Dead Space 3 Story Producer Believes the Game Lost its Identity in Trying to Appeal to a Wider Audience

gamingbolt.com:

Dead Space 3 has lived in infamy thanks to some controversial decisions that were made about the game’s core design and story. Story producer Chuck Beaver, speaking with YouTuber CaptainBribo, has revealed that he would like to “almost completely” rewrite the game’s story.

According to Beaver, some of the more controversial parts of Dead Space 3 were developed because: “There’s a return on investment number that has to be hit, so there were some calculated risks that we all made that we thought would do it, and it didn’t work out.”

For context, Dead Space 3 was a major departure from the franchise’s roots. The game included a co-op mode for its main campaign, and also included a new weapon crafting system that was also monetised, allowing players to pay real money to get their hands on more crafting materials to make better weapons.

Beaver goes on to talk about the decision to include co-op in Dead Space 3, owing quite a bit to the relatively low popularity of the survival horror genre at the time of the game’s release back in 2013.

“I mean, that’s almost inarguable at this point,” Beaver replied, “because the cap seems to be around 2 million people who are really wanting to see it,” said Beaver in response to CaptinBribo suggesting that there was a cap on the number of players interested in single-player horror titles at the time.

“The plan was that we would expand into other gameplay genres and stuff, and I think all those bits together not only didn’t generate a new audience, they lost the old audience,” explained Beaver.

“The gun mechanic, the re-crafting, [we] missed a lot of the stuff that everybody loved about the old one, and then created a whole bunch of exploration space – we were on a big wide open planet