 at 06:00
Quote Posted by WingedKagouti
I completed it, but only because people claimed it was good while hoping for the game to show more than just glimpses of a tense/scary atmosphere. What I remember is a tedious slog through a fairly generic sci-fi tech interior (though I vaguely recall one or two walks on the outside of the ship) with the obligatory "covered in organic material" sections, followed by an uninspired science installation on some planet and ending with the stupidest looking final boss since Clive Barker's Undying*. Also, you kill a horde of each non-boss enemy type over the course of the game, they start losing any kind of scare factor after a while as they slowly turn into "that target I need to take out this way" instead of some horrible reanimated thing like they're supposed to be.
Besides, if a game marketed as a Scary/Horror Game is not scary on Normal difficulty, I'd say someone on the development team has failed. Less available ammunition/increased enemy health/increased enemy numbers doesn't make it scarier for me, it only adds an annoyance factor along with me becomming more aware of the game itself instead of the world it tries to portray.
*Undying had a good first act, followed by a noticably weaker second act and ending with some of the stupidest crap ever (if you think of it as a Horror game, the last act is decent, not great, FPS action).
I don't really get the point of arguing opinion when it's obvious we have different reasons to like/dislike it. I liked it because I wasn't expecting it to make references to my favourite LGS franchise. It was thickly atmospheric all the way through because of a) the visual design that evoked some of SS1/2's environments and b) the sound design. If you went at it without liking either, it's obviously going to be tedious for you. And let's face it, none of us were playing it for the story. The ending plot twist was telegraphed and a facepalm moment, but then, so was SS2's. The last boss fight was awful, but then, so was SS2's. Did either make SS2 a terrible game? No. The same goes for DS1.
Dead Space's Normal difficulty really was too easy and undermined the scarcity of resources/tension aspect that informs most of the fights, and
that's what makes the combat and tension work. Not the jump scares, which get old within the first hour; you're free to disregard them anyway, because they're mostly cut down after that. It wasn't a wave/horde shooter, which is what happened with DS2; sure, the end devolved into a lot of fights, but that's how escalation works. I felt it balanced its combat with unpredictability fairly well before that, so the pacing ended up pretty good.
So yeah, the difficulty was a mistake on the designers' part, but we can chalk that down to well-intentioned accessibility, which slowly devolved into not-so-well-intentioned accessibility in the sequels.
Again, I don't really understand why we're arguing opinion when it's obvious that the things some of us like are the things some of us don't.
