EA Motive has confirmed in an interview to IGN that its Dead Space remake isn’t going to have any microtransactions. These are the tiny costs that slowly cut away at what made the games good, killing them very slowly from the start of Dead Space 2 until the end of Dead Space 3. It’s a shame really because, without them, the Dead Space franchise would have survived to this day with no break. As it is though, it’s taken years between Dead Space 3 and now to finally get a remake of the first game. While I’m very much here for a Dead Space without microtransactions, I do miss aspects of those older games that they were built around.
In Dead Space 2, the microtransactions focused on skins for the game’s tacked-on multiplayer mode. Most people didn’t like it, but I actually had a lot of fun with it. In a weird way it was a deathmatch game that saw you play as either one of Isaac Clarke’s outfits, or one of the many necromorphs in the game. Learning how the movements and attacks for each enemy worked was awesome, and it’s something I wish was still alive today, though not in quite such a toxic fashion.
In Dead Space 3, microtransactions were rife. The game had a co-op functionality and a customisable weapon system. Players could pay for better components to effectively help them gain levels and push through the hardest parts of the game with no trouble at all. It was the definition of pay to win, and it’s something EA only repeated in Star Wars Battlefront 2. After that, the company has thankfully learned to avoid that sort of thing.
However, Dead Space 3’s customisable weapon system was great. It was a system that kept the engineering of Isaac Clarke alive despite him no longer being an engineer. It was a great callback to his early days with the series, and something that you had to learn to master based on enemy types and your own play style. I’d love to see some of these elements return, but as long as there are no microtransactions, I’ll be very happy to play any sort of new Dead Space entry.