Sunday, July 12, 2009

There is a problem with Dead Space

Now, I'm currently trying to finish Dead Space... on the uh, very last leg of it. Chapter 9 I believe. Just uh... been caught up in other games and well, Dead Space is a very scary game. Kinda hard on my nerves. Not a big survival horror guy, cause I'm a scaredy cat. But Dead Space is obviously a great game, and I can admire the craftsmanship of the dev team even if the actual game is really making me piss my pants. Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, after all I did manage to get through the first 9 chapters. So it's pretty scary, but tolerable. And uh, finally decided to try and finish it. Having a good time. Could've used a quicksave system, would've been a lot better, but I guess that would've made it a bit less scary. I can see why they wouldn't want that in there. I would like that in there, that's just me, personal preference. Hey, it's alright, it's not you it's me, whatever.

But uh, there's an issue with Dead Space. One that's kinda bothersome, and I really really do hope they uh... manage to correct it for Dead Space 2. Which you know they're gonna do, they must. EA would be retarded not to make a sequel to one of the best games of 2008. Completely warranted to call them retarded if they didn't. Dunno about the ending, but most game endings these days pave the way for a sequel, right? It makes sense, just like a lot of films. Sequels deliver more of what you loved about the first game, while hopefully improving on the deficiencies. Well, Dead Space has a deficiency, and that's the damn loot system. Unlike a lot of other games, the loot, or ammo drops and health drops, is uh, not hand placed. There wasn't some tired game engineer painstakingly placing down each and every item. It's actually spawned by a somewhat dynamic system which takes into account what your current weapons are. So you'll generally get ammo that corresponds to the ammo you're actually using on the monsters that drop the ammo. It's a great cycle.

Except it's not working that well. It seems to be much too nonchalant about the types of ammo that're getting used. The game sees that I have four weapons in my inventory, and then just seems to place ammo for each in nice 25% ratios. Or something like that. Which is completely too unrealistic to what a player actually does. Or maybe I'm just different from an average player, because I certainly don't use ammo from each weapon in the same proportions. The plasma cutter is my fucking go-to gun. I need way WAY more plasma ammo then the other guns. Yet I keep getting drops for my contact beam and line gun when they don't need more ammo. I don't fucking use the contact beam unless I'm confronted by one of those huge Brute thingies. Who the hell uses the contact beam for regular enemies? It's like the rocket launcher in Doom, you don't just waste it on the normal shmucks. Same with the line gun, I'll generally pop it out for big battles when I need to cut down a lot of folks in a hurry. The rest of the time, it doesn't get used. The fourth gun I have is the Force Gun, which is the other gun I'll actually use somewhat frequently, because really, it's like an uber shotgun of sorts. The range sucks, but since most of the enemies are melee ambush types, the ease of use with the wide spread just makes a lot of sense. So in tight cramped spaces, pulling out the force gun can be rather more reassuring then the long ranged plasma cutter.

So yea... plasma cutter and force gun get used a lot, contact beam and line gun not so much. This heavy use of two guns at the expense of two other guns really shows the flaw in the loot system, because it's just too dumb to recognize this. So I keep running out of ammo for the plasma cutter and force gun while picking up obscene amounts of contact energy and line racks. Oh, and a random drop of pulse rounds here and there. Like, WTF? Sure, I can sell the contact energy and line racks and buy more plasma ammo, but that's only whenever there's a handy terminal nearby. Seriously, it's not a bad system... but it needs to be refined. Don't give out equal portions of ammo for every weapon, have the AI take note of how much ammo for a particular weapon is getting expended.

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