Headscratchers / Dead Space 2

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Isaac's credentials

• While initially seeming a clever aversion of An Economy Is You, is there justification for Isaac's credentials as a CEC engineer to work when he's been in Guantanamo Sick Bay for three years? Even if some bureaucrat forgot to erase his clearances upon admission, after his escape it doesn't take him long to get the attention of Teidemann, who happens to be the director of EarthGov on Titan who just declared martial law. If simply being director of the People's Republic of Tyranny wasn't enough, declaring martial law over the colony likely placed endless colony resources at his disposal that should include overriding any and all attempts to access restricted areas made by one Isaac Clarke... At the very least, Tiedemann should have been able to restrict his access in the the government sector itself, right? I'm not confused about Isaac hacking to gain resources, as that makes perfect sense. This specifically regards his ability to access maintenance vents and kiosks without consequence.
  • EarthGov is powerful, but not that powerful, not to mention unpopular as well. The CEC was never under the jurisdiction of the Government, and since Isaac is still officially MIA, they haven't revoked it. Additionally, the shops and maintenance functions were run by private companies, and EarthGov had no jurisdiction over them, even under martial law, likely thanks to Unitologist infiltrators ensuring those boundaries or the servers allowing remote control of those systems being taken offline in the infestation. Finally, as for how Isaac could still use the kiosk in the Government Sector, Tiedemann assumed Clarke would never get there, and then assumed the security teams could handle him, and when both failed he had bigger concerns than shutting off a kiosk.
  • It feels like more of a Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? problem that wasn't well-justified. Tiedemann tries to kill Isaac by cutting power/life support to a whole section of Titan, reactivating the CEC's processing plant with him in it, and aiming a solar array at him. All that, but he can't bring himself to access the system that gives him access to restricted areas and hit "Delete"? Interestingly, while inside the plant, Isaac asks Ellie if she can shut it back down. She replies by saying she can't because Tiedemann somehow "declared her dead in the system".
  • Since Ellie works on the Sprawl it's possible that EarthGov has a system in place where they can notify CEC one of their employees died and that automatically lists her as dead, so if someone murdered an employee and took their staff card/details they could be prevented from using them in a hurry. Since Isaac isn't supposed to be on the station no such functionality works for him.
  • Alternatively, Isaac is on the station undergoing a psychological evaluation and C.E.C.'s automated store systems act on the assumption that if he has unimpeded access to the store, his evaluation is over without the paperwork being completed. Furthermore: it may be that the shops are on a separate network, or that they don't require access codes. They may very well basically be a corporate 3D Printer or matter-fabricator that services all RIG equipped personnel in their operation zone. Note: Ellie is declared dead in the Titan Station security networks, meaning things like secured machinery, access doors to restricted areas and other such things no longer recognize her access as valid; Issac may very well have similarly been declared dead in the main operation controls of the Sprawl and Government sector. It's possible that things like the maintenance doors (the little Jeffries Tubes) only check for classification, not actual access codes due to the fact that engineers may need access to dangerous or restricted areas in a hurry in an emergency.

Ellie

• What's with Ellie's drastic shift in behavior between the first and second time you speak to her? To paraphrase:
  1st Encounter: "Stay back you well armed and armored, seemingly sane person who wants to help me! You'd only be a liability"!
  2nd Encounter: "Hey Guy That I Told Not to Follow Me, I found this weirdo who says he knows you. What? You want me to escort your helpless and clearly delusional friend to the Transport Hub so we can all meet up? Sure, no problem!"
  • If you follow the many audio logs in the production section of the game, you find out that out of a group of about thirty or more people, only Ellie manages to survive. Watching friends and a potential love interest be slaughtered or sacrifice themselves to give the others a chance to escape and survive. When Isaac encounters her, she is now suddenly alone, having fought for survival in the nightmare and may have dealt with a few crazies in the process. Traumatized, paranoid, just finished fending off a wave of Necromorphs does not make a person very trusting of random strangers.
  • Yeah I did follow those logs, and you're right that they do explain quite well why Ellie is paranoid and unwilling to trust Isaac when they first meet, believing him to be a liability. What they do not explain is why, literally 5 minutes later, she suddenly changes her mind and not only is totally willing to trust Isaac, but agrees to babysit his helpless and crazy friend who actually is a liability. Why did she change her mind so quickly and completely?
  • Perhaps because unlike Stross, Isaac comes across as fairly sane and rational? Plus, he's the only other living person around and he's not hostile towards her.
  • It's because Isaac does exactly what she tells him to do. She says she'll open the security gate, but he can't follow her. So he doesn't (okay, he kind of does, in that he ends up going to the same place via mostly the same route, but that's by necessity). The fact that he's obviously not crazy/delusional/desperate enough to ignore her request probably goes a long way to earning her trust: she says she needs to be alone, he suggests sticking together, she says no, he says okay. He doesn't like it, but he doesn't push it. That would certainly help her realize that, hey, maybe this guy really is just trying to look out for her.
  • At heart Ellie is a really good person that has empathy for other people. Seeing Stross alone, unarmed and looking quite helpless through what she thinks may be panic with his mentioning of knowing Isaac probably activates that compassion in her. As well she knows that to get further she will need help even though the last one she was with were wiped out. She did not seem to start disliking Stross until he made himself not only useless in defense but also a liability with his constant muttering.
  • Adrenaline rush. Ellie probably just fended off whatever killed off her party of 30 something people, including a few friends who'd have most likely been turned into necromorphs against her. Ever been in a particularly intense fight? The adrenaline rush tends to blind you to common sense. Literally 5 minutes later the rush comes down, and Ellie finally gets a few moments to think "maybe it would have been a good idea to get help from the guy with the gun, armor and knowledge of how to kill these things".
  • Ellie explains to Isaac when they meet she's suspicious of him because the last person acting like they wanted to help tried killing her (I don't recall if details about what happened are in the logs). Presumably, her quick change of heart results from a combination of realizing Isaac truly does not have sinister intentions—possibly due to his aforementioned willingness to do as he's told—and more than a bit of eagerness not to be completely alone in the given circumstances (the latter possibly accounting for her tolerance of Stross).

Calling Isaac

• How did Ellie and Stross get Isaac's phone (RIG?) number/radio frequency? Isaac never got a chance to give either of them a way to contact him.
  • The Sprawl Yellow Pages! More than likely, there is a directory of active RIG signals that a person can look through. As well, the HUD communication system may automatically link two people trying to talk over distance and within LOS as with Stross on the opposite side of a foyer in the living complexes.
  • It's highly likely you can search for RIGs in your general area - the military talk about tracking Isaac's, for instance. She probably just synced his RIG number when they met.
  • Also there probably weren't very many RIGs in the station which reported living crew members inside. It wouldn't take long to narrow down.

The Marker and Isaac

• Okay, so it turned out The Marker was only using him to complete Convergence by absorbing him at the site of the Marker, but if its intention was to betray Isaac all along, then why did the Marker allow Isaac access to the Eye Poke Machine? Isn't the machine supposed to be the only way to harness the knowledge needed to build or destroy a Marker? So why would the Marker take that risk to begin with? Why not just skip that step and absorb him normally?
  • It was trying to do so the entire game by sending Necromorphs after him. All that's required to "make us whole" and start Convergence is for Isaac to die. Isaac accessing the Eye Poke Machine was not part of the plan. The Ubermorph shows up to kill him immediately after he uses it, for Pete's sake. The Marker clearly wanted him dead badly at that point.
  • But Marker-Nicole was the one who told Isaac to use the machine in the first place- it even showed him how! How could it have been 'not part of the plan'?
  • Because it could potentially kill or cripple him, under the guise of furthering trust. Plus as pointed out it gives time for the Regenerator to catch up.
  • I think that since Isaac had managed to fight his way past legions of Necromorphs to get that far, The Marker wasn't very confident that the Ubermorph or Teidemann would stop him and feared that Isaac would find some conventional way to destroy The Marker (such as overloading Titan Station's reactors) and so it had Marker-Nicole show him how to use the Eye Poke Machine as part of a last ditch effort by to make him susceptible to a direct mental attack. The level of trust Marker-Nicole gained with Isaac from the act was probably intended to increase the effectiveness of this attack. Risky, yeah, but The Marker was getting desperate.

