The Rise and Fall of Dead Space

space cold dark and endless the Earth's final frontier has long served as the backdrop for all manner of horrifying fiction from the heart pounding terror of alien to the cerebral drama of System Shock where other classic horror settings require the addition of fantastical stalkers to put the lives of their characters at risk space alone tears apart anything that dares confront it unprepared uncaring Lee unflinchingly and in total silence when EA Redwood Shores debuted the survival horror game dead space in 2008 they succeeded in both capturing the inherent wickedness of its setting and delivering an experience that played more sublimely than any other horror game before it rather than attempt to generate tension with sluggish tank controls and other arcane mechanics dead space made Isaac clerks hellish march through a zombie infested flagship as intuitive to control as it was scary players lapped it up Redwood Shores became visceral games and a small barrage of cross media content followed including an unexpectedly solid spin-off on the Wii and an even greater sequel eventually however the demands that the franchise cater to a wider audience caught up with it and visceral games released dead space 3 a solid action title that exemplified its creators competency but failed to fully capture the sense of 4 that made his predecessors so beloved the series faded away and its developers despite their pedigree would follow shortly after this is the rise and fall of dead space [Music] [Music] when ei moved their corporate headquarters from San Mateo to Redwood Shores in 1998 they founded a new development studio at this location called EA Redwood Shores eager to establish itself amongst its parent companies growing roster of developers the eponymously named studio would go on to release the third person shooter future cop LAPD in August of that year before devoting the next decade of its existence to making a small mountain of licensed games from Tiger Woods to James Bond Redwood Shores pumped out movie and celebrity tie-ins quickly and consistently earning more than enough cash to remain in EA's good graces and decent but rarely great reviews the team was happy with this output but by the mid-2000s it had become interested in breaking out of its menagerie of licensed games and developing something a little bit different System Shock 3 the first two systems shot games were landmark first-person adventures developed in the 1990s by Looking Glass Studios centered on the players attempts to defeat the malevolent AI showed an across the darkest reaches of space the games blended survival horror and role-playing elements into sublime experiences that would serve to influence many titles to come such as Bioshock and prey Redwood Shores technically wasn't allowed to develop a new system shot game while EA owned the science fiction series trademark system shocks development rights had fallen into the hands of an insurance company after looking-glasses closure in 2000 and yet despite both this and a sense of apprehensiveness at the thought of taking on such a beloved universe the wheels on the unproduced threequel would slowly begin to turn within the studio until a little game called Resident Evil 4 was released in January of 2005 [Music] the fourth entry in Capcom's iconic survival horror franchise ratcheted up its predecessors slow and methodical gameplay into a much more action-oriented experience with an over-the-shoulder camera providing a more intimate view of the games world and a wider assortment of firearms and enemies creating more intensive battles than ever before the game took the industry by storm and convinced many a developer including Redwood Shores to rethink their current ambitions speaking to PC gamer in 2017 dead space designer Ben Wayne at explain that upon its release Resident Evil 4 proved so popular among the team that they almost immediately dropped their plans to create System Shock 3 and instead began scheming an entirely new survival horror property one that would still be set among the stars but that would eight resident evils mechanics and formula a game simply titled dead space it started a little over two years ago just felt like it was the right time to go and you know talk to the general manager and president of the company about making her own IP understanding that the heads of EA would likely be weary at the thought of them launching a new franchise Glenn Schofield Redwood Shores then general manager would forego directly pitching dead space to them instead he and his team would spend a long time developing and showcasing small yet highly polished prototypes of this concept to EA in order to gradually build up their parent company's confidence in his future prospects their strategy worked after much coaxing EA accepted the project and development began in rigor in many ways crafting their new horror property was easier than Redwood Shores expected it to be new and gruesome ideas to help distinguish dead space from similar games float easily and from all corners of the team making it and EA a company with a stigma of making its games as safe and appealing to us brought an audience as possible let Redwood Shores get away with most of them but its development was also haunted ironically by the very game that helped spur it into existence speaking to gamasutra in 2011 Wright Bagwell who served as a creative director for much of the series would reveal that