EA’s Scrapped Dead Space 3 Would Have Been AMAZING

"Single-Player Games Are Dead"

For one, the franchise was kind of born during a period where EA was having a bit of a breakdown. After being named the worst company in America and criticised by fans for relying on the same old tired franchises, executives greenlit a bunch of new IP to prove that it still had passion for creativity. This boom resulted in some great games, including Mirror's Edge, Skate and Dead Space, with the latter being the most successful. However, it is telling that all three franchises are currently on ice.

Even from the off, it was clear that EA wanted to morph Dead Space into something it wasn't. As mentioned earlier, even the second game edged towards action over the slow approach of the first, and it also featured a huge mandate from the company: multiplayer.

Though they're not shy about the fact now, even a decade ago EA executives were making it clear that they thought single-player games were dead. Their worst nightmare was something like Dead Space that could be played solo, finished in a weekend, and then traded in. In a 2010 interview with Develop, then EA Games label president Frank Gibeau made the claim that single-player only titles weren't a viable model, saying: "I think that model is finished. Online is where the innovation, and the action, is at."

This directly impacted Dead Space 2, which had to crowbar in a competitive multiplayer mode to tick a box. Even Wanat agrees that nobody came to the game for this, and it wasn't treated as a vital component by either the devs or players.

Consequently, wanting to integrate multiplayer into the core experience in Dead Space 3, they came up with the asymmetrical approach. This felt like a more natural choice as the co-op idea wasn't something totally forced on them - they had tried and failed to implement it in the first game, with the executive producer on that title saying the experiment failed because "it was way too in development, [and] it didn’t make sense with the story."