Stross solo

• How was Stross able to survive on his own up until Ellie started babysitting him? The guy was unarmed and crazy, he should have been easy picking for the Necromorphs.
  • Stross' back story has him on the O'Bannon when an outbreak on that ship occurs. He is part of a group that manages to get through the ship alive and hiding in an engineering deck for a long period of time until help arrives. So he probably knows how to avoid the attention of the Necromorphs. Many people on the Ishimura managed to survive the duration of the outbreak on the ship unarmed and only armed with knowledge of the ship.
  • It's entirely possible the Marker deliberately made the Necromorphs leave Stross alone. After all, Stross was just as susceptible to the Marker's influence as Gollum was to the One Ring, so leaving Stross alive gives the Marker access to another pawn, this one in particular being in a position to betray and possibly kill Isaac at the least convenient moment.
  • This is actually kinda funny since when you meet him the second time, at the apartments, you can see all the Necromorphs chasing people in the background (especially funny if you have Benny Hill playing) while all of them conveniently ignore Stross. The fun part comes in where you can kill these same Necromorphs, meaning there is literally nothing between them and Stross. The only possible explanation is that Stross is not being targeted by the Necromorphs.
  • This. So much this. It's been shown through all of the games as well as the supplemental materials (movies, comics, etc.) that the Necromorphs tend not to target those under the direct influence of the Marker, or at the very least, those who aren't really fighting it to the point where they aren't a threat to itself and whatnot. Sure, Stross was initally trying to help Isaac with destroying the Gold Marker, but that kept begging the question of why he couldn't try to do it himself, with the obvious answer: he wasn't able to do it himself, because if he did try, the hallucinations of his wife and son were only going to get even worse, and Stross was doing all he could to get away from that. In short, the Marker "knew" Stross himself was no real threat, and being the even MORE fucked up version of the original than the Red Marker (which originally wanted to just contain the infection), approached this in a manner suitable to its needs: what better way to try and all but ensure Isaac might be killed not by Necromorphs, but by the ONE PERSON Isaac, through most of the game, believes is part of the key to tearing down the Gold Marker itself? Of course, this is speculation, and as we all know, the Gold Marker is pretty damn schizophrenic compared to the Red Marker, so....

Chapter 5 and the fuel tank

• At the end of Chapter 5, in a particularly Moment of Awesome, you detonate a fuel tank of a gunship, destroying it and and the local boss in one stroke. The force of the explosion you generate throws you through a window into a residential district, filled with your usual Unitology graffiti and candles. However, because you enter a window, the place decompresses, yet the candles are still lit somehow. Why? Are these space age candles, fueled by magical fire that never goes out? It seems rather jarring, considering Visceral did their research for all other types of fire in this game.
  • I wouldn't be surprised if the Unitologists invented technologically superior candles for just those kinds of situations. Self-lighting wicks, built in oxidizers, internal fuel reserves, the works. Those Unitologists love themselves some candles.
  • At that point air was being sucked out into space, the area is being decompressed at that moment. There is still oxygen but the amount is diminishing rapidly. Regardless, there is still oxygen for the candles to burn but their flames would be small as the atmosphere is being vented. In fact, you see similar in a later section with the zero-g fire you have to suppress by turning off the atmospheric pumps to that section. Even as you remove the batteries the fires still burn, but become less intense with the lowering oxygen levels.
  • That may be plausible, but the decompression creates winds. You can see the force of that wind is enough to toss items around, so shouldn't it be easy to blow out a few candles? Hell, you could blow one out, and I doubt your breath is as fast as hurricane-speed winds.
  • It has been a while since I played, but it always appeared to me the candles were in a container of some kind. Of course, I never looked too hard at the lanterns as there were always those friendly Necromorphs just wanting a bite to eat. This one could probably be explained that with the candles snuffed out, it would have destroyed the atmosphere at that point. If nothing else, Thermite Candles!
  • Funny you should mention that. As I recall there was audio-log stating that (You find it in Church) due depressurization - candles blew out, later followed by eardrums blowing out. ... Thermite?!
  • The log says the pressure "blew some candle flames around" not that it put any out.

Narrator

• Who's the person narrating the opening? On the "previously on dead space", the first game and back-story are described by someone. An actual person too, because he mentions himself as a former Unitologist. It sounds like nobody you've encountered before, yet is aware of the covered up Ishimura incident and the current whereabouts of Isaac. Seriously, I would have expected to meet this person.
  • You did meet him. It's Dr. Terrence Kyne narrating, he was one of the main characters in Dead Space and Dead Space: Downfall
  • The guy Kendra did kill in Dead Space 1. Why choose him to do the narrating instead of, say, Tiedemann?
  • Why not choose Isaac? Or Ellie? Or Stross? Or any other of the dozen characters running around? There doesn't have to be a concrete explanation for everything.
  • I hadn't noticed it the first time, but the narrator does refer to himself in the first-person, and he is voiced by the same guy who did Dr. Kyne. It would have been an improvement to simply make the narrator omniscient, as the end of the "Previously on Dead Space" remarks on things about which Kyne would not have known.

Eyes

• Shouldn't Isaac and Stross' eyes be utterly wasted? I'm no medic but jamming huge-ass needles in your eyes SEVERAL times over three years, and jamming them so far it probably goes right through the optical nerves, and add the fact that the eyes bleed and thus is probably filled with blood, how is Isaac even able to see shit with his right eye just after the minigame sequence?
  • People have had similar procedures in real life, though not a needle through an eye there has been eye surgery on the retina. As well people suffer from burst blood vessels in the eye from trauma and the blood eventually clears out with time. As well the needle could also be injecting the same magical material that makes up the medipacks he uses.
  • As I recall it is possible to pull it off, if you know what you're doing. And don't forget that Stross isn't a very nice person, they could care less if he became blind or not.
  • Eye Paracentesis is a dangerous but relatively routine procedure that involves sticking a needle into the eye to get samples. It's not pleasant, it's not painless, and it's certainly not a walk in the park to perform, but a proper procedure will cause absolutely no lasting damage.
  • Hell, recently, people have been getting the whites of their eyes tattooed. It's no stretch to imagine automated technology giving you eye surgery in a hundred eyes- I mean years.

Solar Array

• How did the Necromorphs get up to the Solar Array? It's almost a mile up from the station, and can only be reached by an elevator that runs on magnetic rails and not been used recently enough so it is broken when you reach it? While necromorphs can survive in Space, until we see forms with rocket propulsion and ability to spread The Corruption I'll still be wondering.
  • They jumped. You know, like the 20 or so tripods that leap onto Isaac's high speed magnetic rail elevator with pinpoint accuracy while it's moving? There's no gravity out there so even the basic necromorphs could make the trip eventually if they aimed well. Plus, there is a rocket propelled necromorph - those flying kamikaze balloon bombs that are spit out by the giant stationary pimple things. There's one of 'em in the solar array, and a couple of other zero g areas. Maybe they can spread the corruption too, who knows.
  • That might explain a few leapers, and the mass of corruption growing on the side. But do you expect Crawlers, which are explosive babies who can only flop around, to actually have made it up there? And since the elevator, the only way up there, is broken down due to not having been used in forever, how are there other uninfected corpses up there?
  • We don't know when the elevator was broken. There are two corpses at the bottom of the elevator shaft. There's air there and they don't look too rotten. Maybe they broke it a few hours before you arrived and were killed by the tripods. One of them is missing a head and limb as I recall. Though that doesn't explain how the Necromorphs used an elevator. Maybe they slaughtered people who got on the elevator, but there's no blood in there... The only really plausible explanation is that people used escape pods or ships to get up there, but they were intercepted by the tripods. Such desperate people may have brought their children with them...

