Dead Space 2/Headscratchers

• 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".

• 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 RI Gs in your general area - the military talk about tracking Isaac's, for instance. She probably just synced his rig number when they met.

• 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 Covergence 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.

• 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 ignores 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.

• At the end of Chapter 5, in a particuarly Crowning 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 see 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 audiolog stating that (You find it in Church) due depressurization - candles blew out, later followed by eardrums blewing out. .... Therimte?!
      • The log says the pressure "blew some candle flames around" not that it put any out.

• Who's the person narrating the opening? On the " previously on dead space", the first game and backstory 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 incedent 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, Tieddmann?
      • 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.

• Shouldn't Isaac and Stross eyes be utterly wasted? I'm no medic but jamming huge-ass needles in yours 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 eye bleed and thus is probably filled with blood, I mean, 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.

• How did the Necromorphs get up to the Solar Array? It's almosta 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 froms with rocket propulsion and ability to spread The Corruption it's 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 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?

• 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.
    • This troper is an atheist and regularly says 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 back story 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.

• 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?

• 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 it's presence animates Necromorphs, would it want 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 powerfull 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 destroy Necromorphs, the Marker wouldn't last long.

• 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.

• Are RI Gs 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? RI Gs 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.

• 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 it that much get there so fast? No other growths were witness before or after that. I guess it's just there to make the last encounter with the Stalkers even more dificult.
  • 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.
    • 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.

• 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 it's 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 knoweldge about the marker and presumably the necromorphs, so maybe they showed clips of Isaac slaughtering Necromorphs with it and realised 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 equiped with a Plasma cutter, I would expect them to have picked up a Standar 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.

• 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 rationalisations 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 the goes on a rant saying that we want survive much longer on just planetcracking and we need marker technology to survive.
    • And then everything made just a little more sense.
      • Necro flesh as an alternative fuel source? Ewww...
      • Not quite: Tiedemann doesn't explicitly say it, but the implication I got from his text files and such was that the Marker could be valuable for a number of different reasons. Power source. Interstellar travel. Resource recycling. He doesn't explicitly say what he's hoping it'll do, but he knows (likely due to insanity) that the possibilities are endless.

• 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 of it's mental assault did. it seems like it was shoehorned in just to add a gripping sequence in.
  • 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 from logically from 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 eyepoke machine so they could acquire data and blueprints more efficiently and used memory erasing drugs to control the side-effects. As for why Isaac had to use the eyepoke 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 had failed. The Marker was afraid that Isaac would reach it and find some way to destroy it, so it used Nichole to manipulate him into using the eyepoke machine. Once the eyepoke machine had 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.

• 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 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?
  • They 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 it's none 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 there numbers. Look at how many 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 its 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.
  • 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 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.
• Can anyone explain how the planet cracking 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 losen a section of the planet for the planet cracker to extract, then when the ship arrives it locks it's beams onto that section and slowly pulls it up. Since it's been weakened ahead of time through years of mining to seperate/losen 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 peroid of time, shipping off what they've gathered when they reach capacity. Anything that can't be used just get 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.

• 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 non 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 refering 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 billion 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.

• 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 500 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 fourties are going to face. Mid life crisis' 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!"'s.
        • You've never been in a high stress situation before, have you?
• 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 actualy succeded in holding him in place. If the gunship wouldn't have turned up Isaac could have just aswell 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.
• 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.
• Can someone explain this to me? The Goverment 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 your 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. Issac 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 Issac 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 Issac 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 minigame 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 it's 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.

Government Sector 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, Issac 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, Tiedeman 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 Issac cut the power and let the Necromorphs have at it. The plan to deal with Issac seemed to be cut off all his routes of escape and let the Necromorphs deal with him. It would've worked if Issac 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 Tiedeman's attempts to kill him.
• 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...

• 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 seen again.He is shoot 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 fell from great height, and shrug. A bolt to the shoulder is no biggy.

• 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.

• 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 it's 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 emited 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, Hallucination-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...

• 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.
• Where did Tidemann 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 that they build their courage enough to storm in, Isaac is already gone.
• 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 where 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 Issac out more the the other forms thus the pack represents them in his mind.
• 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 refered 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.