their decision to copy Resident Evil Force mechanics eventually started creating headaches for them explaining that they initially assumed that in order to provide a tense experience for the player their game needed to cap how much control the player could have and Resident Evil fours control scheme which featured contrivances such as being unable to walk and shoot at the same time seemed like the best one to borrow from but once Redwood Shores began focused testing the game the team would consistently get complaints about these very contrived answers from players it didn't increase their attention it just frustrated them further as a result most of these mechanical restrictions were removed and the players movement speed was increased albeit slightly after being officially unveiled via Game Informer in September of 2007 dead space would be accompanied by a bevy of cross promotional content leading up to and at its launch including a comic book series an animated feature film and an alternate reality game esque website called no known survivors calm but in the end while all of this content helped build up hype for the NASA horror series it would be the game itself and these mechanical changes that were made to it during production that would make it a star when it would release for the PlayStation 3 Xbox 360 and PC in October of 2008 how many times you watched that thing guess you really miss her don't worry we're almost there you'll be able to look her up once we're on board it sounds like you two have a lot of catching up to do when the starship USG Ishimura sends out a distress signal for reasons unknown ship engineer isaac clarke and a small team of emergency responders are sent to investigate the issue mira is a planet cracker designed to break open planets so they can be harvested for their resources and employs scores of personnel including Nicole Isaac's girlfriend Isaac is deeply concerned for her well-being but is forced to put his worry for her to the back of his mind when the Ishimura is revealed to be infested by Necromorphs repulsive monsters created from reanimated corpses with nowhere else to go Isaac is forced to make the most of his engineering equipment which includes a plasma cutter typically used for mining to restore the Ishimura to working order lopez crew find a way out of their current predicament and discover Nicole's ultimate fate unlike most enemies and video games involving aiming and shooting the Necromorphs are resistant to headshots instead requiring the player to aim for and dismember their limbs in order to destroy them effectively the presence of zero gravity environments and air strapped spacewalks throughout the Ishimura only further complicate matters turning Isaac's confrontations with the monsters into horrific puzzles that juggle the players resources spatial awareness reflexes and quickness all at once thankfully Isaac can use stasis and Kinesis modules to briefly slow down and throw enemies and objects and he can upgrade his inventory and rig with various and game currencies these benefits grant Isaac enough of an edge to keep going but never enough to hand him complete control of the situation dead space would be met with widespread critical acclaim across the industry with critics commending its gameplay for the ways in which it expanded upon that of prior horror titles as well as the haunting immersiveness of the Ishimura it felt as if every part of the experience was working in near perfect synchronicity to try and envelop the player in its fiction from its expertly crafted sound design and graphics to the way in which Isaac and his adversaries lumber through the ship's blood-soaked halls even the game's UI played its part rather than exists as a series of icons in the screens corner that represented the players current status nearly every UI element was baked into the games tied Jesus with Isaac's health displayed on the back of his suit and stores projecting Holograms of their wares in front of Isaac not all of the games design would be met with praise some felt that the experience worsened the further it progressed with the objectives that Isaac is forced to complete gradually becoming more repetitive and monotonous and his encounters with enemies less scary a fair few would single out the game's bosses us being particularly weak criticizing them for leaning more heavily into being big and bombastic than tense and adrenaline-inducing but these issues weren't enough to stop pundits from quickly crowning death space a worthy evolution of Resident Evil forced tenants and a hallmark entry in the horror game genre [Music] as a result of dead space's success Redwood Shores would be rebranded by EA to Visceral Games in April of 2009 establishing them as its premier third-person action developer in doing so EA would also establish international branch's of visceral the following year in Montreal and Melbourne the company hoped that visceral and its sister studios would be able to replicate dead spaces magic and create several new franchises on which they could hang their hat however while visceral would indeed go on to develop a small handful of non dead space titles following this rebranding none of them would experience the same acclaim as the horror franchise Dante's Inferno a 2010 hack and slash action game based on the Divine Comedy would be derided for being uneven an overly derivative of God of War in 2013's army of - The Devil's cartel which visceral