Cursing

• Why do people still say, "Oh my god!" and "Jesus Christ"? In the backstory, it's made clear that Unitology was the only real religion to survive the trip into space, so why do people still use Christian references? Remember that Christianity has been gone for for over 200 years, and Unitology has no god to speak of.
  • Most probable reason: Those terms were used as curses so often and so for long they just became part of the lexicon, even if people didn't worship them anymore.
  • To further that a lot of Latin phrases exist to this day.
  • Atheists regularly say the two items in question as a statement of surprise. You say what you hear in pop culture. It's possible the phrase would still be used more than 200 years into the future without a real religious meaning.
  • I do not remember reading in the backstory of the universe that Christianity was utterly wiped out. That Unitology had become the main religion at that point, people probably practice Christianity in the same manner we have practicing Druids and other sub culture religions. The Unitologists also seem to believe in a higher power, a deity or god. God does not mean Yahweh or the Christian god in its meaning, but some immortal being with power and influence. In addition, we still use many Greek and Latin phrases from hundreds of years BC.
  • Christianity was in no way wiped out. It's still around, Unitology is a very popular and powerful religion, yeah, but it hasn't wiped out any other religion. It's sorta like a more powerful version of Scientology in a way.
  • I found it odd that when Isaac said, Jesus, the subtitles said, "Jeezus", instead. Whether or not Christianity still exists is besides the point. Terms like "man" and "jeez" still exist. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if people still called others "bros, dudes, and John Doe."

Hacker Suit

• The Hacker Suit, just the Hacker Suit. Don't get me wrong, I love how it looks, but it seems to be more of a Rule of Cool than anything plausible. A gasmask that folds, and that doesn't even have proper sealing? Exposes ears, so you could get pressure sickness, and be unable to hear your Voice with an Internet Connection when you got in Depressurized zones? Jeans? I fail to see how a suit made out of a heavy jacket, jean shorts, rubber patching, and a gas-mask could compete with a prototype super-advanced engineering suit meant for operations during meteor showers.
  • It is a special suit only for the aesthetics and Rule of Cool, it makes you look a bit like a cyberpunk cowboy, is that not cool?

Red Marker and virus

• Could somebody explain the relationship between the Red Marker and the virus? According to the first game, the DNA sequence of the virus was inscribed upon the surface of the marker, but once unleashed by humans the virus was seemingly independent of it. The marker, in fact, emitted a weak energy field (dubbed "Dead Space") which inhibited the virus if amplified. But then in the sequel, we learn that upon the Red Marker's destruction, all the necromorphs collapsed into an inert DNA sludge, implying that it also animates them! So the Red Marker emits two signals then, the weaker of which inhibits the virus, but the stronger of which sustains it? How does that make any sense?
  • If you believe that the Marker is sentient, yet its presence animates Necromorphs, would it want to be destroyed? Likely the events on Aegis VII got out of hand when the Hive Mind was created and took control of the other Necromorphs, so the Marker wants to find a way to destroy the Hive Mind and take control of the Necromorphs for itself. The "dead space" around it could just be a powerful field designed to prevent any sort of attack propogated by Hive Mind influenced necromorphs. Also, since it is sentient, it doesn't want to die, and if people knew destroying Markers destroys Necromorphs, the Marker wouldn't last long.
  • It could be that, instead of a constant field sustaining the necromorphs, its destruction created a "pulse" that destroyed them
  • Or the Marker could be doing the "Dead Space Field" on purpose, if the theory that the Markers are sentient is correct. Think about it, the Marker doesn't want to be destroyed, therefore when Necromorphs start popping up how does it stop people wrecking it once the obvious connection is made? Generate a field that blocks/kills Necromorphs, you wouldn't destroy your only shield just because it was made by the enemy would you?
  • As of Dead Space 3 being released the following seems most likely. The Marker is part of the life cycle of the Brethren Moon interstellar apex predator. The Moons are essentially giant highly intelligent necromorphs that farm sapient life to feed on and reproduce from. The Black Marker they send out manipulates the development of species to guide them to sapience and emits a signal that converts dead tissue within a certain radius into simple necromorphs such as the wall flesh, "space slinky" small three armed growths, and a thin flesh like substance that converts living humans into larger necromorphs if ingested. However because the Moons need a certain population before they can feast, the Marker actively suppresses Necromorph outbreaks unless there are sufficient bodies to meet that requirement. In the case of the Red Marker, the EarthGov attempted to replicate the original Black Marker substituting certain minerals within but in the process it didn't work quite right. It still emitted the signal that creates necromorphs but its ability to suppress them pending sufficient biomass was stunted resulting in an outbreak on Aeigus VII when CEC mining interfered with it that created a Hivemind, or a similarly stunted equivalent to a Brethren Moon. To compensate the EarthGov had fabricated a special pedestal that enhanced its suppressing capabilities but when removed it simply wasn't enough.

Ishimura

• I thought the return to the Ishimura was cool, but I'm wondering, why were they fixing it up? In the intro, Isaac mentions to Nicole that the Ishimura was due for decomissioning the next year, yet while it's drydocked on the Sprawl, they appear to be working to get it back to working order. I could see them maybe trying to make a museum ship out of it or something, but if that's the case why is everything still more or less functional (especially the working escape pods)?
  • From what I understand, they're not fixing it up, they're trying to cover up that anything ever actually happened on the Ishimura. All that plastic stuff in the early parts of the Ishimura could be hiding bloodstains, later you find areas spraypainted with instructions to wash and clean, placed around bloodstains. Everything's been left functional because the ship is still on reserve power (According to the diagnostic), likely so that they can also clear out security cam feeds and other data logs referring to the Necromorphs.
  • Possible that CEC changed their minds, it is still the largest planet cracker in the fleet and after the "terrorist" attack then have a chance to do a complete overhaul on all the ship's systems instead of a simple upgrade. Oh and it's probably best to keep the thing in working order while you're looking around clues about what happened.
  • The Sprawl itself is also desperate at this point. After the collapse of the planet-cracking business, the Sprawl hit 9.5% unemployment which is major recession territory. The only thing that kept the Sprawl alive was Tiedmann's government sanctioned Marker research, which, by the way, proved VERY dangerous. Tiedmann would have every reason in the galaxy to recommission the Ishimura.
  • Since Earthgov is the one handling the clean-up and retrofit, I took it that it was part of the cover-up effort. Since the Ishimura is still intact at some point CEC might want to have a look at their property, or might want an inquiry into how one terrorist (the last survivor of the Aftermath film who became the scapegoat after getting lobotomised) managed to take down two of their ships and one of their colonies. After they finish cleaning up all the blood and evidence of the necromorphs, phase two would be to add evidence of a terrorist attack to back up their cover story.

RIG cybernetics

• Are RIGs cybernetic augmentations or equipment worn over the clothing?
  • It's most likely they are a combination of both. Likely, there are some kind of under-the-skin neural nodes, which are picked up by a worn RIG. Elie's RIG is obviously worn, due to how her shirt is under it, which wouldn't be possible if it was surgically integrated. As for Isaac, it's most likely just part of his suit.
  • What really puzzles me is how is it possible to tell how much health you have? RIGs can do that, but shows no injuries. What.
  • Look closer: when Isaac is injured, his suit shows his health declining, and there's blood all over his suit. In the first game too. It's not blood from Necromorphs, or he'd look like he was bathing in it, and using medical kits has the blood slowly fade over time as, presumably, the wound is healed (leaving the wounds unhealed has the blood fade as well, but it takes longer). It's a very cool level of attention to detail that is very, very easy to overlook.

Corruption speed

• Just how fast does the Corruption spread anyways? If it took a few hours, I wouldn't find that too hard to believe, but in the area when you encounter Stalkers for the last time, the growth has covered nearly 50% of the room. The problem is that necromorphs only got into that area around 15 minutes ago, so how the hell did that much get there so fast? No other growths were witnessed before or after that. I guess it's just there to make the last encounter with the Stalkers even more difficult.
  • Its spread is proportionate to the availability of dead biomass. So the more tissues that are around, the faster it spreads. As well, we are experiencing the outbreak as it just happens, roughly 0 hour of infestation. But in the previous materials and games, the crud grows long before there are necromorphs around to add to it. Not to mention that the government sector is surrounded in vast amounts of corruption as seen from the tunneler sequence. With necromorphs breaking in and what not, the corruption probably did its part by quickly weeding through the air ducts and inside.
    • Speaking of the availability of dead biomass, it's worth pointing out that somewhere between 75% and 90% of all household dust is dead skin cells.
  • I'm guessing that the giant Marker and all those incomplete and prototype Markers in the government sector probably had something to do with the unusually fast and immense growth of corruption in the area.

