Dead Space 2 concept art, from here.

check out the source link, it's got some interview snippets from the people behind the necromorph designs :]

Dead Space 2 concept art, from here.

check out the source link, it's got some interview snippets from the people behind the necromorph designs :]

While I'm in a Dead Space mood and looked up Dead Space things, I came across this little bit of info that ties into the current discourse about Microsoft closing down Beloved Bethesda Studios, which is just the latest salvo in a tough environment.

Consider: Dead Space 2 was a 360/PS3 game that came out 13 effing years ago, and even back then it already cost 60 million dollars to make. They then spent just as much on marketing, for a 120 million dollar budget. I remember the news that it shipped 2 million in the first week, and this tweet from 2017 says it went on to sell 4 million, but between a 120 million budget, retailers and platform holders taking their cut and price cuts over time, 4 million wasn't good enough. In 2011!

Now that development budgets have reached ridiculous levels that make 60 million look like the good old days (and they are, in that sense, insane as that sound), it's not hard to see why narrative-driven single player AAA games are increasingly a relic of the past.

I really hope the industry finds ways to make them work again, even if they have to dramatically cut back on production values. I like eye candy as much as the next guy, but I like even more when games I love thrive and become long-running franchises rather than see them die because perfectly rendering those beautiful strands of hair and drop-dead gorgeous pipes is just too effing expensive.

While on that note, I have no idea how Sony and Microsoft plan to get developers to make AAA games that wow us enough to buy next gen hardware when the AAA industry is already breaking at the seams before they even got to truly push the limits of current hardware.

Started Dead Space 2, reach the first store, there's a mountain of weapons and armor costing zero credits, wtf! I didn't remember that at all. So I go Google, there are quite a few threads asking the very same question. Turns out EA included all the DLC in a later patch, supposedly due to some disagreement with Valve.

Which kinda sucked, cause now there was all this late game gear available right from the beginning, killing immersion and the sense of progression.

Never fear, the Internet was already on it, and I quickly found a way to replace the .exe, tinker with some in-game files, and voila, Dead Space 2 as it was meant to be played, DLC-free.

Huh. Tinkering with in-game files to fix bugs or remove some undesirable nonsense took me way, way, waaaaaay back. What a blast from the past!