I'm almost finished with Dead Space 2, and I have to say that it has been one hell of a ride so far. I originally started the first game back when it came out in 2008, but I only played it for about twenty minutes, due to the amazingly poor quality of the PC port. I dredged it out again recently because of a friend's high recommendations and because Dead Space 2 was coming out soon and was getting a lot of hype. I played it with a controller this time (the mouse/keyboard controls really make the game unplayable), and stuck it out through the first (rather boring) chapter. I am so glad I did.
Dead Space isn't just a good game. It's a great game, and when I beat it, I immediately bought, installed, and played the sequel. As long as I have played video games, I have never beaten a game and started its sequel on the same day. It's usually just too much of the same thing for me, but Dead Space was that good. One of the things that made it so good was the characterization of the main character, Isaac Clarke, which is odd because throughout the first game, he doesn't utter a single word. Isaac is yet another example of the tired "silent protagonist" trope, a concept so inane and outdated that it makes the save points littered throughout both games look like the way of the future. Instead of speaking, Isaac's thoughts are written in his "personal journal," essentially the quest log. It's actually pretty interesting, and it got me to read to read the log for every quest, which is not something that I would normally do.
In the second game, in addition to keeping a journal, Isaac is fully voiced, which gives him an opportunity to talk about things other than which part of the ship is broken and how he needs to fix it. I still read the journal, however, and it was going great until towards the end of the game. I checked my journal, and read that Isaac was looking for a certain character that he was particularly worried about. I then moved forward a couple of feet, which triggered a cutscene in which the character that Isaac was looking for dies a horrible horrible death. After the cutscene was over, I pulled up Isaac's journal to see what he had to say about it, but according to the journal, Isaac was still looking for that character and was still very worried. That was the first time in either game that the illusion was shattered enough that it occurred to me that there was someone who actually wrote these journal entries. Someone over at Visceral Games actually took the time to put this much thought into characterizing Isaac through his mission objectives and, for the most part, did really, really well with it.
What an awesome job. I want that job.
Most quest logs are terrible. The ones that do try to take the first-person narration style usually don't work and are filled with unnecessary filler. The others are usually short, to-the-point, and boring. Borderlands did a pretty decent job, but after a couple of hours they descended into tedium. Alan Wake was interesting, but that game didn't really need mission objectives, and ended up just rehashing recent events. I think quest logs need to be spiced up a bit, and I think it would be awesome to be the guy that does it.
I went through the Dead Space credits to see if I could find out who this guy was, but there was not a single writing credit. Not one. There were a bunch of general "designers" credited, but nothing specific in terms of writing. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to go back to my old dream of being the guy that designs the "options" menu.
