Even without those exploits you are pretty much drowning in resources by the time you reach the planet anyway. And the Mark V stuff has mostly added more ammo or reload speed, the only one that I have that does something great is the Mark V Diffraction Torus that has like 3 extra bars of SPD which makes my spike chaingun pretty ridiculous.
I wasn't even paying attention to Artifacts anymore, just grabbing them as I saw them, and I finished getting the SCAF (the last one is in Chapter 14) and Unitology (last is in Chapter 17) sets. They each give you a bunch of +3/+3 and +3/+2 upgrades, which is nice since the best I'd seen otherwise were +2/+1. Two Earth Gov artifacts you can only get in co-op missions, so I wrote those off. Apparently the last two of the Alien set are in Chapter 18, so we'll see if I missed any (I'm in Chapter 17 now). I don't particularly need any more after the SCAF and Unitology sets, but I'll take them. The game does drag from Chapter 14 on, particularly after the 25th mountain climbing/descent sequence. Seeing the same room with with the loot elevator again was kind of ridiculous, too. At least I already knew where to stand after the trigger. They really throw weapon frames and parts at you in the latter part of the game, but many of the scripted combats are so deadly that experimentation is generally bad. It's also somewhat tedious. Part of the problem is the autosave checkpoints. If you trigger one with your standard loadout, then go back to a bench and mess with your weapons, you can't easily tweak things without going through the whole process of assembling and assigning upgrades again. I think they need to modify their save system if they're going to continue this route, because what worked for Dead Space 1 & 2 doesn't so much with the weapon flexibility of 3.
You can quit out when you trigger a story save and then go to the Weapon Crafting Test Arena or whatever it's called at the menu and tweak your guns there and it will do an inventory save when you leave.
Manually saving (by quitting the game) will also save your inventory but it will not save your progress beyond any checkpoint.
Which makes it pretty useless for testing weapons against a specific area or encounter. That was my point. The checkpoint save system that worked fine in DS1 & DS2 isn't great when they give you as much weapon flexibility as they do in DS3. The Weapon Crafting Area Adree mentioned is nice because it spawns necromorphs on demand in the same room as a workbench, and any inventory or weapon changes you make carry over to the main game. It's not ideal because part of the benefit of having so many weapon options is the flexibility to tune your loadout to a specific area or encounter. When you have a workbench in a room before a tough fight, often far from the last story save, tinkering with your loadout is a pain in the ass.
Gameological posted its review and it's definitely an amusing read. Just some more thoughts after finishing the game yesterday. I feel like I wasted a big opportunity by not more fully exploring the weapon options available to me. The carbine/shotgun combo was such a great, all-purpose Necromorph destroyer that I never felt any need to deviate. I almost never used the Plasma Cutter even, let alone the more exotic combos available. Which suit are you guys using? Since it's all about aesthetics, I stuck with the gold First Contact suit throughout the game. I think it was some kind of preorder bonus. Definitely the slickest looking of the bunch I had access too. I couldn't bring myself to wear any of the suits with the stupid fur collars. After finishing the game the complaints about the DLC micro-transactions were definitively exposed as beyond silly. "Drowning," is the perfect word to describe the amount of crafting materials I had at my disposal at the end of the game. I was able to craft anything and everything I could ever need, including the best weapon parts and upgrades, along with ammo and med packs. Regarding my complaints about the cliff ascent/descent sections and on-rails flight sections: I understand what they were trying to do with them. Breaking up the usual locomotion is a good idea. Visually both types of sequences were great. I love the detail of Isaac grabbing the cable off the winch and attaching it to his suit to climb/descend, for example. But the sections play out in an annoying way, often making me suffer a bunch of deaths in order to memorize the pattern of obstacles. If the sections were trivially easy and presented no or almost no possibility of death, I'd have liked them a lot more as palate cleansers from the point A to point B walking and shooting.
