Dead Space 2 is available now on Steam for just $5.00/£2.49—but be quick; it won't stay that price for long.

Dead Space 2 sees you reprise your role as Systems Engineer Isaac Clarke three years after the horrific events on the USG Ishimura. Expect more of same atmospheric horror and monster-stomping action, only this time around, Clarke's a little less taciturn when he encounters more of those murderous Necromorphs.

If you've never explored the original game, you can add that to your library for cheap, too. The Dead Space bundle—which boasts the tense prequel, too—is available for just £3.74, a whopping 81 percent off its usual retail price.

Last month EA closed Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline. Electronic Arts' vice president Patrick Soderlund confirmed the closure and confirmed that the design direction of Visceral's Star Wars project will undergo a "significant change."

In the words of one plucky commenter on the Dead Space 2 customer reviews page, "Don't be sad that it's over, be happy that it happened."

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Electronic Arts closed the doors on Visceral Games yesterday, bringing to a close the studio whose (relatively) recent work includes Dante's Inferno, Army of Two: The Devil's Cartel, Battlefield Hardline, and the Dead Space series. Following the announcement, Zach Wilson, who worked briefly at the studio as a designer on Hardline, took to Twitter to offer some thoughts about where it all went wrong. 

Wilson's opening tweets say it all: 

In follow-ups, Wilson said that he's "back of the napkinning" the numbers, but added that they're close to the real thing. "I don't know the exact marketing budget but they're frequently close to the dev cost (I have heard this anecdotally)," he wrote. 

Sky-high budgets are also why developers are launching their own digital storefronts, rather than simply relying on the simpler and far more ubiquitous Steam.

"Do you hate uplay? Well, the pub gets 90% of the $$$," he tweeted. "EA makes $30 per copy after retailers and console makers take their cut. Then consider that a chunk of the game was sold on sale ... Through Origin they get 90%"

Wilson's tweets don't directly address the reasons for Visceral's closure, but they do paint a very grim portrait of the state of the business, and the extent to which major publisher releases are either big hits, or big busts. If a mid-tier game like Dead Space 2 can knock out four million copies and still be considered underperforming (and keep in mind that EA reported two years after its release that the original Dead Space had sold roughly half that number), then the bar is incredibly high. Any new project that looks like it won't be a huge hit, or won't have a long tail via microtransactions and DLC, suddenly starts to look like a risk from that perspective.

And if, on top of that, the game in question appears to be in trouble, as Kotaku suggested in its report of Visceral's closure yesterday, then risk-averse publishers (which is to say, all of them) aren't likely to wait too long before they take action.

Resident Evil 4’s influence has become immeasurable since its release in 2005. Games like Gears of War and Uncharted owe much to the game that revolutionized third-person action controls. However, one popular sci-fi horror game would look a lot like an entirely different sci-fi horror game if not for Capcom’s reinvention of its seminal series. I got the opportunity to sit down with Dead Space designers Ben Wanat and Wright Bagwell to talk about the early days of development and how Resident Evil 4 helped them shape their own horror series out of another.

"When Resident Evil 4 came out, we were just awestruck by it," Wanat told me. "We were all playing it and we were like, 'Holy shit, this is a really awesome game. They're actually trying to tell a story; they've got some cool cinematics; the gameplay systems are fixing a lot of problems, bringing it into this action realm but keeping this intense horror feel to it. It was this amazing combination and—oh, the enemies were so freakin' cool."

Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'

Wanat didn't shy away from admitting that Resident Evil 4 is one of his favourite games of all time. And it's clear looking at Dead Space that he wasn't alone at EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games).

"It's pretty obvious when you play Dead Space, to look at it and go, 'Yeah, it's almost like they decided to make Resident Evil 4 in space,' which is exactly what we were doing."

A shock to the system

But it wasn't always that way. Early on in its development, before Resident Evil 4 had even been released, Dead Space was a completely different game. Rumours have circled around the sci-fi horror game's early days, reinforced by similarities found within Dead Space. During our discussions, Wanat confirmed them to me. 

