Dead Space 3, which was “officially” announced last week even though everyone to a man knew about it months before that, will have co-op multiplayer. I’m all for co-op and at least EA didn’t announce some ham-fisted deathmatch mode with Issac running around shooting people with the line gun.
The co-op mode does seem to have its limits, though, according to a report at IGN which was written by former GameShark staffer and friend of the podcast and all around cool guy Mitch Dyer. Love to see former staffers do good things.
Here’s some highlights:
*The co-op is drop in and drop out. (Good!)
*The co-op mirrors the single player campaign (ok, ok, I’m still in)
*In co-op you’ll be able to share ammo with and heal your teammate. (I’d hope so…)
*There is no revive system so if when your buddy dies…both players reload the last checkpoint. (What the hell?)
There’s more info in the article about enemies, storylines, etc. I’m all for co-op modes being part of a game, even a horror-ish game like Dead Space, but that no-revive thing is admittedly a worry. This means there’s no way I’m playing this with Brandon.
You won’t be playing this with me because Dead Space 2 sucked. That and I’m terrible.
Dead Space 2 did not suck. I know suck and that wasn’t it.
First few hours were amazing. Everything after that was nigh incomprehensible drivel punctuated by cheap scares and frustrating chase sequences.
Hey, that sounds like The Michael Barnes Story!
Was Dead Space 2 any different than the first two hours of Dead Space 1? Once I figured out the gag (you will backtrack, only to find your previously disassembled corpses rising again), I got suddenly bored.
Dead Space 2 was WAY better on every level. I thought the first was hugely overrated and I was disappointed that it’s horror was more Cannibal Corpse album artwork than ThE Turn of the Screw. But the second one had more atmosphere, more sophisticated horror, and better action. Still gruesome, but better written and deeper.
Really hope this turns out well.
The Dead Space series has been one of my survival horror favorites for a while now.
2 was a little more action-y but very choice; it had some of my favorite set pieces in any game last year. That morgue was goddamn terrifying.
Yes, you know what you need to create a sense of lonely existential dread, isolation, and helpless solitude?
A BRO!
You know what single player games don’t need? Tacked on multiplayer. Yes, even co-op. If the co-op “campaign” is just the single player campaign with two people with the added bonus that if my partner dies, I die, why the hell would I play that with anybody else?
It’s a survival horror game. If one person could just run to the next save point when the other person dies, or wait for a respawn, it would take alot of the survival part out of the game. You can still heal your co-op partner. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.
In case you’re interested: single player anything is about crafted experience. The problem isn’t so much about controlling the player, as it is about giving him meaningful options (including, in the PC circuit, making modding, powergaming, or other “meta-game” type stuff more accessible).
Competitive multiplayer is about balancing the players against one another. Normally, this means adjusting sniper positions, weapon power levels, and so on until people feel like they’re being beaten fairly.
Co-op is neither of these things. Most co-ops are just single player with more enemies or increased difficulty. The only co-op I can remember being CO-OP is Capcom’s D&D arcade tables. The cleric could un-curse swords that only the Fighter could equip. The Mage could cast his ultimate spell only by destroying sacrificed magic items from other players. Has any co-op had that level of depth in recent years?
Any amount of effort you spend on one, is effort you do not spend on another. It’s not that multiplayer isn’t valuable. It’s not that there isn’t a way to add it to a single-player game “correctly”. It’s that single-player only gamers are watching single player mode get shorter and worse. We know exactly why. And when we ask nicely for that trend to change, we’re told:
*You don’t *have* to play multiplayer, so I don’t see what the fuss is about;
*This is the way the market is shifting, and Games Are a Business;
*Blargalgrlrgrl multiplayer blargagral disincentive for GameStop; and
*If you don’t like it, vote with your wallet.
Okay. I have begun voting with my wallet. The short term effect is that I’m being ignored by the mainstream games market. Zynga wants to turn my mom into an ad slave, and EA wants to sell Tactical Manshoot to high-school kids at 10 bucks per monthly IV drip. Sure glad I have that option.
The inability to revive your partner and have to go back to the checkpoint is actually one of the things I hated the most in Halo 2 on legendary. Just means you have to be more careful, be a better teammate really. I still have Dead Space 2 CE sitting on my shelf waiting to be played; considering how much time and effort I put into the first, I should’ve beat 2 by now. I’m all for a third Dead Space though, just no more stupid iphone games, make it XBLA so you won’t have terribad controls. (on second thought, if you do make an XBLA game; don’t make another mini-game bananaza like that last one.)