I haven't played 3 and I'm not sure I ever will (even though I enjoyed the first two) but this has been an issue that has existed in the series from its inception. I'm not sure of the reasons in 3 but in the first two the scarcity of ammo (real or perceived) and how the determination of what dropped was handled meant that sticking with just a handful of weapons for the entire game was the best and natural option. It might have been somewhat intentional to try and encourage multiple play throughs but I don't think the games lend themselves well to being played multiple times as the familiarity destroys a good amount of the tension in these games which was a big part of what I enjoyed about them.
I used a shotgun/rapid-fire weapon combo (with Stasis Coating) for most of the game, but I switched to a shotgun/Ground Diffractor at the end because it's tough to avoid getting mobbed. That way I could also use an Ammo Box on my shotgun/diffractor (because even 16 shotgun blasts at max damage is not enough sometimes, and 6 consecutive floor blasts is handy) and still use Stasis Coating on my Chain Gun/trip mine layer. Plasma is worthwhile for the Ground Diffractor alone. I mostly used the Witness Suit (which also works as a snowsuit): Until got the Elite Suit and switched because it rocks:
The situation you describe definitely existed in the first two games, but not in Dead Space 3. All ammo is universal and you're limited to two guns at a time, albeit both can have two functions, effectively giving you access to four weapons. Ammo is NEVER scarce and the game does everything that could be reasonably expected to encourage the player to feel free to experiment with its many weapon options. I'm just the type of person that looks for the best all-purpose solution and sticks with it. So all that stuff was pretty much wasted on me. I don't even know what a Ground Diffractor is, which was apparently a staple weapon for Raife.
Another reason you should get to know Mr. Ground Diffractor (Plasma Core/Diffraction Torus). Killing them fast with a Chain Gun (Telemetry Spike/Diffraction Torus) with Stasis Coating is the way I prefer to deal with them, though. You have an 80 round magazine before you even add circuits. You can also set up Detonator Mines (Survey Charge/Directed Ejection Field) before they attack if it's a triggered event to whittle them down. See what happens when you experiment with weapons?
I'm not sure that I ever got the Diffraction Torus, but it sounds very cool. And I definitely realize that I missed a lot of cool stuff by not experimenting with the weapon system. I probably should've given up on carrying the Plasma Cutter early on and used that second slot to build and try out weird stuff.
You should put acid rounds in your chaingun. Even your random stray spikes do a shitload of damage after that.
A few other tips: You can duplicate any circuit you've found with Construct New Circuit option when you select an upgrade slot and circuit type. It costs materials, but you can deconstruct them again when you find better ones for half of the build cost. On that note, deconstruct anything you're not going to use including excess frames (especially Standard Frames), weapon engines, weapon attachments, and circuits. You only get half of the build cost back, so be sure you don't want them, but you can build them again for a loss if you really need them. Keep a couple of each type of weapon engine, though. Some of them do funky things with the right Tool Tip. You can unlock new circuit slots on the named frames (until you have all four available) for 20 Tungsten each. Just click on the orange box on the Circuit Upgrade screen. They all have built-in strengths that make them better than elite frames, although some only allow upper Tools. For example, weapons on the SCAF Heavy Frame do extra damage. You can see the bonus they give when you build a new weapon and select the named frame. You can also build more named frames once you find them. I don't think the pip limit on the display is a cap on the weapon's abilities. My Chain Gun has a 131-round capacity and it's well beyond the pip limit. Every time I add more clip circuits it still increases normally. It's no guarantee, but I wouldn't forgo adding more damage or anything else just because it looks like you hit the maximum.
Don't be an idiot like me and ruin a deathless game (so far) by standing on your electrified bola when it goes boom. Instant removal of torso. That Safety Guard attachment is there for a reason.
I rolled credits on this last night, after a final chapter that was significantly longer than I thought it would be. I think it was pretty good. Definitely worth my money and a good early-year release.