"Originally, we were pushing around this idea of maybe we could make System Shock 3. And you can look at the Dead Space blueprint and be like, 'Oh, this is kind of like System Shock,'" Wanat said, smiling. 

"To do a System Shock 3, you're really tackling a monumental task, to make people happy with a sequel that wasn't made by the same team as the original," he explained. And while the game didn't make it out the door and live on as the third System Shock, Wanat said that a new entry in that series was the goal they shot for early on.

"It was like, 'Everybody, get your System Shock 2 copy, play it start to finish, and let's figure out what we're going to do,'" Wanat said, recalling the early days of development. "Then Resident Evil 4 came out and we were like, 'Oh. No, this is the shit.'"

However, Redwood Shores couldn’t just change the name of its project and work on something completely new. 

"It was at a time at EA when there was no appetite for original IP. It seemed like everybody else was doing it except for us," Wanat lamented. While Redwood Shores created games based on James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and The Godfather, Wanat said the desire to make something original was fervent within the studio. And Resident Evil 4 was the catapult they needed.

"We were so hyped about Resident Evil 4 and we got obsessed with improving the mechanics," Wanat said. The team truly wanted to develop a first-rate survival-horror game. However, convincing EA to bet on an original idea wasn't going to be easy, and it was something that co-director Glen Schofield, now the GM of Sledgehammer Games, would work on for a long time. Schofield would break the ice on the idea, show some promising progress, and over time, slowly build the confidence EA needed to give the project a thumbs up.

"Eventually everybody accepted it, they saw how cool the things coming out of it were. That confidence continued to grow," Wanat told me. "Having that group there from the get-go and building this stuff without a greenlight was a little weird, but it's probably what got that whole thing working because we could all put our expertise into a pool and make something tangible. 

"And once people saw that it was a real thing, they got it much easier than if you were trying to say, 'I want to make this totally scary-ass thing,' to which they'd look at their portfolio and say 'Nope, scary-ass thing is not in our language.'"

The executives weren't the only people impressed by the Dead Space demos. Wright Bagwell, who was working on another game at the time, played through one of these demo levels and was so enamoured with the experience that he absolutely had to work on the game.

I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'

"One of the level designers came over and said 'Hey Wright, we're testing this out. I want you to come into this dark room, I'm going to turn the lights off and turn the sound up really loud.' And we played through this demo level, and I remember feeling like I was going to shit my pants," Bagwell said, laughing."I was working on another game that got cancelled, and EA was trying to get me to work on something I didn't want to work on, and I was like, 'No, I want to work on Dead Space or I'm going to quit.'"

So Bagwell joined the Dead Space team, and at this point, it was starting to come together. Controlling Isaac was becoming a smooth experience, thanks to some of the big improvements to Resident Evil’s formula that the team was working on. Wanat specifically pointed out the ability to move while shooting. Despite the relatively simple-sounding nature of this change, it wasn't as straightforward as flipping a switch and letting someone walk around.

"I love in Resident Evil 4, the tension of not being able to move. But it caused a lot of problems for us to put movement in because we were making a new game," Wanat explained. "The enemies couldn't follow the same formula. It breaks a lot of the mechanics. We didn't know it was going to happen until we did it and were like, 'Oh, I think we broke something fundamental about the tension,' so we had to get it in other ways.

"It was like, 'It's a game changer. Let's embrace it and make this the best, polished survival shooter. Let's try to be the gold standard.'"

Space to grow

The move from System Shock 3's first-person view to the over-the-shoulder perspective that we know from Dead Space was something else that Wanat was increasingly happy about, as it allowed players to more easily care about Isaac.

"Even though Isaac didn't have a voice in the first game, seeing him and seeing him get grappled and eviscerated, I felt like there was a better chance to make a connection with the character. And that kinda gives the player a sense of who he is and the place he's in that we could have missed out on if we went the first-person shooter route and—man, we ripped off so much stuff from Resident Evil 4," Wanat stopped himself mid-sentence, laughing.