Security Forces and plasma cutter

• Why do the Security Forces in Online play use the makeshift Plasma Cutter? It's the same model of plasma cutter that Isaac has, namely the one Isaac cobbled together from a flashlight and surgical laser. Shouldn't players get the standard issue plasma cutter, the one you can get yourself? It's also incredibly unlikely that the team built one on the way to their destination instead of picking up a normal one. Seems like the developers were being lazy.
  • Why would security forces even be equipped with plasma cutters, period? The plasma cutter is a mining tool, presumably hacked by its previous owner (Dead Space 1) and by Isaac when he was building it (Dead Space 2) to remove the safety restraints so it would make a viable weapon. A logical weapon for a desperate engineer, not so much for a trained soldier.
  • Since the Plasma Cutter is a secondary weapon which is chosen by the player, you can chalk it up to that soldier's personal tastes. As for why'd they have it, they soldiers have some knowledge about the marker and presumably the necromorphs, so maybe they showed clips of Isaac slaughtering Necromorphs with it and realized just how effective it was.
  • Valid points, but not what I'm asking. I'm asking why they have plasma cutters made out of a flashlight and a surgical laser. If they come equipped with a plasma cutter, I would expect them to have picked up a standard issue one that dead CEC engineers would leave around, not Isaac's unique, crafted weapon.
  • Well, 1.) that's assuming there'd be enough dead engineers with intact weapons, and 2.) the 'surgical' lasers seem a hell of a lot more effective than regular cutters.
  • Laziness on the part of the developers is the only possible answer I can think of. It would be highly implausible, to say the least, for each soldier to also be an engineer who looted a surgical laser and handcrafted his own weapon on the way to the fight. They really should have the standard-issue CEC cutters.

Tiedmenn

• Can someone tell me what exactly Tiedmenn was trying to do with the marker? It was said he wanted it for power, but what power?
  • The game states it is powerful alien technology, but it is possible that he was affected by the marker like the others. As a audio logs puts it the marker is "making us make it" and that even their rationalizations for making it are supplied by the marker.
  • One of the text logs by Tiedmenn says he was hoping that the marker technology could be an alternative to planetcracking. He then goes on a rant saying that we won't survive much longer on just planetcracking and we need marker technology to survive.
  • Dead Space 3 Markers have a strong, constant electromagnetic field or something that makes them a source of limitless energy when you build generators around them. Dr Earl Serrano's team, however, notes that they don't actually create energy but convey it...

Eye poke machine

• The Eye Poke machine was a very tense sequence. But what was the whole point? Isaac just sticks it in and a few Marker symbols just flash by. It didn't help him destroy the Marker, fending off its mental assault did. it seems like it was shoehorned in just to add a gripping sequence.
  • It was. Developer posts on the SA forum - by the guy who made the eyepoke machine, in fact - said the last couple of chapters had to be rushed as they were scrapped a couple of times due to feedback. Eventually they ended up jamming in a couple of disjointed plotpoints and shoved the Regenerator in, just so they had something to work with. The wonders of deadlines!
  • Ignoring the meta reasons above and trying to explain it logically within the game universe, the 'point' of the eyepoke machine, as it were, seems to be to greatly increase the recipient's susceptibility to the signal emitted by the Marker. Use the eyepoke machine and you'll absorb knowledge from the Marker more quickly and with greater understanding, but you'll also go crazy much sooner. The researchers who were trying to reverse engineer the Marker forced Isaac, Stross and their other patients to use the machine to acquire data and blueprints more efficiently and used memory-erasing drugs to control the side-effects. As for why Isaac had to use the machine to destroy the Marker? My theory: he didn't. It was a trick by a desperate Marker trying to protect itself after everything else failed. The Marker was afraid Isaac would reach it and find some way to destroy it, so it used Nicole to manipulate him into using the machine. Once it made him more vulnerable to the Marker's signal it was able to attack his mind directly. Unfortunately for the Marker, Isaac's mind turned out to be stronger than that of the Artifact of Doom and this backfired badly.

Peng

• Who is Peng?
  • From the deadspace wiki
    "It is suggested through in game posters and bathroom graffiti that reads "I give great Peng" that Peng may have referred to a form of erotic entertainment featuring an attractive woman which the Statue is modeled after (also, in the "Severed" DLC, the Peng trophy/achievement is titled "Peng Me Again"). Also, one of Dead Space's Object Artists is named Wang Peng. It should be noted that in the south of the UK (London) 'peng' is a slang term used to describe an attractive woman."
  • I think the woman is named Peng and is a musician, because one of the second graders in the elementary school drew a picture of her playing an electric guitar (the picture is labeled "Peng"). The references to her name as a slang term for a sex act probably references something she did (a celebrity sex tape scandal or public wardrobe malfunction, or a suggestive signature dance move perhaps).
  • I give great Attractive woman? Attractive woman me again? Was that Unichinese word for blowing out the candle? What.

