Dead Space

I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Dead Space, the new EA SciFi horror shooter, so my expectations were naturally high. When Steam finally had it (funny enough, I’m one of those odd folks who are up in arms against any form of too rigid DRM except when it’s Steam), and in English too (something that’s nigh impossible to get here in Switzerland in retail, but that’s another issue), I bought it.

So yesterday I tried to play it, with those high expectations, and with disastrous results. Those were my first impressions:

• Odd strafing … When a game moves you forward with speed X when you press “W”, and moves you sideways with a speed close to X when you press “A”, you’d expect pressing both “W” and “A” would move you roughly in a 45° angle? Not in this game, here the angle is closer to 4.5°. That’s a common shooter standard that you chose not to implement there, and it is annoying.
• Aim mode … You can only shoot if you enter aim mode first, which displays those nice targeting dots, but which also slows down your mouse a lot. You know, EA, I do have this custom-built gaming rig with an insane-res laser mouse and a huge mouse pad, and I do play with low sensitivity. I can aim perfectly well without you slowing down my mouse – in fact, I can aim way better if you don’t keep changing my input. This is not a console. At least give me an option to change it.
• Mouse smoothing … Turning off VSync helped a bit, but the smoothing isn’t gone (with 50+ FPS). And there’s no option to switch it off. My mouse movements are rather smooth, thank you very much, and having them artificially smoothened further disconnects me from what’s happening on the screen. And I’m not alone (although I wouldn’t use such strong language).
• Save function … There is none. I have no clue if the game is supposed to autosave or if there’s checkpoints and forced save spots or whatnot. And honestly, I don’t care. A PC game without a save function has to explain to me why it doesn’t have one, preferrably within the first minutes of play. And then the reason better be good, too (like the one in PoP: Sands of Time was).
• Program crash … Right after shooting the first monster, my game crashed. Not just the game, the whole system halted. It managed to do something I didn’t know was possible: It put the video card into an error state where a soft reset didn’t help anymore (the BIOS then beeped “video card error”), a hard reset did luckily. I’m sorry, EA … is my run-of-the-mill 8800GT (market share according to Valve: 12%, drivers updated) too exotic for you?

All in all, I can confidently conclude that something is wrong in the EA PC testing department. And I can even point to what it is: The ones testing PC games there are not actually PC gamers, but console gamers who have to test the PC version as well. No way those huge bloopers would have made it into the final obvious console port otherwise.

It’s just another game that alienates PC gamers by screwing with their conventions in favour of a game experience similar to the one on the console. In case you haven’t noticed: The demographics of PC players and console players might overlap, but have distinct histories and premises.

Now if you’ll excuse me, work first, and I’ll need some Quake Live (or possibly Left 4 Dead) this evening to calm down. Maybe I’ll give Dead Space another try afterward, the story seems to be great so far after all.