"But in a way, the modifications we made to the formula gave it its own style. Things like the outer space setting gave us a way to include new mechanics that weren't really available for the time and setting that Resident Evil took place in."

Dismemberment by way of plasma cutter, perhaps Dead Space's defining feature, was one such mechanic that joined the movement system to set itself apart from its Earth-based counterpart.

"It was very interesting to get those two things together and see that something special was taking shape," Wanat said. "But we do owe tremendously to Resident Evil 4. We were really big fans. We had so many of those water-cooler moments after that game came out."

Dead Space released in October of 2008 and was met with an overwhelmingly positive critical reception, in addition to sales of over two million copies. When Dead Space 2 was announced less than two years later, it was no surprise that EA wanted to push the series into a more action-focused direction to appeal to a wider audience. Bagwell moved into the creative director's chair, charged with a delicate balancing act of making sure there were moments of adrenaline-surging panic, but also time for the player to relax among the nameless horrors and dismembered limbs.

Despite its obvious inspirations, Dead Space had become its own thing. The studio was no longer praying at the altar of Resident Evil 4, but Wanat says there were some leftover influences that didn't make it into the first game.

"We didn't really have the ability to do any elaborate cutscenes," he explained. "I mean, we looked at Resident Evil 4, and we thought those were elaborate at the time. I love the intro. They're in the jeep, a guy goes to pee in the bushes, it's this really cool moment. And we couldn't really do those things, but we all wished we could. So in Dead Space 2, you get a lot more character moments and those over-the-top moments."

I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it.

Like its predecessor, Dead Space 2 garnered high praise from critics and, according to EA, sold nearly two million copies in its first week of release. However, that success wouldn't carry over to the third game. With less positive reviews and significantly less sales, Wanat, the creative director of Dead Space 3, expressed disappointment with how it closed out the series.

"I think in Dead Space 3 we kinda destroyed what we had because we pushed too far on it, but it was a deliberate decision in each of those instalments to make it faster, more relevant to a broader audience," he said. "It's a hard thing to do, to make a horror game have mass appeal. They're two diametrically opposed things."

Wanat and Bagwell went on to co-found Outpost Games, a developer that's currently working on a multiplayer survival game. Not much is known about their upcoming game, but the two designers wouldn't be surprised if Dead Space fans found some pieces of the sci-fi horror series woven throughout it. However, speaking to Wanat, it sounds like he's not quite done with survival-horror.

"Personally, I've got so much of that stuff in my system, that one way or another I will make another survival-horror game because I can't stay away from that kind of creative expression. That's just part of my DNA now." 

Dead Space is a game so unsettling it took me years to finish it. Soon after its original 2008 release, I abandoned my first attempt. I d played and enjoyed horror games before, but something felt different about what Dead Space had to offer. I couldn t take it. Years later I would end up completing the game, but I ve never forgotten the initial anxiety that it stirred up in me. Setting aside the missteps the series would end up taking in its second and third entries, what the original Dead Space accomplishes is simple in its frightening elegance: You re trapped on a ghost ship in the midst of its own industrial/organic nightmare and you have to escape.

Much of the anxiety that I find simultaneously attractive and repulsive in Dead Space is tied to the worn-down, blue-collar approach of its story and setting aboard the massive Ishimura mining vessel. As a kid growing up around the deep, dark waters of Puget Sound, WA, I would watch big tankers roll into Commencement Bay and anchor in the shadow of the giant copper smelting tower that used to overlook the area there. It was a filthy place and I d wonder what part those mysterious rusty ships had to play in that toxic wasteland. Where in all the world had they been and what had they brought back with them?

This was the image Dead Space had drawn from my memory and that had bothered me so much. And it s one that still fascinates me, even as the game s jumps scares and lighting tricks lose their intended effect on repeated playthroughs.

This edition of If you like deals with big ships and the mysterious, sometimes evil cargo they carry. I ve picked out some novels, comics, and films that deal with what I think is Dead Space s central theme—machines that bring us into contact with new fears as well as show us the ones that travel with us all the time.

Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke s 1973 novel anticipates and works with many themes that have become a staple of late-20th century science fiction. The development of planet earth in response to catastrophe, the limits of technology, and the difficulties of inter-species communication. But just like Dead Space, Rama also functions as a hard-sci-fi adventure story that puts a host of problems at the feet of some pilots and engineers and asks them to find a solution.

In the novel, a massive celestial object appears in earth s solar system. First thought to be an asteroid, it s actually an interstellar spacecraft. But the destination of the ship is unknown. The drama of the story plays out as the crew of the only ship that s near enough to make contact—a solar survey vessel—begins to explore the alien craft. The novel is a great example of Clarke s tightly controlled characterization and attention to scientific detail and plausibility. While Rama isn t a novel of space horror per se, its sense of urgency, claustrophobia and mystery should appeal to fans of Dead Space.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter

Beyond the obvious references to the 1982 John Carpenter classic in terms of Dead Space s body horror and gore, the psychological dimension of this film also has a lot to offer. We re confronted fairly early in the film with the horrific implications of an alien being bent on murderous replication. But it s the response of the men to the psychological challenges brought on by their isolation in Antarctica that lends the film its true narrative pulse: Who can they trust? How do they escape this scenario?

Carpenter gathers a superb group of character actors to play out this test of wills, led by Kurt Russell who turns in a sardonic performance as a chess-playing helicopter pilot bent on survival. It s also worth checking out the original novella upon which the film is based—John W. Campbell s Who Goes There?

For a slightly less-serious take from Carpenter on isolation and the horrors of space, you might also be interested in his 1974 movie Dark Star. The movie follows a stressed-out group of men who work as a kind of wrecking crew in deep space, launching bombs to destroy dangerous or problematic planets and moons. Sometimes billed as a comedy, the low-budget Dark Star helped kickstart the career of Alien writer Dan O Bannon who acts in the picture.

Southern Cross, story by Becky Cloonan, art by Andy Belanger

A new comic from Image that s only on its third issue, Southern Cross hits all the right notes for dark and ambitious ship-based sci-fi. The narrative so far follows the journey of Alex Braith, a woman traveling from earth to the Titan moon in order to collect the body of her dead sister. A solitary and—perhaps—troubled woman, Braith has to find a way to make it through the voyage to Titan on the giant Southern Cross spaceship, an industrial tanker and personnel carrier that appears to have a few horrors of its own to reveal.

Along the way Braith encounters a variety of strange types all looking to dig some kind of meaning out of a solar system structured around the faceless corporations that keep the fuel flowing. The writing is pithy and authentic, an approach that gels nicely with Belanger s Moebius-influenced art style. Belanger s art not only captures the sharp edges of Braith s emotional landscape, but also works brilliantly at depicting the technological complexity and scale of the comic s grimy industrial universe.

Event Horizon, directed by Paul Anderson

The movie follows a rescue crew on a mission to investigate the sudden reappearance of a ship that had been missing for seven years. That ship, the Event Horizon, was tasked with attempting to make mankind s first interstellar voyage through the use of a new propulsion system that exploits gravity. Now that the Event Horizon s returned, and in a decaying orbit around Neptune, the rescue crew and the ship s designer head out to try and find out what s become of its mission.

It s no secret that horror films like Event Horizon lose a bit of their punch on repeated viewings. But I ll never forget the sheer bizarreness of my first encounter with this movie in the late-1990s. Although it was a critical and box office flop, it was the kind of film you d pick out and watch with friends just to see how they would respond—kind of like The Shining in this way.

The film s look and story owe a lot to earlier movies such as Solaris and Alien, and were an obvious influence on the aesthetics of Dead Space. And from its costuming to its acting and practical special effects, the nearly-20-year-old film holds up remarkably well. If you like Dead Space and haven t seen Event Horizon yet, it s a must-see. 

For more installments of If you like... , check out Patrick s recommendations for The Witcher, Dishonored, Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Deus Ex fans. 

