Nah, EA are a buncha short-sighted shits who will leave an excellent horror series like Dead Space with tons of potential in the trash can because they can't monetize every drop of blood out of it.
They sure tried to, though...
I really miss Dead Space, and I think even a lot of Dead Space FANS missed out on a lot of Dead Space-related content back in the day because EA tried to flood the market with comics, movies, and spin-offs.
Like, the Dead Space iOS game is FANTASTIC! Original story, original characters, legit great graphics and scares and trippy hallucinations. How many Dead Space fans got a chance to play it?
Dead Space Extraction was overlooked by so many fans for being on the Wii and being on-rails. A late port to PS3 didn't really bolster it, but it's incredible and it planted so many extra seeds the franchise could've followed up with.
The comics were supremely disturbing, especially the ones with art by the incredible horror artist Ben Templesmith.
The DVD movies are inconsistent but I consider still mostly positive, if only to flesh out a few background characters from the games. Anyone check them out? The first one "Downfall" holds up pretty well, all things considered, while "Aftermath" is far more inconsistent because it uses multiple animation styles (though some of them work better than others). They're highly disturbing and very visceral, at the very least.
You want more info on the background history of the series - the history of stuff like the Markers and Unitology? The books have you covered.
Hell, I'm willing to be most people don't even know that there's an official Dead Space 1 tie-in interactive ARGN website called
"No Known Survivors" that told the story of a man on the space cruiser slowly losing his mind that someone put a ton of effort into. I was shocked to discover it years later.
There was merch and MTX and online multiplayer and all this extra stuff... some of it terrible, some of it great.
EA just didn't know when to stop and had no idea what made the first game successful. They didn't understand that "less is more" and that you couldn't just create a giant, sprawling Dead Space universe from the start. You had to build to it, slowly. They didn't want that and that's what turned Dead Space 3 from the really awesome pitch the devs had into the tedious, unscary military co-op experience we ended up with.
The Dead Space series tried a TON of new things - too many, too quickly - but some of them did work very well. Even if the series is dead and gone right now, I do encourage people to ask for a remaster and to track down some of the lesser-experienced works of this underrated series.
Maybe not Dead Space: Ignition though. Solid pass on that one.