developed alongside its Montreal branch would be criticized for failing generic and forgettable visceral x' many studios would also attempt to develop an action game about Jack the Ripper during this time according to a 2018 investigation by polygons Alex River yellow the game titled the Ripper would have reimagined the infamous serial killer as a crazed vigilante that fought demons in the streets of London and would have featured an asymmetrical multiplayer mode that would have pitted technological freemasons against bloodthirsty vampires however it ended up being cancelled after running into development issues despite many well intended attempts to branch out and try new things dead space would remain visceral zone Lee major claim to fame for the next half decade but the second title in the studio's horror series was to be a little different than his first one don't take another step several months before the original dead space's development came to a close EA greenlit production of an entry for the Wii the publisher had seen decent returns on Nintendo's motion controlled console with kid-friendly fare like my Sims and rock band but wanted to see if they could take advantage of its massive success with their more adult-oriented titles in a 2009 interview with games industry biz yes in touch EAS European VP would stay that the company already suspected that many we owners also owned a Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 and that such players typically enjoyed more mature titles on the latter devices but on the off chance that they were wrong about we owners interests and this game which would come to be titled dead space extraction proved lucrative it could open the door for similar titles in the future in order to accommodate for the Wiis weaker hardware visceral enlisted the help of eurocom and english studio with experience developing licensed games for the console and made a variety of concessions to the first dead spaces design rather than allowing the player to move wherever they chose in third-person extraction would be an on-rails first-person shooter this way visceral and eurocom could minimize the amount of characters and environments that needed to be shown at any given moment and maximize the graphical quality of those that would be as well as better utilized the Wiis unique functionalities they weren't the first developers to do something of this nature Resident Evil the Umbrella Chronicles which launched on the Wii in 2007 and likewise adapted its series third-person action into an on-rails first-person shooter and received a decent amount of a claim but extraction would receive even more when it would release in September of 2009 taking place shortly before the events of the first game extraction follows a group of colonists as they fight to survive at the outset of the Necromorph outbreak traveling from the planet of agus 7 which the Ishimura was in the process of cracking open to the Ishimura itself in search of help despite being on Rails much of the original dead space's combat mechanics and features are present and accounted for with the player able to tear apart Necromorphs limb by limb to defeat them slow them down and move them about using stasis and Kinesis and like most other rail shooters extraction allows a second player to drop in and play cooperatively alongside the first critics were taken aback by how earnestly extraction attempted and succeeded in replicating its HD Brethren's look and feel as well as the quality of its pacing replayability and motion controls what could have easily been a shoddily constructed 3rd party experience for Nintendo's home console instead became one of its most warmly received it wasn't a proper sequel but it was an immensely strong game in a genre typically designed to hustle quarters out of arcade goers unfortunately the game's strong critical reception didn't translate to sales like other mature Wii games released in 2009 such as mad world and Silent Hill shattered Memories extraction would fail to find an audience on its console proving EAS concerns about its user base correct though it probably didn't help that it lacked much of the marketing push that the first dead space enjoyed as of trying to make up for extractions losses EA would later port the game to the PlayStation 3 in January of 2011 reworking the experience so that it can be played with my other Dual Shock or move controllers damnit gotcha you see that wasn't so hard that's what she said careful officer Anderson and might report you for sexual harassment in October of 2010 developers mega tube and sumo digital would release dead space ignition for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 a choose your own adventure style motion comic punctuated by minigames ignition would be scorned for vacillating greatly in difficulty as well as the Portus of us artwork and plot after proving that dead space could radically switch genres and still retain its essence with extraction ignition felt completely at odds with the tenants and quality of the rest of its series but to a large extent it didn't matter because ignition along with a novel a new comic book series and a second animated film were all part of another promotional blitz this time for the upcoming release of Dead Space 2 for the second entry in the horror series dead spaces shareholders wanted to provide players with a slightly more varied action-oriented experience after giving the series the leeway to