Planet cracking

• Planet Cracking in general. Ripping apart a few cubic miles of common asteroid would produce more raw materials than humanity has used since the Industrial Revolution. Our own belt could sustain us for several millennia - even if the entire human race started reproducing at China-level rates... which would be absurd for an industrial civilization which spends more time educating fewer children instead of producing more and more children for unskilled labor. And an FTL drive powerful enough to send aircraft carriers to other star systems yet efficient enough to put on a ship the size of your average cabin cruiser and sent on the spur of the moment would make finding even more asteroid belts simple. Where did the need for ripping Titan - let alone multiple extrasolar planets - to rubble come from? A single planet crack would produce more raw material than our entire asteroid belt? Is it supposed to be some absurd Green Aesop that makes Avatar look subtle?
  • There are dozens of other human colonies, most likely it allows humans to mine stuff without ruining the planet they want to live on.
  • To my knowledge from the logs in game it's suggested that 1) Earth is dying from overpopulation and the exhaustion of its non-renewable substances, and 2) that humanity is having it rough trying to live out amongst the stars while still playing around with the woefully outdated system of capitalism. They simply don't know how the hell to control their numbers. Look at how many necromorphs you kill exploring only a fairly small portion of The Sprawl. Take sixty billion people and then factor in a decaying environment the rate at which we consume things today.
  • The previous poster was not a space colonization advocate. We could comfortably support six HUNDRED billion people in space habitats come 2100 if we get the bureaucrats to build them. And the store system can provide infinite amounts of just about anything if it's provided with schematics... and credits, which may make the "woefully outdated system of capitalism" idea not that far-fetched. A low-scarcity civilization refusing to convert from a high-scarcity system could lead to all kinds of hardships.
    • See: Modern day Earth.
  • I really wanna know how humanity is using up such incomprehensibly vast amounts of resources so quickly that they needed to build a whole fleet of planet cracking ships to perform at least three dozen different planet cracks. Just how many colonies have humans established in the Dead Space universe to need so much raw material?
  • They're very, very far out from Earth on their forefront, so assuming that at least one planet in each solar system is colonized, that's a lot of god-damned planets. Each one has things that require minerals, so that's a lot of minerals required. THAT'S how they're using such things up. It's all a vicious cycle. "Why do we need to colonize new planets?" 'Cause we're low on fuels. "Why are we low on fuels?" 'Cause we're colonizing so many planets.
  • Greed. Which is not far-fetched at all. Humans are greedy. And a lot of greedy humans that sit in EarthGov = a lot of planet cracking. Therefore a lot of material used up, which in turn require even more to be salvaged. And yet they don't want to harm our asteroid belt. Maybe because they're nostalgic? Or they know something about gravitation fields of our belt that prevents them from salvaging it... How about it?
  • I'd stick with Corrupt Corporate Executives pulling a species-wide and market-wide equivalent of de Beers' diamond hoarding. If they actually permitted the majority of the resources from planet cracks to go on the market, mineral values would plummet to maybe a cent for several tons of gold. In space, simple solar arrays (like the one on Titan station) make energy every bit as dirt cheap. The only valuable property left would be information - and how do you fractional reserve a database of information they deem Man Was Not Meant To Know?
  • The Unitologists are also implied to be building a massive, secret fleet of starships, though you'd probably need trillions of ships to explain where all the ore is going. Anyway, the developers are not as stupid to not see this counter-argument coming. The simplest explanation for Planet Cracking is that it's cool.
  • I'd chalk it up to Scifi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. They probably vastly underestimated the amount of resources that could be obtained from mining asteroids, let alone from mining a planet.
  • I think it has to do with the Forbidden Zones. As far as I can tell, EarthGov has colonies throughout the galaxy and ONLY the Milky Way galaxy, but the government that was destroyed before this appears in Dead Space 3. This government was overthrown because it was manipulated by Markers. It is implied that there may be hundreds of planets with Markers and that every alien race in the Milky Way was destroyed by Marker influence. The entirety of Earth's sub-sector could be surrounded with Forbidden planets that house Markers and Necromorphs, greatly limiting the places people can settle. On top of this, some colonies are so remote that they may not be in a place that's easily resupplied. Remember, humanity is still recovering from an intergalactic Civil War with itself that MAY have involved Markers and nuclear weapons. If so, not only are planets uninhabitable due to Marker infestation, many planets are uninhabitable due to a very high concentration of radioactive fallout. The result is that humanity is stuck in limited size areas and squalor just keeps getting worse. This is beside the fact that not many people remember WHY these areas are forbidden due to loss of information from the Civil War which leads to new Marker outbreaks. Finally, there is government corruption piled on top of religious fanatics trying to feed everyone to Necromorphs. Hell, the Church of Unitology has BILLIONS of followers, many of which are willing to sabotage and sell out their entire species to Markers in order to bring about Convergence. It's a story about humanity's fight with religious freedom, poor logistics, and inability to learn from past mistakes.
• It is also plausible that the specific materials/minerals required to sustain the space-faring society that exists in the Dead Space universe are exceedingly rare, existing in the minimal parts per million in a suitable planet, or require large amounts of energy to synthesize/utilize. For example it's not exactly revealed how shockpoint drives or gravity tethers are constructed or function. The energy requirements for such devices might also require some form of MacGuffin resource that Earth might have only a negligible supply of, resulting in the need for planet cracking. Mining an entire asteroid belt for these resources in an expeditious manner would necessitate even more ships, personnel, and effective training that impact the bottom lines of any interstellar mining corporation. Couple this with the perceived notion that all of humanity now enjoys a standard of living that surpasses even today's possibilities, and multiply that by the several billion humans in existence that would require numerous space colonies. The notion of a Green Aesop fits into this scenario as a cautionary result of humanity spoiling themselves for generations. The first planet crack happened years before the events of the original game; as soon as it's revealed to be a profitable and resource producing enterprise, with survey teams indicating numerous other potential sights for future cracks, why would any tech corporation invest money in researching more efficient means of consumption and production? By the time the games actually take place, a culture of "Why the hell should I do that?" has emerged due to the provided abundance of the galaxy's empty worlds. Indeed, the markers trick the scientists studying them into thinking that they are supposed to be some sort of "free energy" producing batteries. When you put the greed of EarthGov on top of the overall greed of humanity, the necromorph infestations now become a big "told ya so" from the universe.

Planet cracking logistics

• Can anyone explain how the planet cracking is actually supposed to work? How does a tiny ship (fruit fly to watermelon, for scale) consume and process a whole planet? How does it do it once the crust is lifted and you are left with a molten core? How does it not pull itself onto planet surface but rather lifts huge chunks of it into space? How much of that planets' resources could a comparatively tiny ship possibly store on board? The whole idea sounds plausible for all of five seconds until you try to sort out the logistics and than it ceases to make any sense.
  • It's quite simple; years ahead of time a mining colony is set up to loosen a section of the planet for the planet cracker to extract, then when the ship arrives it locks its beams onto that section and slowly pulls it up. Since it's been weakened ahead of time through years of mining to separate/loosen it from the rest of the planet it manages to pull it up. And the point isn't to consume the entire planet and/or segment in one go; the planet cracker and the colony on the surface harvest resources over an extended period of time, shipping off what they've gathered when they reach capacity. Anything that can't be used just gets ejected to form a new asteroid belt like we saw in Dead Space 1.
  • It's literally mining IN SPACE!. The gravity tethers they use to lift the chunk of the planet is simulating gravity, so it's not a physical pulling action (which requires the ship to brace against something. This is more like magnetic attraction). The whole action probably mines from the most mineral rich, but unstable part of the planet, so it yields more usable ore per load, but has the unfortunate side effect of causing tectonic shift. On a planet you actually want to live on, this is a baaad idea.
  • Sorry, but magnetism doesn't work that way. It's a force like any other, therefore it doesn't matter if you lift something by rope and pulley or by magnet; the machine doing the lifting will have to withstand the forces involved and will be moved as well, as per Newton's axioms. What seems more likely is that they found a way to negate these in the Dead Space universe, as with the kinesis module, which seems to convert energy into instant motion without any reaction forces involved. That is however so utterly beyond current technology that we might just as well call it magic.
  • No, it's like magnetism. Humanity at this point is using the graviton to do all the work. They mastered controlling gravity. The gravity tethers are basically creating a giant gravity sink in the universe which pulls the planet towards it. The ship then shuts off these tethers and blows the pieces into smaller and smaller chunks. It uses anti-gravity to prevent the debris from hitting the ship and then it gathers the resources it needs and lets the rest float away into space.
  • There is a log that talks about graviton manipulation, so the physics that allow it to work are probably a combination of quantum mechanics and Applied Phlebotinum.
  • The planet cracker's engines are powerful enough to keep the ship in orbit against the pull of the lifted chunk. There is a mission specifically to refuel/restart the engines in Dead Space 1, because the Ishimura was losing its tug-of-war with the chunk. That combined with the anti-gravity tethers that pull from the ship and also push from the surface can lift the chunks of planet into orbit. The mined/refined minerals the miners keep are a minuscule percentage of the planet's mass. The Ishimura has huge cargo holds, and there's no reason shipments couldn't be offloaded as they go.

Maker creation

• Isaac and Stross being necessary to the EarthGov for Marker creation. It would makes sense to extract information implanted by the Marker from them IF the Marker on Aegis was an alien artifact. It makes no sense whatsoever to extract that information when it turns out that that marker was man-made. What do they need their information (from an imperfect Marker that caused a Necromorph infestation no less) for? Did they lose the schematics that they used to build the red Marker? Confused.
  • Actually, that's exactly what happened. The original marker on Aegis VII was made centuries ago, and when they had an outbreak of their own the whole place was sealed up and declared off limits. Likely, all the data on the project was kept in the facility, which was destroyed. Now EarthGov has a renewed interest in studying the Marker, but now the only instructions to make one are in Isaac's and Stross' heads.
  • Wow, somehow I liked it a lot better when red marker was simply an alien artifact. It's as if 'alien' was rectonned to have the space jockey, aliens, and the ship they are on to have been a lost WY experiment.
  • Hold on though, then whatever happened to the marker discovered on Earth from which the red marker was derived? Did that mysteriously evaporate along with everyone that worked on it as well? Seems awfully hard to believe.
  • The Black Marker, the one you were referring to, was likely an Alien Artifact. The glyphs on the side of markers are instructions to make new markers, and Earth Gov made their original copies from that Marker. In Martyr, Earth Gov got enough blueprints to make their own, but events occured so the lab in which the marker was contained was sunk to the bottom of the ocean, and then a seafloor was collapsed on top of it. At this time, Earth Gov considered it easier to extract schematics from Stross' and Isaac's heads than to unearth billions of tons of rock for the same instructions. In all likelihood, Dead Space 3 is going to be about Isaac stopping Earth Gov from unearthing the original marker.
  • They have ships that can tear apart planets. Moving a mere few billion tons of earth should be child's play to them.
  • Planetcracking tends to have the side effect of destroying planets. There are still billions of people on Earth around to object to being pulled apart. It's possible that they will consider spending billions designing a retrival system for the original later, but at the time considered extracting the same schematics from a few insane people in their custody to be more economical.