With Visceral Games sadly closing and their Star Wars project of at least 3.5 years being handed off because of "fundamental shifts in the marketplace", here's our 2015 Reinstall on Dead Space, a classic Visceral game that gave survival horror a shot in the arm back in 2008. 

There were 1,332 crew members on the USG Ishimura, but it took an unassuming engineer with a power tool to defeat the ungodly evil that devastated their ship. Isaac Clarke (see what they did there?) is the unlikely hero of Dead Space, an atmospheric space horror game that came out of nowhere at the end of 2008.

After losing contact with the Ishimura, a massive ‘planet cracker’ mining ship, the owners send a small team—of which Clarke is a member—to find out what happened. When they get there the ship seems abandoned and its lights are mysteriously out, so they go aboard to investigate. Bad idea.

There’s nothing that unique about Dead Space. Its mix of cold, industrial sci-fi and gruesome bio-horror has been done many times before, from Alien to System Shock. But it makes up for a lack of original ideas by just being really good.

Borrowing heavily from Shinji Mikami’s peerless Resident Evil 4, it’s an over-the-shoulder shooter that blends slow, atmospheric horror with bloody action. You can trace almost every moment back to a film, but it’s so fun, so atmospheric, and so well-designed that it doesn’t matter. It’s a loving homage to classic horror and sci-fi cinema.

Playing it now, seven years later, I’m amazed at how good it looks. A few blurry textures and low-poly character models aside, the Ishimura is still a wonderfully atmospheric environment. It’s a claustrophobic warren of oppressive metal corridors that owes a lot to Alien’s USCSS Nostromo. The single setting is one of its greatest strengths, giving the developers the chance to really flesh it out. It feels like a real, lived-in place that was once teeming with people, which makes its current abandoned state even more eerie.

You move through different areas—engineering, medical, the crew quarters—and in this sense it’s reminiscent of BioShock’s Rapture, revealing more about the place and its former inhabitants as you delve deeper into it.

The Ishimura has a lot of dark secrets to be discovered, chiefly its ties to Unitology: a fairly obvious Scientology spoof that would come to form the backbone of the series’ mythology over the two sequels. There’s a reason why the crew are all dead and the ship is swarming with monstrous creatures, and a desire to find out keeps you engaged.

The enemies, called necromorphs, are straight out of the Stan Winston book of creature design—John Carpenter’s brooding ‘80s horror classic The Thing is a clear inspiration. To design them, Visceral’s artists studied photos of car crash victims and war casualties.

Compared to, say, the genuinely unsettling denizens of Silent Hill, they do look fairly ridiculous. They’re bloody constructions of squished-together body parts that flail and screech as they predictably burst out of vents. But in the heat of the moment, with five of them bearing down on you, pincers swinging, they’re an effective foe.

Dead Space isn’t that scary. It falls into the Resident Evil camp of horror games, with cheap jump scares and tension-building looming large in its vocabulary. It won’t affect you on some deep, psychological level, and it won’t tease out deep-seated primal fears. It’s more like a ghost train, with people in white sheets popping up and going “Boo!” But that’s fine, because the game has no pretensions otherwise. Never knowing when a necromorph is going to come bursting through a door or out of shadowy corner is what keeps the tension taut and constant.

To defeat these creatures, you have to take advantage of the game’s ‘strategic dismemberment’ gimmick. You can’t kill a necromorph just by blasting at it with the game’s array of deadly engineering tools—you have to sever its limbs.

The game teaches you this by having the words "CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" scrawled on a wall in blood. Then it tells you in a tutorial. Then an audio diary. Then another tutorial. Subtlety is not really the game’s strong point. There are a few quieter, more thickly atmospheric moments, which sadly fall by the wayside as the game gets increasingly louder and more action-packed: a crescendo that kept on going until the end of the underwhelming Dead Space 3.