Ugh! I wish I had seen these tips when I was playing the game. I never figured out how to deconstruct circuits. I had a pile of them at the end of the game and couldn't figure out why there was no way to dispose of them. I also foolishly broke down the special frames I found when I saw in their descriptions that they had only two or four circuit slots. They really should have noted that those were upgradeable in the descriptions! I did figure out that the pips were not the limit of upgradeability. I had exceeded the damage limit so swapped in another type of upgrade circuit. I notice a significant diminishment in damage output and realized that while the meter stopped at 100%, the bonuses could exceed that.
I really wish I'd started this on hard mode. Normal is waaay too easy. I haven't deviated from my Shotgun/Detonator Mine & Plasma Cutter/Revolver combo as there hasn't been a challenging fight at all. I'd like to try all of the crazy exotic weapons, but what's the point?
Yeah, hard is definitely the normal difficulty for this one. Apart from coop screw-ups, there hasn't been much dying on our hard playthrough.
I didn't like how they turned Ellie from a survivor into a damsel that had to be rescued multiple times. They wussed out by not making her the co-op character.
I think this was necessary once they made the decision to gigantify her boobs. *facepalm* What Dead Space could use to mix things up in a future iteration is a strong female character. So far, they have had Ellie in DS2 (mostly, though she gets wussified near the end and is wasted IMO in DS3) and Kendra in the first one (who is offscreen for most of it and then dies like a chump at the end). The player character in the iOS game was also a woman, but that used a Samus-like reveal at the end, so in my book it doesn't count. Anyone who is expecting another characterization that is as good as Stross in DS2 (the hero of that game, storywise) or as the audio logs in DS1 is going to be pretty disappointed from here on out, I think. The longer they drag out the premise without some kind of significant crowbar to the narrative, the dumber the characters are going to get.
The chapter titles spell out a message, like in DS1: Prologue: Beginnings Chapter 1: Rude Awakening Chapter 2: On Your Own Chapter 3: The Roanoke Chapter 4: History's Ember Chapter 5: Expect Delays Chapter 6: Repair to Ride Chapter 7: Mayhem Chapter 8: Off The Grid Chapter 9: Onward Chapter 10: Now We Know Chapter 11: Signal Hunting Chapter 12: Autopsy Chapter 13: Reach for the Sky Chapter 14: Everything Has Its Place Chapter 15: A Change of Fortune Chapter 16: What Lies Below Chapter 17: A Strange City Chapter 18: Kill or Be Killed Chapter 19: Endings "Brother moons are awake." I would buy a DS4 or a DS spinoff that has a back-to-DS2-characterization Ellie as the player character.
I'd definitely buy another Dead Space game. I'm really curious to see what they're going to do with DLC. I think they'll jump back and make a prequel vignette about the SCAF folks on the planet 200 years before the events of Dead Space 3.
I liked that they gave their supermachine a bunch of activation puzzles because they obviously had time for that sort of thing.
The necromorph reveal is the best thing about Dead Space 3's story. An actual alien horror reason that makes some sort of scientific sense in a game? Who've have expected that?
I'd like to take a moment to say that if you haven't ever played it, Dead Space: Extraction was criminally overlooked. It's a rail shooter for Wii and PS3 Move, and it's both a really good rail shooter and a good extension of the Dead Space fiction. Also, if you don't set your aiming to Classic in DS2 and DS3, I'm not sure we can be friends.
I think of it as the true horror-oriented sequel to the original. It's a pity about the graphics, and the platform's limitations generally, even if it is well-suited to being a rail shooter. I think I did set this just to see what happened, but I forgot to test what the difference was. What is the difference?
The aiming in the first Dead Space was slightly off-center. They changed it in DS2 to be centered but gave people an option to turn it back (in DS3, if you play Classic mode in NG+, aiming is automatically set to the old way and can't be changed). In both DS2 and DS3 I started the game only to wonder what felt "wrong" about the aiming. Turning it to Classic fixes that.