Isaac's age

• Am I the only person who thinks Isaac is, well, too damn old? The wiki lists his age as 46, which is accurate according to the backstory logs unlocked in Dead Space, but he just doesn't act or talk like a man in mid-forties. Maybe it's telling that Dead Space was supposed to be self-contained; Isaac at the end of the first definitely looks his age. In Dead Space 2, he looks younger — I'd put him in his mid- to late-thirties. Is it ever going to be cleared up?
  • Chalk it up to standard Future Health Care being better. The standard life expectancy in north-western Europe 200 years ago was only around 40, and Dead Space is set more than 500 years into our future, so naturally there will be some advancements. Probably Isaac's age would be more analogous to our mid-thirties, i.e. what you just said. As for the sudden age up after DS1, chalk it up to the stress and horror he experienced causing his hair to prematurely gray.
  • Misunderstood me there. To me, Isaac actually looked younger in Dead Space 2 than he did in Dead Space.
  • If anything, Isaac looks older, with a thinner complexion, a sunken look, and more gray hairs. It also could be that Isaac's face was remodeled to be more like his voice actor, Gunner Wright, which does look younger compared to Isaac's DS1 face.
  • And why doesn't he 'act' like a mid-forty year old man? He's not exactly in a typical situation most people in their forties are going to face. Mid life crises don't usually involve horrific monstrosities devouring everyone in sight.
  • Most of his dialogue doesn't seem like a man in his mid-forties would say. Like the scene early in the game with the escaped mental patient. "Come on, man. Don't do it." Or the constant "holy shit!"'
  • You've never been in a high stress situation before, have you?
  • More like he's obviously not socialized with many people in their forties and is going off how he thinks people in their forties are supposed to act. There are plenty of people in their early to mid-forties, and even their fifties, who talk much like Isaac does, right down to the swearing (holy shit), even the "Come on, man. Don't do it." I've heard several folks in their forties and fifties use such colloquialisms. Your age is hardly the sole defining characteristic of your behavior, much less the rest of your life, how you speak, et cetera—those are factors determined by upbringing, personality, personal experiences and personal social compass, not to mention personal preferences. Age is just that—how old you are, nothing more, and nothing less. It is not the sole defining factor in how you behave, regardless of social stereotypes. I'm in fact quite happy to see what many modern gamers (i.e., those all under the age of 25 or 30) would consider an "old man" to be going about kicking ass and not being some mid-life-crisis stricken, old-word using cultural throwback.
  • I'm a squirrel's fart away from 45, and I still play both video games and tabletop role-playing games (when I have time). Ever heard the phrase "you're only as old as you feel"?

Daina

• When you finally reach Daina, two Unitologist goons grab Isaac by the arms making him unable to move anymore and resist them taking him to their shuttle. Which would make sense if he was still in his patient RIG and unarmed. However Isaac is armed with at least a Plasma Cutter and possibly several other weapons and wears an armored RIG capable of withstanding attacks by Necromorphs. Not to forget having just fought himself through countless of these monsters. The two goons are unarmed and dressed in robes. The hell?
  • Isaac has no problem killing Necromorphs and based on the early part of the game does genuinely care about other people. He tries to save the patient stuck on the operating table, and seems genuinely upset with what happens to the guys in the beginning. Not to mention they are unarmed, the back story for him from the two games is that he was raised well by his parents thus having great determination and a moral compass. If they were armed and trying to harm him, he probably would have retaliated.
  • He still had no problem kicking the last goon away into certain death. Though then again unlike the patient he really would have no way of saving him anyway.
  • The thugs hid on either side of the door and ambushed him while Daina distracted him, and he wasn't expecting an attack. He thought Daina was going to help him. Isaac is badass but he's not psychic. How exactly is Isaac supposed to use that plasma cutter on them with his arms restrained? His armored RIG is tough but it doesn't boost his physical strength. Also, are you sure the thugs were unarmed? At the least they had stasis modules and presumably would have used them if Isaac had put up more of a fight, and I have a hard time believing they could have stayed alive that long on a Necromorph-infected ship without weapons.
  • He still wears armored boots and could either have stomped or shot on the feet of one and punched the other to get free.
  • We don't even know if they would have actually succeeded in holding him in place. If the gunship wouldn't have turned up Isaac could have just as well freed himself with either his armored boots, his weapon or stasis module, without killing them. He most likely was just still shocked over the turn of events or wanted to still try to reason with them.
  • I got this impression too. He didn't seem to be fighting them very hard, I think he was waiting until after he'd pumped Daina for as much information as he could get to really start struggling but the gunship showed up and made that unnecessary.
  • I got the idea that he wanted to know what was going on, if they could cure him, and if they would be useful to be alive. At that point, he is demanding a cure to his dementia. Isaac is obviously an "ask questions first, then shoot them" kind of guy. He thinks things through and doesn't just kill everyone he sees, otherwise he would have just took on all those soldiers in the government sector himself instead of thinking it through and unleashing hundreds of Necromorphs on them.

Night vision

• In an age so advanced, why doesn't Isaac use night vision?
  • Preservation of tension. The weapon lights and light from the helmet only illuminate a small area, night vision would also ruin the moments where the lights go out.
  • Why would a mining suit need night vision? A light from the suit would be sufficient and possibly less expensive.
  • Engineering RI Gs are probably designed with welding in mind, so night vision would be the exact opposite of what would be designed into the RIG. Night vision for the security RIG however, might be a decent idea, but they are designed for a space station that is artificially lit all the time, so nighttime never truly exists. Barring some catastrophe, lighting and emergency lighting should always be available.

Government Sector main door

• Can someone explain this to me? The Government Sector compound has a ridiculously reinforced main door. Yet all it takes is removing one power cell and the door may as well be made out of cardboard. WHO THE HELL DESIGNED THIS PLACE? I mean, seriously? What was the plan for if the power cell went bad, which happens with alarming frequency throughout the game. I know there's a back up power system but why isn't something like that automatically brought online in the case of a power outage? I mean if you're going to be this sloppy in designing your impenetrable fortress where you're planning on waiting out the Necromorph outbreak, you deserve to be eaten. One last thing, if your defenses are reliant on a single power cell, why aren't you guarding that power cell in case, oh I don't know, some CEC Engineer on the run from your troops decides to disable your defenses so as to let the Necromorphs distract you from stopping him from destroying your precious Marker.
  • The clear implication from later on in the Government Sector is that the Necromorphs were already tunneling through the walls and spreading through the rock. It seems to have just been a matter of time.
  • Is that the case? I mean yeah it would've happened eventually but it would've taken ages what with all the routes into Government sector cut off. Isaac and Ellie at the very least severely reduced that time by drilling their way to the compound. And there isn't a single hint of a Necromorph inside the base prior to Isaac yanking the power cell. Besides the Necromorphs charge head on through the front door, which is not typical behavior, which suggest there were no other routes at least until they reached an air vent which was likely behind the wall of soldiers Isaac needed to get past.
  • Yeah, I thought the single unprotected power cell required to open the security door was really lame too. They could have at least thrown in a hack mini-game to release the cover and made you pull out 2 or 3 power cells, would have made it a bit more believable. Also, how exactly does turning off the power open the door?
  • When you remove the power cell, you can hear some of the soldiers say something about the "kinetic restraints" holding the door closed. There was probably a whole horde of Necromorphs banging on the door after Isaac got through, and once the power cell was removed, they just forced the door open through weight of numbers and charged through.
  • Considering that roughly 30 Necromorphs plus the Ubermorph enter within seconds of power being lost, this seems the obvious answer.
  • It's quite possible that the power cell WAS the back up security power, or even the back up to the back up. After all, the colony got its power cut off, large chunks got sliced up by a solar beam, the whole thing was dragged by a gravity tether and more damage was done via a gigantic drill rig. Redundant systems can only take so much punishment. I'm surprised the building was standing at all.
  • One of the soldiers says "we just lost auxiliary power!" when Isaac pulls the power cell, so it's not just a possibility, that really was the backup power source. Now why the backup power source was so poorly protected, that's another question entirely.
  • Take note of the fact that in order to get access to the internal portion of Government sector, Isaac used his engineering mojo on some of the equipment near the door. Chances are, Isaac broke something when he opened the door, and the power outage triggered a malfunction in the door's locking mechanism. Isaac himself probably damaged the systems that would have prevented that.

