Retrospective: Dead Space -or- EA can't fuck up ALL the time

Electronic Arts is the serial killer of the gaming world. They butcher companies, buying them out and gutting them, and turn the corpses into meat puppets. One has only to look at the necrophilic orgy that is Origin Systems or the slaughter of Westwood and subsequent closure of the Nevada studios to see this statement clearly evident, sensationalist though it may be.

However, they have still managed to put out some decent games. Back when EA let its companies work as they would, we had Westwood Studios blazing the trail for Real-Time Strategy, beginning with the Dune games and graduating up to their grand achievement, Command & Conquer. The first two C&C games, and their Red Alert spinoffs, were fantastic to say the least.

Then EA happened, stripping Westwood apart and implementing all new rules and restrictions that stifled the creative minds of the Nevada team. Frank Klepacki, brilliant games composer who singlehandedly helmed the scores of Command & Conquer, C&C Tiberian Sun, Red Alert AND Red Alert 2, was chased off because he wouldn't sign a new, much more limiting contract. Dozens more developers who helped put EA on the map in the 90s, who made EA at the time a symbol of quality gaming, were ousted and forced to seek employment elsewhere.

Electronic Arts murdered the Ultima series, imposing a stranglehold on the already of-questionable-mentality Richard Garriott, aka Lord British and outright obliterating the eighth and ninth games.

I already did a post about how EA gutted BioWare's creative integrity and the fetid abortion that was Mass Effect 3, so I won't even go into that again.

However, just as rotting corpses can produce new life, so too can EA make something good on that rare occasion - appropriately, with rotting corpses.

Enter Dead Space, the hands-down scariest game I have ever played, and a true joy to experience.

Now, before the horror-game diehards grab their torches and pitchforks, let me explain my above statement. I have experienced the greats of horror, from Silent Hill 2 to Amnesia. None of those scared me. I could speculate on all number of reasons that they didn't, but my best guess is that my own mind is far scarier than any dissonant pseudo-world that those games can create, and the inner demons I've faced during my deepest throes of depression are a thousand times scarier than any lumbering humanoid in those games.

What works in Dead Space, especially for me, is the feeling of direct malevolence. These aren't creatures that just drift around, attacking you only if you get too close. These beasts are out for your blood, and they're built explicitly for that purpose. The monsters are faster and more mobile than you are, so running is out of the question. It's kill or be killed, prey against predator, and that alone is eminently terrifying.

Humanity has spent so long at the top of the food chain that we forget what it's like to be hunted. This is why movies like the original Halloween produced such visceral terror: we get to experience, often for the first time, the feeling of being prey.

In Amnesia you are being hunted as well, but it's a rather "false" hunt, a disingenuous kind of fear. You have no capacity to fight back, so over time the effect changes from, "Holy god I'm gonna die" to, "Ah shit, gotta reload my game."

Giving the player a means by which to fight and even defeat the predators, Dead Space creates a truly animal setting: kill, or be killed. This is different from fighting other humans, because in shooting games like Call of Duty you've done something to incite combat. Against the monsters of Dead Space, your only crime is being food.

Many critics complained that it was too easy to mow down legions of enemies, that it should have been more like Silent Hill. That's fine for survival-horror games, but Dead Space is action-horror, a different breed. In addition, the reason why the monsters are so scary is precisely because of how many you kill. The ease with which these monsters will kill you shows how dangerous they are, and when you realize how many there are... When I first saw the legions of necromorphs in Dead Space 2 I was reminded of the army ants. Indeed, necromorphs take the most horrible parts of the Amnesia monster and the army ant and fuse them together: they're designed explicitly for killing, and there are so many of them that they overwhelm damn-near anything.

The religion that rises around these creatures - a real religion, not just some blood-drinking cult - is also a part of the terror. Unitology, the Marker, "Make Us Whole"... As the story of the two games unfolds, you realize just how little anyone knows of the true inner workings of Unitology, how little anyone understands the necromorphs' hive mind.

I think that slasher movies have since desensitized most people to the predator-prey concept, so games like Dead Space are dismissed as just jump-scare fests without real scares. However, I believe that if one allows oneself to be immersed in the world of the hunted, to actually experience the isolation and tension of being alone against an endless legion of predators that the game presents so masterfully, one can truly find one of the most rewarding - and chilling - experiences in modern gaming. Likewise, for every jump-scare there are two, three or more subtle occurrences that can be missed if one's eyes aren't open. To me, that's much scarier than an endless barrage of cutscenes that outright order the player to be disturbed. Finding yourself in a living world, one that goes on with or without you, and is falling apart regardless, is to me far more terrifying than being trapped in a world made up of inner demons that would piss themselves at the dark thoughts running through my head when I'm off my meds.