The score, although largely forgettable, makes use of Krzysztof Penderecki-style timpani rolls and sharp, piercing strings to build the suspense, a ploy straight out of Kubrick’s The Shining. Visceral watched hours of horror films during the game’s development to get ideas for scares. Cult scary sci-fi flick Event Horizon is another obvious influence, with a story, locations, and monster designs so similar, it almost feels like an adaptation at times.

This is a game that’s quite unashamedly steeped in imagery and sounds from the silver screen. As a result it can feel overly imitative, but a few visual elements—particularly the green glow of Isaac’s clunky helmet and the Unitology stuff—are distinctly its own creation.

PC gamers were short-changed with the port, and you’ll need to tweak a few things to get it running satisfactorily on modern machines. Disabling vsync on modern GPUs causes certain events not to trigger, making progress impossible. But with it enabled, the game feels unplayably slow and clunky. You have to disable it in-game, then enable it through your graphics card control panel to fix this.

There’s also appalling mouse/controller lag on some PCs. But wrestle with this stuff successfully and you’ll discover an enjoyable horror romp with a memorable setting and great set-pieces.

In moving away from a single, focused setting and introducing more third-person shooting, the sequels never really recaptured the magic of the first game. Hopefully the next—if they ever make another—will take a step back and try another smaller, slower game like the first. Alien: Isolation is proof that bigger and louder isn’t always better.

EA doesn't want your money anymore. Well, it does, but mostly for its newer and shinier selections. Starting today, the publisher will choose one older game from its library and offer it On the House, a new Origin category for games available free of charge. First up: Visceral's disturb-tastic Dead Space.

EA hasn't specifically said how long an On the House promotion will run for a given game, but judging from the expiration date displayed for Dead Space (May 8), we could add a free title to our libraries once every month or so. Otherwise, the promotion looks pretty string-less. It's also a rather strong display of EA's apparent intent to park itself with other online markets running similar costless campaigns such as GOG. "Who doesn't want free stuff?" reads the diminutive FAQ. Who, indeed?

On the House is on Origin, and you can grab Dead Space either through the client or via the website.

EA getting a Humble Bundle sounds like a thing that should raise eyebrows, but considering how much money is being raised for charity right now - and how many normally-quite-expensive games can be had for pocket money - I'm finding that my cynicism chip is just not activating. The explosion-studded bundle has raised nearly $8.5 million already, with EA's entire share going to charities the Human Rights Campaign, watsi, the American Cancer Society, the American Red Cross, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. In addition to the likes of Dead Space 3, Mirror's Edge and Battlefield 3, you can now get C&C: Red Alert 3 - Uprising and Populous if you pay over the average of $4.84.

Here's the full list. Pay what you want to get Dead Space, Dead Space 3, Burnout Paradise Ultimate, Crysis 2, Mirror's Edge and Medal of Honor, or pay over the average to get C&C: Red Alert 3 Uprising, Populous, Battlefield 3 and The Sims 3 thrown in too. You'll get Steam keys for some of the games, plus the soundtracks to BF3 and The Sims 3. It's quite a good deal, and it's quite a good deal that ends in five days.

The Humble Origin Bundle is live, allowing you to pay what you want for Dead Space, Dead Space 3, Burnout Paradise, Crysis 2, Mirror's Edge, and Medal of Honor. Paying more than the average (roughly $5 at the time of this post) unlocks Battlefield 3 and The Sims 3 with some DLC.And all of EA's share goes to charity.

I know, right?

The offer runs for two weeks, and benefits the Human Rights Campaign, watsi, the American Cancer Society, the American Red Cross, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Bought separately, the bundle would cost over $200 U.S. While Origin keys are provided for all of the games, you'll also get Steam keys for each of the games that are available on Valve's platform. Origin is also throwing in the soundtracks for Battlefield 3 and The Sims 3.

Check out the whole bundle at HumbleBundle.com. It's a heck of a deal.