Gunship

• Why is there a fully fuelled, armed and functional gunship docked near the entrance to the Government Sector, unlocked and ready for the taking by anyone that knows how to pilot it? Why didn't Tiedemann have his men hunting down Isaac in it, or at least move it somewhere where Isaac couldn't find it and use it to bypass literally all of his defenses? Seriously, if Isaac wasn't overcome with guilt and a Hero Complex he could have flown that gunship directly to the marker, just as Ellie does at the end of the game.
  • This is just a guess but at that point all of the soldiers that would have been protecting the facility were either busy being eaten by Necromorphs or dead. So, Isaac may have been unable to use the gunship to go straight to the Marker as the soldiers would have shot him down for trying it. After he distracted them with a massive Necromorph attack might have been a different story. So, there may have been no "need" to move it somewhere safer. Also, Tiedemann had initiated Operation Endgame which appears to amount to "Return to Base and wait it out in our impenetrable Fortress complex". To be fair, this is a perfectly sensible plan as it seems to have been working up until the point Isaac cut the power and let the Necromorphs have at it. The plan to deal with Isaac seemed to be cut off all his routes of escape and let the Necromorphs deal with him. It would've worked if Isaac weren't an Engineer, which might as well be a superpower by this point as it literally makes him the strongest fighter in the entire game with enough smarts to out-maneuver Tiedemann's attempts to kill him.

Weapons and environments

• As in the first game, there is the question of why Isaac's [weaponized] tools do no significant damage to the game's indoor environments. In supplementary material, we are repeatedly told how such devices as the Line Gun are designed to cut cleanly through large chunks of solid rock. Yet, when a shot rips through a necromorph (or misses the target entirely) and strikes the wall behind it, no real damage is visible—this, in spite of the fact that javelins and necro claws DO stick in the walls. Consider also the Contact Beam, whose alt-fire mode is a kind of energy jackhammer for softening up sections of planetoid. Oddly, it does nothing to the floor of the shopping mall at the Sprawl. The lack of collateral damage from the flamethrower also suggests that nothing is flammable in the far future. Space age materials indeed.
  • Clearly, these inconsistencies arise from technical issues. In a game with Dead Space 2's high level of graphical fidelity, it would be difficult to implement a fully destructible environment. What's really odd is that the lack of even cosmetic damage to surrounding structures isn't more jarring than it is.
  • But it is awful. Think about it entire station is unbreakable. Unless something like sun laser is in effect, or giant drill. And yet there they are - fragile windows! Leading to outer space no less. What if someone would accidently fell on them? Brrr...

Javelin gun

• At the endgame Isaac is repeatedly impaled by the javelin gun, making whatever health he has plummet like a stone. After the last fight is done however, he shows no signs of it. This could actually become a nice bit of fridge brilliance, if it is later revealed he is gaining Hunter/Ubermorph fuck-you-conservation-of-mass powers, and regenerates leading into a storyline of how he's turning into a necromorph human hybrid or how there are two forms of Convergence, the Necromorph/Hivemind one and the Badass Engineer/Nerd/Iron Man Isaac Clark version, as well as explaining how he seems to be made of iron even with his armored suit. But I doubt that will happen.
  • Watch carefully at that scene again.He is shot twice by the Javelin Gun. The first shot got Isaac about 4 inches left of the heart (if you look closely), and the second shot went right through his hand. Also remember how much adrenaline must be going through his system, and the Ri G suit may have a way of numbing pain without medigel. We never see Isaac about 20 minutes after the game has ended, if we had, he would probably be in serious pain.
  • And as I recall his RIG health gone to complete red zone. So that means after Marker was destroyed, his injuries caught up with him. Adrenalin boost wore off and all. And why should we wonder? He can fall from great height and shrug. A bolt to the shoulder is no biggy.
    • He can survive falls from great height because 1) he has jet-boots and 2) his armor seems to be able to absorb impacts to a certain degree.

Emergency window shutters

• Why are the emergency window shutters designed to be closed by gunfire? And they are designed that way, the computer tells Isaac to shoot them close with a gun.
  • Most likely implemented so that in the event of breakage, whoever is in the room can whack it from a distance instead of having to get close to it. Can you imagine trying to hit that thing while being sucked out into space and NOT get cut in half by the industrial-level shutters right behind it? If there was OSHA compliance, that window wouldn't even be breakable.
  • No OSHA Compliance is what this universe runs on.
  • Remember that during a decompression event, the window closes automatically in a few seconds anyway (Isaac is just really unlucky about that), and that there's a lot of crap flying out the window. Presumably, there's the hope that one of those pieces of crap will hit the target and shut the window automatically if it needs to be closed faster than a few seconds. Sucks if you're standing right next to the window, but, well, see above.

Blowing up the Marker

• Isaac blew up a Marker with his mind?
  • He didn't. The Marker was trying to control him, and Isaac managed to repulse it. The Marker is completely undamaged and is only destroyed when The Sprawl's fusion reactors go critical.
  • Actually, it was critically damaged after Isaac fought back its Mind Rape, judging from the exposed internal structure and the pieces falling off of it. It was more likely that the energy that the Marker emitted was disabled or drained somehow after Isaac countered the Marker's Desperation Attack. So now was in the process of dying and breaking down.
  • Remember, people repeatedly state that Isaac can destroy the Marker. The sources of that information are themselves suspect ( Daina, Tiedemann, Marker-Nicole, Stross), but they all agree on that. It may be that, because he made it, he has the power to unmake it. If that's the case, then the other Markers will not be so easy to destroy...
  • I got the impression that since the Marker is sentient, he basically destroyed its mind and caused it to go brain dead.
  • I think what you're all missing is the fact that the Marker can't influence things directly. All the shenanigans that Issac goes through (Like when he folds his helmet all the time for Nicole to attack him) caused by his mind being influenced. So while Issac sees a monster, ghosts, etc. From POV of an observer, he isn't shooting at the ghost of his GF. He's shooting at the actual physical marker. Ghostly necromorphs are actual necromorphs that die and drop ammo as a result. He's hallucinating but the Marker is such a big target that it's hard to miss.