Nerdrage Time

Trilogies really are big in the nerd kingdom, aren't they? Maybe it's due to Schoolhouse Rock's magnificent "3 is a Magic Number" song, or the original Star Wars trilogy (before they left Lucas to his own devices and he kept changing it to come in line with his own cartoonish ideas), but trilogies are very important to the geek and gamer subculture. Trilogies are also the easiest way to make a titanic fuckup these days. I don't even need to do more than mention the colossal atrocity that was the Star Wars prequel trilogy, so let's look at some others.
While I've never been a fan of first-person shooters, I greatly enjoyed the Modern Warfare series. The first and second told a gritty and believable alternate-history war story. WW3 was a bit hard to imagine, but the story had a firm enough setting that it was forgivable. Modern Warfare 3 dropped the ball, killing off fan-favorite Soap MacTavish and going insane with the first-person "crippled cutscenes" wherein the player's revered tough-as-nails veteran character falls down and has to be carried away again and again and again. The story became too bloated and bizarre, with the villains somehow overcoming the entire Russian government and establishing military dictatorships in existing nations.
The Matrix trilogy is another major disappointment, trying to tell some sort of twisted existential nonsense instead of a legitimate story. And considering that the Revolutions tie-in game had the Wachowsky Brothers actually step in during a cutscene and insult fans for not liking the third movie's ending, well...

These failures in storytelling, however, pale in comparison to the big daddy of narrative buttfuckery known as Mass Effect 3. For those not "in the know," the Extended Cut DLC was released today, with several minutes of new footage to pad out the almost transcendentally horrendous original ending. Fan anger at the original ending was greater than almost anything the gaming world has ever seen. This game was made by BioWare, the company known for their storytelling above all else. Even in games with poor controls and unbalanced gameplay, fans didn't care because the story was strong enough. Me? I say meh. I enjoyed the Dragon Age and Mass Effect series, but I always thought BioWare's character development was better than their storytelling. Even with that said, however, the original ending was an abhorrent sore.
I could go on for fucking pages about how shit the ending was, but you can just google the ending and find entire forums dedicated to picking apart and analyzing that fuckheap. Suffice to say, it was bad. It was very, very, very...bad. Throwing in an eleventh-hour character, subverting the entire theme of the series up until that point, and completely invalidating one of the most lauded aspects of the Mass Effect series - that is, player choice making a difference not only in one game, but in all games to follow - the ending would have been horrible enough without the creative director building up hype about how many different permutations to the ending there would be, how this was THE END of a titanic series and how this would change the gaming world as we know it. Casey Hudson even said, "You won't be able to say you got ending A, B or C." Well guess the fuck what? The only endings available were A, B and C. No permutations in the ending, no real impact from all the war assets and hours of one-mode multiplayer consumers were ordered to play in order to receive the so-called "best endings," no nothing. Player choice meant NOTHING. Less than nothing, in fact, since if you didn't do everything in the game and play hours of multiplayer there was a good chance you wouldn't be given a choice. If you saved Wrex or the Rachni Queen in the first game? Doesn't fucking matter. You helped save Tali's home world? Doesn't fucking matter. I had my first inklings of this even as I was playing the game, where you can accidentally doom an entire planet to extinction and nobody even mentions it again. Two whole races wiped out, and nobody bats an eye. The developers didn't care.
So now we get the Extended Cut, a free downloadable add-on that brings in a few extra lines of dialogue and cut scenes to "better explain" the ending. This is the equivalent of finding a rat in your Taco Bell and the manager adding some parsley to it. You still paid for your meal, and there's still a dead sewer animal in it, but this might make it a bit more palatable. Oh, they included a new ending - a half-assed "Refusal Ending" one-fifth the length of the other endings that has the cycle continuing a la Matrix 3, where it turns out instead of Buzz Aldrin's voice recounting stories of "The Shepard" to a kid and creepily calling the boy 'my sweet,' the entire Mass Effect series has been a recording from a holographic Liara telling the next group of species how Shepard failed.
To me, this is the ultimate slap in the face. You already get a sad enough ending, with Shepard either completely compromising his/her moral code and the entire theme of the trilogy at the drop of a hat, or exterminating entire synthetic races to destroy the Reapers. Now we get an even sadder ending where everyone dies because the fans had the audacity to want to have a choice in the matter, to have Shepard continue along with his morals. War assets still make no difference; there's only a single tiny cutscene where we see the victory fleet being destroyed. There's no chance to save people with the new option. It's just BioWare and Electronic Arts spitting in their customers' faces, saying "Here's your fucking new ending. You killed everyone we made you care about. That's what you get for wanting a satisfying conclusion to your game, schmuck!"
Every developer seems to have the urge to "go against the trend" these days and give a downer ending or an unsatisfying one, but over a goddamn decade that has become the new trend. At least when Fallout 3 did it the ending was in line with the Biblical theme of self-sacrifice that had been established from the game's start. At least Lemony Snicket's books were internally consistent, having warned readers from the beginning that the ending would leave them disappointed.
Unlike many others I actually really enjoyed Dragon Age 2. I thought it helped to establish the series as being about the entire world instead of a war against the darkspawn or anything as pedantic and overdone as that. However, I will not be purchasing any more games from BioWare after this last insult to their consumers, the people without whom they cannot exist. Nor will I be purchasing from Electronic Arts, who have now killed two of my favorite game companies, Westwood Studios and BioWare.