Are mute heroes better than verbose heroes? Does a voice-acted player character infringe on your ability to put yourself into the story? In this week's debate, Logan says "Yes," while his character says nothing. He wants to be the character he’s playing, not merely control him, and that’s easier to do when the character is silent. T.J. had a professional voice actor say "No." He thinks giving verbalized emotions and mannerisms to your in-universe avatar makes him or her feel more real.

Read the debate below, continue it in the comments, and jump to the next page for opinions from the community. Logan, you have the floor:

Logan: BioShock’s Jack. Isaac Clarke from Dead Space. The little boy from Limbo. Portal’s Chell. Gordon Freeman. These are some of the most unforgettable characters I’ve ever played, and they all made their indelible impressions on me without speaking a single word. In fact, they made such an impression because they didn’t say a word. By remaining silent throughout, they gave me room to take over the role, to project myself into the game.

T.J.: All of the games you mentioned were unforgettable narratives. But everything memorable about them came from the environments, situations, and supporting casts. Gordon Freeman is a great example. What can you really say about him, as a person? I find Shepard’s inspirational speeches to the crew in the Mass Effect games far more stirring and memorable than almost anything I’ve experienced in a silent protagonist game. I was Shepard, just as much as I was Gordon. But I didn’t have the alienating element of not having a voice making me feel less like a grounded part of the setting.



Logan: Ooh, Shepard. That was cold. I’ll happily agree that some games are better off with fully written and voiced protagonists—and Shepard’s a perfect example. But it’s a different matter, I think, with first-person games in particular, where your thought processes animate the narrative: “OK, if I jump into a portal here, I’ll shoot out of the wall there and land over yonder.” In this way I’m woven into the story, as a product of my own imagination. If the character is talking, I’m listening to his or her thoughts—and they sort of overwrite my own. It can be great fun, but it’s a more passive experience.

T.J.: First-person shooters are probably one of the best venues for silent protagonists, but lets look at BioShock and BioShock Infinite. I definitely felt more engaged by Booker, who responded verbally to the action, the story twists, and the potent emotions expressed by Elizabeth... than I did by Jack, who didn’t so much as cough at the chaos and insanity around him.

Logan: But was the result that BioShock Infinite was a better game, or just that it delivered a traditional main character?

T.J.: Booker? Traditional? Did we play the same game? I mean, it’s a tough call to say which was out-and-out better, as there are a lot of factors to consider. But zooming in on the protagonist’s vocals (or lack thereof) as an added brushstroke on a complex canvas, Infinite displays a more vibrant palette.

Logan: Do you think that Half-Life 2, in retrospect, is an inferior game as a result of its silent protagonist?



T.J.: Half-Life 2 was great. Great enough that we gave it a 98. But imagine what it could have been like if Gordon had been given the opportunity to project himself onto his surroundings, with reactive astrophysics quips and emotional back-and-forth to play off of the memorable cast around him? We relate to characters in fiction that behave like people we know in the real world. So yeah, I’ll take that plunge: I think I would have bonded with Freeman more, and therefore had a superior experience, if he hadn't kept his lips sewn shut the whole way.

Logan: A scripted and voiced Gordon Freeman may or may not have been a memorable character, just like a scripted and voiced Chell from Portal might have been. But in a sense, that’s the problem! Because some of my best memories from games with silent protagonists are the memories of my own thoughts and actions. I remember staring at the foot of a splicer in BioShock and realizing that the flesh of her foot was molded into a heel. I was so grossed out that I made this unmanly noise, partway between a squeal and a scream. I remember getting orders shouted at me in FEAR and thinking, "No, why don’t you take point.” I’m glad these moments weren't preempted by scripted elements.

T.J.: You were staring at the Splicers’ feet? Man, in a real underwater, objectivist dystopia ruined by rampant genetic modification, you’d totally be “that one guy” who just stands there dumbfounded and gets sliced into 14 pieces.

Logan: No, I’d be the guy at Pinkberry with his mouth under the chocolate hazelnut nozzle going “Would you kindly pull the lever?” But my point is, I remember what I did and thought at moments throughout all of my favorite games, and those are experiences that are totally unique to me. And that’s at least part of why I love games so much—because of unique experiences like that.