Marker functions

• Something that's been bugging me since finishing Dead Space 2 is just how the Markers actually work. In the first game, the Red Marker could arguably be described as benevolent. Its goal ("make us whole again") is to be returned to Aegis VII where it shuts down the Hive Mind. But in the second game its goal ("MAKE. US. WHOOOOOOOLE!") is to kill its creators and activate Convergence (or, turn every human into a Necromorph).
  • They are identical in the same way two humans are identical. Even then, not as much. They were constructed centuries apart under very different circumstances, and ended up alike only in superficial appearance. If they are sentient, their experiences would result in deciding on different courses of action. If they aren't sentient, consider that they are both imperfect copies of the original marker, and may have corrupted programming.
  • It could also be a case of the Marker wanting to control the Necromorphs instead of the Hive Mind. When the Marker is put into place in Dead Space 1, the Necromorphs immediately die off as they're severed from the Hive Mind's control, but they're still around. It's only when the Marker itself is destroyed via accidental orbital bombardment that the Necromorphs actually melt into gelatinous goo. If this is the case, then the Hive Mind and the Markers have different goals: the Hive Mind wants to use the Necromorphs to consume the galaxy, while the Marker wants to use the Necromorphs to initiate a convergence event. And since the convergence event apparently requires the Marker's original creator to be consumed as well, the ancient Marker on Aegis VII would probably be looking at damage control: the creator is long since dead, and a convergence event is therefore impossible, but it can cut off the Hive Mind from controlling the Necromorphs while the other Markers that are being made by the people who came into contact with it carry out Phase 2.
  • Wordof God is that they retconned the first game's Marker, due to inconsistencies. However, there's a better answer: The Black Marker (Original Marker) works as intended - It wards people away from the infection it's supposed to be guarding. However, because it is alien in nature, much of what it tries to do to ward humans off is counter-productive, and it fails. Later on, the Red Marker (Dead Space) is constructed by humans. It too tries to ward off the infection, but because it's imperfect, it does an extremely poor job of it. The Golden Marker (Dead Space 2) is a copy of a copy, and is so miserably broken that it's actually attempting to propagate the virus. It's also possible that the marker may inherit something from its creator - The Red Marker does a piss poor job because whoever made it didn't fully understand its function, and the Golden Marker actively attempts to spread the virus because that's what Isaac thinks the Red Marker was doing.
  • As of Dead Space 3 we now know that "Make us whole" is anything but benevolance, my theory is the red marker worked the way it was as a kind of trojan horse, basically if the marker is destroyed or removed far enough away, the Necros turn into DNA slurry, which we can assume is useless as material to the Brethern Moons, so it creates safety, and makes sure the necros go dormant, therefor stopping people from destroying it, because they would think destruction or removal will wake up the necros, when in fact it would destroy them, but people obviously wouldn't be in a hurry to test that.

Tiedmann's security personnel

• Where did Tiedmann get his security personnel, at the bottom of a cereal box? When they all point their guns at you and tell you to drop your weapon, you have to duck in a door to the right, which leads to a bathroom. Ok. But then they freak out and, according to comm chatter, start sweeping the area with search teams as though they have no idea where you are. In spite of the fact that about 15 of them had just seen you duck into a doorway to a bathroom with no exits, save for an access crawlspace. Why didn't they just barge into the bathroom, instead of freaking out and saying that they had no idea where you went.
  • To be fair, they do enter the bathroom ... immediately after you enter the crawlspace that only authorized CEC engineers can access. You can hear them banging around in there. And the freaking out and sweeping the area part is justified, since they don't know where the crawlspace goes and they're probably terrified that you're waiting around the corner with a contact beam or planting detonator mines everywhere. I know I'd be pretty paranoid if I was ordered to hunt down the one man army that has survived two necromorph apocalypses and I had no idea where he'd gone.
  • Oh, so they do follow you in there? Ok. I just ran through there so fast that I didn't pay much attention to what was behind me. So if you hang around in the bathroom long enough, will they come in and kill you?
  • No. They're scared shitless of a lone engineer who blasted his way through an infestation that killed hundreds of thousands, killing thousands of potentially more dangerous creatures than them, and may or may not be waiting to dismember them should any guard poke their head in. The game assumes that by the time they build their courage enough to storm in, Isaac is already gone.

Shadowpack

• What exactly did the Shadowpack represent? I mean, I know everything in that fight represented something, but what did they represent?
  • All the necromorphs? After all, they were a dark mob that swarmed all over Isaac, which is exactly what the Necromorphs did in different forms. This is likely just the base concept for how Isaac views the Necromorph infestation.
  • Or maybe seeing the necromorphs using children like that is what freaks Isaac out more the the other forms thus the pack represents them in his mind.

Construction of eye machine

• That eye machine that you use at the end of the game seems to have been poorly constructed. When you get the alignment wrong, instead of sending a little needle into the wrong place, it suddenly sprouts a freakin' drill and rips your face up. Why would anyone design it that way?
  • The death animation was explicitly referred to as critical error on the monitor, if Isaac should fail. Likely all the chaos (like a convergence event) going on around it, some energy fields would screw up calibrations and make it become a Eye Scream Dispenser should everything not line up perfectly.
  • It is likely that since Isaac is the one controlling the operation, his knee jerk reaction to getting stabbed inaccurately is to flub around on the controls causing all sorts of things to go wrong. The better question is why is that machine designed so that someone can perform the operation on themself?
  • I believe it's just a gameplay thing. Why would they give mental patients, especially ones who are so immobile they shit the bed and are unable to leave the opportunity to drive a needle into their cranium? Just Fridge Logic, really.

Severed

• The main point of the Hacking Minigame was in order to show that Isaac is an engineer, not a Space Marine or anything of the sort. Seems simple, right? The only problem is that at the end of Severed, the add-on, Gabe Weller does the very same thing, hacking into a terminal the exact same way, and even uses the same tools as guns in the same ways. Weller is not an engineer, he is a security officer. For that reason, he is closer to the typical "space marine" than Isaac is. So why is it that he has the same skills as an actual engineer? It seems to both cheapen Isaac to a Space Marine (the opposite of the point) and to broaden Weller beyond his actual role (also not the point).
  • I was about to agree with you until I read 'security officer'. The way I see it, both Engineers and Security Officers in this setting would know hacking skills because they both would deal with manually overriding security measures. An Engineer like Isaac would have to hack if there was a malfunction to a door or system to shut it down so that it'd be safe to work on it. A security officer in a space setting where everything is electronic would be similar to a regular Real Life officer using a battering ram on a door: quick access to an area they need to get to.
  • McNiel is a police officer in Aegis that can tamper with circuitry in DS: Extraction, giving credence to the above. Weller usually relies on him to do it, but it is entirely possible that either it is a required ability for the job or that McNeil taught Weller a thing or two, years ago.
  • Except you see McNeill die. That is a bit of a problem, I must say. As if he's dead, how could he teach him the stuff? It's possible that in the death of McNeil, he had to learn the stuff himself.

Riot and SWAT RIG

• Why do RIGs belonging to Riot and SWAT give bonus damage to weapons that lore wise are originally engineering tools?
  • Why is there a foam finger gun that you can only get if you beat the game on hard core mode? That works by making childish bang noises? However, those suits seems to be modified versions of the original that are meant to increase power to modified power tools that happen to be effective against Necromorphs.

Markers, virus, and necromorphs

• So, WHAT is the relationship between the Markers, the virus, and the Necromorphs? Because from what I understood, a virus of some sort reanimated the corpses and changed them into Necromorphs, and it responded to the marker symbol. In Dead Space 2, it seemed to confirm that. However, in Dead Space 3, when the Marker was activated in the first part of the game, it just jumpstarted a necromorph invasion without any need for even an Infector. So what the hell causes the infection? Is it a virus or can the Marker just do that?
  • We could assume that either the Marker only resurrects the dead in the initial "pulse" there seems to be in Dead Space 3, and relies on infectors to spread the virus after that, or that it can only resurrect within a certain range, and relies in infectors to spread the virus beyond that. In either case, I think it can be assumed the marker manually used its power to craft the virus manually from the chemicals present in the body, and let it spread naturally from there.

Protecting (not destroying) the Marker

• Why protect the Marker once the necromorph outbreak starts? They have a protocol in place on what to do if there's an outbreak, so why doesn't the protocol include "blow up the Marker to stop the outbreak"? The only thing I can think of is that they want to keep secret, even from Tiedemann, that there's more than one Marker, and an order to destroy the Marker would imply that they had more than one. However, it would only imply that if they couldn't make any new Markers, yet the whole process they put Stross and Isaac through was precisely to get the blueprints/formulas/etc for making Markers.
  • There is no 'blow it up' procedure because the people in charge honestly believe that using the Markers as a power source is worth more than hundreds, millions or even billions of lives in the long run. In other words: they don't care about the people, only that they are able to use the Markers to make energy. Furthermore, the Unitologists MAY have infiltrated EarthGov at that point, in which case they are actively suggesting that allowing the Markers to do what they do is GOOD and necessary to producing power from the Markers.