establish itself EA wanted to try and make dead space appeal to as large an audience as possible horror games historically didn't sell strongly and EA wasn't in the market of selling anything less than a best-seller meanwhile visceral wanted to try and capture the sense of exuberance present in Resident Evil fours over-the-top cutscenes having wanted but been unable to do so during the development of the original dead space as well as accommodate for fans more easily scared than others in his 2011 interview with gamasutra Wright bag Wilwood explained that after the first game's release the team received feedback from any players who expressed that they generally loved as space one yet simultaneously felt unmotivated to continue playing it on account of how continuously terrifying it was visceral wanted to keep dead space scary and Atmospheric such tenants were non-negotiable but felt that they could still do so while giving players a chance to breathe every now and then the team also wanted to break narrative ground and provide a voice for Isaac Clarke while Isaac screamed and panted plenty during the first game he never uttered a single word on his tour through hello with their sequel visceral felt that continuing as such would be a waste with Van well stating that if Isaac didn't really have anything to say about what was going on then the statement visceral would have made about the franchise is that there's a sort of ignorance on the character and players part about the events they've experienced before and they didn't want that they wanted Isaac to have an opinion about his predicament and ownership over what he wanted to do within it thus when Dead Space 2 would launch on High Definition consoles on the PC in January of 2011 players found plenty to like and dislike over its predecessor I know you're confused right now I can explain everything but you gotta trust me okay listen you're in terrible terrible said three years after the events on the issue marae the game sees Isaac awaken in an asain asylum deep within the sprawl a civilian space station built into the last remaining fragment of Titan one of Saturn's moons after a Necromorph outbreak frees him from his confinement Isaac is immediately beset by confusing and disturbing hallucinations harassing his mind no matter where he turns determined to put an end to the madness around him both real and illusory Isaac suits up and sets out to confront his demons across the station all the while coming repeatedly into contact with Nolan Stross a crazed scientist and Ellie Langford a pilot who insists on surviving the outbreak by herself to some dead space twos campaign which featured many of the same weapons mechanics and challenges as the first game but relied much more heavily on bombastic set pieces and highly scripted moments than before was too much of an aberration over what had drawn them into the series for many others however it was a rare example of a horror sequel whose newfound emphasis on action made it even better than its predecessor to them Dead Space 2 was not unlike to Dead Space 1 what Resident Evil 4 had been to its own predecessors years prior a more athletic iteration of a decidedly slower paced experience that didn't lose sight as to why the latter was slower paced to begin with if there was one thing that the game supporters and detractors agreed upon it was that the game's new multiplayer mode outbreak wasn't up to snuff many games during dead space 2 s era featured multiplayer components included with traditionally single-player experiences as an effort on the part of publishers like eh a try and bolster their value and keep players from immediately selling them upon completion not all of them were disappointing but Dead Space twos which received much of its code and basic setup from the Ripper's multiplayer mode was with critics decrying it for lacking the sense of tension or pacing featured in the game single-player campaign in contrast dead space an iOS game released concurrently to dead space 2 would prove an unlikely hit developed by Iron Monkey Studios the mobile title features gameplay almost identical to that of the original Dead Space we worked to function entirely with touch controls critics would come away immensely impressed with how successfully it managed to compress the series staples down to the iPhones limiting format while losing as little of their appeal as possible towards the end of dead space ones development visceral had briefly experimented with including a cooperative multiplayer mode in the game visceral games had long wanted to follow in System Shock 2 footsteps which also featured cooperative play and EA wanted to bolster all of their games value with some form of multiplayer component however as revealed in a 2017 investigation into dead space threes development by eurogamer's Chris Pratt the mode was scrapped once it became apparent that it would cost too much money and upend the rest of the game's development extractions low technological overhead as a Wii rail shooter made it easy to include co-op but when Dead Space 2 came around the decision was made to go with the competitive onslaught mode instead out of the belief that it would be cheaper and less difficult to implement when the gears on Dead Space 3 development began turning the coop question reared its head once more and the team decided to finally do it but this time they would build the entire game from scratch with it in mind so that