If you read my "Dead Space 2" review, you'd know that I really liked the game. Fantastic gameplay, great graphics, solid multiplayer. One element, though, felt like it lagged behind the overall package, and that was the way the story was delivered. Frankly, when it came down towards the end of the game, I really didn't have a clear idea of why I was doing the things I was doing. Maybe I'm an idiot and just missed the clues, or maybe it takes more than a passing knowledge of the "Dead Space" franchise to follow exactly what's going on here.
Few people have better insight into the events of "Dead Space 2" than Wright Bagwell, the game's Creative Director. I recently spoke to him to try to fill in some of the blanks.
NOTE: Heavy spoilers to follow. If you haven't finished "Dead Space 2," you may want to stop reading now.
I started by asking Bagwell an easy one...or so I thought. What is The Marker?
"This is tricky. We spend a lot of time trying to make sure that our story isn't too opaque or confusing. But also trying to let the player know that it's not obvious what The Marker does or how it works. We want to keep a little mystery about it. The fact is, the characters in the Dead Space universe don't quite understand how it works or what's going on. So there should be a little mystery there. But, again, we're not trying to make it feel confusing to the players."
In the end, the attempt to make things less confusing for players probably wasn't as successful as it could have been, but Bagwell did offer a bit more background on the motivation of The Marker.
"Markers are essentially trying to create Convergence. This is the process where there can be a critical mass of necromorphs which leads to a larger event. We're not really letting on too much about what that might be. But it's a big event. It's probably really scary. And it might change the world in a pretty significant way if it did happen."
If you finished "Dead Space 2," you likely recall the insanity taking place around The Marker at the end. You might've heard Tiedemann yell, "There are too many bodies!" And then, of course, the swirling, chaotic vortex around The Marker. This is the Convergence process starting to happen.
Throughout the game, your interactions with Nicole and Stross's interactions with his dead wife and child are focused on bringing about this Convergence, albeit indirectly. According to Bagwell, the phrase "make us whole" is The Marker "talking through other people and saying that you need to help Convergence happen. Basically, as people die and they get turned into necromorphs, they all sort of work together to make Convergence happen."
Usually this is achieved by just killing people and making more necromorphs to hit that critical mass, but for certain people, like Stross and Isaac, they have a bigger role to play. The key to bringing about Convergence lies in their heads and it was that key that EarthGov was trying to extract with the creepy eye machine.
As for Nicole, I was wondering how much of her is The Marker guiding Isaac versus Isaac's psyche. "Part of Nicole is something that's a direct result of the presence of the Marker," said Bagwell. "Another part of Nicole is Isaac's guilt, it's his own fear. It’s a mixture of those things."
Basically The Marker affects individuals differently:
"The Marker causes dementia. It's sort of like if you were to imagine giving somebody a powerful drug. The drug has a known effect on people. But then there's the unknown effect of what it might bring out in a person. That's the way to think about it. It has the intended effect, but then there are unintended side effects, as well."
After three full games, two downloadable games, a novel, a comic book, and an animated film (with another coming this year), it seems reasonable to think that we'd know a bit more about what's going on. After all, we knew what the halos in Bungie's franchise did after the very first game. With "Dead Space," though, EA seems focused on keeping things close to the vest. Unfortunately that unwillingness to provide answers ended up hindering some of the magic of "Dead Space 2," but on the bright side, you did get to blow the limbs off aliens, so I'd call it a draw.