T.J.: I see what you’re getting at. Likewise, a lot of my love for games is driven by their ability to tell the kinds of stories other media just aren’t equipped for. Silent protagonists take us further beyond the bounds of traditional narratives, accentuating the uniqueness of interactive storytelling. That being said, really good voiced protagonists—your Shepards, your Bookers, your Lee Everetts—never feel like a distraction from the mutated flesh pumps you come across. When the execution is right, they serve to enhance all of those things, and lend them insight and believability.

There’s nothing like being pulled out of the moment in Dragon Age: Origins when the flow of an intense conversation stops so the camera can cut to the speechless, distant expression of your seemingly-oblivious Grey Warden.

Logan: Oh yeah, there’s no question that voiced protagonists have their moments. But they’re not my moments, and those are the ones I enjoy the most in games. Valve seems to understand this intuitively, and that’s why it’s given us two of the most memorable characters in videogame history: because I think the developers deliberately build into their games moments that they all understand will be uniquely owned by the players; “a-ha!” moments when the solution to a puzzle suddenly snaps into focus, or narrative revelations like watching horseplay between Alyx and Dog that instantly tell you a lot about how she grew up. Voiced protagonists can give us wonderful characters; silent ones let me build my own.

That’s the debate! As always, these debates are exercises meant to reveal alternate viewpoints—sometimes including perspectives we wouldn’t normally explore—and cultivate discussion, so continue it in the comments, and jump to the next page for more opinions from the community.





https://twitter.com/hawkinson88/status/325060938120183808

@pcgamer it really depends on the writing. Some voiced characters are amazing, and some are whiny and annoying.— Ryan H (@kancer) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer In many cases, yes. I am forced to substitute the absence of a developed personality with my own words and thoughts. I like that.— Rocko (@Rockoman100) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer The volume of the protag doesn't matter, only the skill of the writer: hero voice is just one tool of many in a master writer's box— Jacob Dieffenbach (@dieffenbachj) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer The most interesting characters are the ones with a history, with regrets. Blank characters don't have that.— Devin White (@D_A_White) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer Most voiced characters seem to disappoint. I think silent ones express the storyline better through visuals which I prefer.— Casey Bavier (@clbavier) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer Definitely voiced. Having an NPC talk to you directly, then act as if your lack of response is totally normal feels eerily wrong.— Kirt Goodfellow (@_Kenomica) April 19, 2013


@pcgamer Silent! #YOLO— Michael Nader (@MNader92) April 19, 2013

It isn't often we see the words "Origin" and "sale" next to each other, but this week is the exception: EA is running a week-long Player Appreciation Sale which discounts some pretty hefty games in the publisher's lineup—titans such as Mass Effect 3, Crysis 3, and Battlefield 3.

Here's the full list of games on sale and their prices:

Battlefield 3 Premium—$25
Battlefield 3—$12
Battlefield 3 Premium Edition—$30
Crysis 3—$30
Crysis 3 Digital Deluxe Edition—$40
Crysis 3 Digital Deluxe Upgrade—$10
The Sims 3 Seasons—$20
The Sims 3 University Life—$28
The Sims 3 Supernatural—$15
Dead Space—$6
Dead Space 2—$6
Dead Space 3—$30
Resident Evil 5—$10
Mass Effect 3—$10
The Walking Dead—$10
Batman: Arkham City GOTY Edition—$12
FIFA Soccer 13—$20
Command & Conquer Ultimate Collection—$15
Hitman: Absolution—$15
Saints Row: The Third Full Package—$25
Assassin's Creed 3—$35
Assassin's Creed 3 Deluxe Edition—$56
Darksiders 2—$18
Dead Island GOTY Edition—$10
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City—$25


Normal and special editions on sale? And they're big games? I don't want to spoil this rare opportunity to enjoy a good Origin sale with cynicism, but it's hard not to chortle lightly at the convenient devaluing of nearly half the games EA offered SimCity players for free earlier this week.