it can be implemented properly and meaningfully brats investigation would reveal that the team originally wanted players to play through the game as Isaac and Shadow Isaac a visual representation of Isaac's alter ego disguised as a seemingly unrelated character the two would brave the games campaign together receiving different events as they progressed in order to incite conversation and confusion before shadow Isaac's identity would be revealed in a Fight Club esque twist at the game's conclusion it was a novel idea designed to probe deeply into Isaac's slipping grip on reality and provided deeper and darker experience than anything players had experienced before visceral understood that including a second playable character in a horror game automatically lessens the sense of tension felt when playing in isolation and thus wanted to make sure that the intensity of the game would more than make up for that unfortunately ei felt uncomfortable about making a game that leans so heavily into the realm of psychosis and instead push the studio to ditch its darker undertones and move more deeply into the realm of action than before visceral didn't have much room to negotiate at four million units sold dead space 2 had done very well by any normal video game companies measurement of success but by EA standards it had underperformed in order for the franchise to remain afloat former EA executive Frank Gibeau would stayed in June of 2012 that dead space 3 needed an audience of about 5 million its target was only a million copies apart but two critics the difference between dead space 3 and his predecessors would feel a million more eyes forward Isaac pay attention released in February of 2013 Dead Space 3 follows Isaac and Sergeant John Carver Isaac's co-op partner on a mission to find Ellie who has become missing in action somewhere within the icy planet of tau volantis lashed at every turn by Necromorphs crazed zealots and the biting cult of the tundra Isaac and Carver's journey into tau volantis depths only becomes more and more daunting that deeper they go with the two ultimately forced to stop anachrome Orphic Cataclysm on a scale unlike anything humanity has seen prior Dead Space 3 would still receive positive reviews but critics would be more tepid this time around the game continued to possess the same dazzling production values that made the series previous titles so seductive as well as the same frantic yet satisfying loop that came with hacking apart Necromorphs the inclusion of human enemies however as well as a cover mechanic not dissimilar to that of Gears of War would prove less popular as would the game's story which many felt lacked much of the psychological intrigue or tenseness that so strongly characterized past titles Carver would be derided for being flat and uninteresting and the cooperative mode he Co led despite still including some clever moments where Isaac and Carver would perceive things differently would generally be written off as inferior compared to the experience of playing solo and finally much heat would be directed at the game's crafting system rather than collect a small repertoire of weapons each with their own outlined strengths and weaknesses Dead Space 3 allows players to use scavenged resources to infinitely craft and modify an utterly customized weapon of their choice for use in combat however in a move prompted by EA the game also allows players to directly pay for resources they lack using microtransactions while not an absolutely game breaking feature this and the game's many other frustrations wood together amount to an experience that while by no means bad was no longer scary Dead Space 3 had lost its series identity those hopeful that the game shortcomings would be made up for by strong sales were in store for disappointment with EA announcing at a financial call the following May that both it and Crysis 3 had come in below their projected forecasts at roughly 600,000 copies sold dead space 3 was still the top-selling game for the month in which it released but it was well below the 5 million unit bar Frank Gibeau had set for at the year prior critics half-hearted opinions on the game had struck hard with potential buyers and tanked whatever shot had had it hitting its sales target shortly thereafter EA's former chief design officer Patrick soderlund would state in July that while the horror series remained close to their hearts a fourth entry in Isaac Clark saga was not in production in a 2018 interview with Eurogamer Ben way net would reveal that despite never being realized many ideas as to what dead space for would have entailed were outlined at visceral after 3's release rather than take place in a single fixed location visceral story team wanted dead space for to involve the player treading through the galaxy on a spaceship in search of a way to end the Necromorph apocalypse surviving day by day as they scavenged for supplies collected survivors and fought off other infected ships the game would have allowed players to progress through it in a more nonlinear fashion than previous entries and featured a wide variety of derelict spacecraft to explore with each one possessing its own unique look layout and gameplay opportunities weapon crafting would have been more realistic Necromorphs would have been a greater threat in zero-g environments and thanks to dead space 3 xopen ended conclusion the game's protagonist could have been someone other than Isaac with Wayne at personally expressing that he had always envisioned players inhabiting Ellie's shoes and dead space for you are we and I you bastard while these tantalizing ideas would ultimately be cast aside ei would continue to keep visceral busy handing them the reins of several significant projects after closing the door on debt space the first was battlefield hardline a cops-and-robbers iteration of ei dices seminal first-person shooter series the game would receive a positive yet unenthusiastic reception would have been launched in March of 2015 with pundits praising hardlines multiplayer offerings while criticizing its single-player campaign for lacking focus the second was an action-oriented Star Wars game according to a 2017 investigation into its development by Kotaku s-- Jason Schreyer visceral originally conceived making an open world game codenamed Yuma however after famed game designer Amy Hennig joined visceral in April of 2014 the project drastically changed direction morphing into an uncharted like action-adventure game codenamed ragtag excitement for the project was high after watching the action-adventure oriented Star Wars 1313 get tragically canceled at 2013 fans were ravenous for a similar type of experience and Visceral Games and Hennig seemed the best team to deliver it coming in 2018 is a new action adventure game from visceral games Amy Hennig and team are creating an original narrative in the Star Wars universe with new characters unfortunately despite repeatedly claiming for years that rag gang was progressing smoothly eda would unexpectedly announced in October of 2017 that visceral games was shutting down and that development of their Star Wars game would begin anew at EA Vancouver Patric soderlund would claim that these decisions were made on account of them listening to what kinds of games players wanted and deciding that the project needed to become a broader experience one that would allow for greater agency and replayability many took soderlund comments to suggest that the company wanted to rework the title into a multiplayer centric games as a service experience leading to widespread postulation that ragtag and visceral death were representative of EA and the rest of the triple-a industry having become soured on single-player games however EA CEO Andrew Wilson would push back on this blaming in November the project was cancelled solely so that they could make what gamers would enjoy the most meanwhile Schreyer support mentioned investigation into ragtags development would reveal that regardless visceral x' star wars project was beguiled by many other problems in addition to its scope perpetually dwarfing the amount of staff assigned to it EA often nipped at visceral seals for not including more iconic Star Wars characters into its narrative both these grievances and many others including friction between Amy Hennig and the rest of visceral and difficulties working with the game's engine severely hamstrung ragtags creation and where the main causes behind both it and visceral x' collapse at the end of eurogamer's 2018 expose into what dead space for would have entailed Benway net would state that visceral games had a plan in mind as to how the game would have ended but that he didn't want to spoil it on the off chance that EA might revive it one day instead he cryptically teased that visceral x' creative team had spent some time figuring out the ultimate purpose of both humans and Necromorphs in the series dark universe and that while players would most likely be able to find a way to overcome the latter once and for all they might be sorry once they finally did stating that sometimes you're better off with the devil you know if there's anything good that came out of the Dead Space series untimely end it's that it likely spared many of its characters a fate worse than death for everyone else however it's hard to find a silver lining that resulted from its abandonment a historic horror franchise was lost the game that was supposed to make up for its absence was canceled and the team that helped realize both was let go all of visceral x' former employees who managed to land jobs following its closure will undoubtedly continue to make the most of their time at their studios in viewing the strong design acumen they cultivated developing dead space and ragtag into whatever projects they work on in the future but the exact consortium of talent that helped conceive Isaac Clark's terrifying adventures is gone and while stranger things have happened Dead Space 3 is underwhelming reception all but guarantees that EA won't attempt to bring them or their flagship Series back anytime soon thank you for watching our video our documentaries are crowdfunded and made possible by your continued support for us we'd like to thank by name the generous patrons who have pledged to our highest rewards here Alex Moretti da da da secrets own EMU movies.com jefferson dos santos oliveira Maktoum saeed al maktoum nick timor to this bake-off if you enjoy our content please consider subscribing to our channel and joining us on patreon thank you you

Channel: GVMERS

Views: 319,405

Keywords: Dead Space, Dead Space 2, Dead Space 3, Dead Space 4, Visceral Games, EA Redwood Shores, Dead Space Extinction, Dead Space Ignition, Cancelled, Gameplay, 4K, The History of Dead Space, Documentary, Dead Space 5, Leaked, E3

Id: gHe9MwHXy8w

Length: 36min 11sec (2171 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020