I don’t massively feel the need for a new version of Dead Space 2, even following EA’s posh remake of the first, but if you’ve been dreaming of another visit to the game’s sprawling interstellar necropolis, you could do worse than to check out the community-brewed Marker Patch.
Primarily created by Wemino, whose other projects include tune-ups for bullet-time shooter F.E.A.R. and American McGee’s Alice, it’s a cure-all bundle of fixes for various issues with the game’s PC release, including problems created by running it at higher frame-rates on heavier-duty 10 core PCs. Vemino has also increased the max number of genuinely dead Necromorphs that can be present in the environment, forced anisotropic filtering throughout, and added options to stop the game automatically connecting to online services that are no longer offered by EA.
You can find the Marker patch on Github. It’s compatible with both the Steam release and the EA app version, with instructions for getting it working on Steam Deck or Linux. Here is a compressed/curated rundown of the contents I have produced by running my Plasma Cutter crudely over the Github page:
- Stabilizes physics behavior at high framerates to eliminate the annoying flying corpses and limbs
- Prevents the game from crashing on systems with more than 10 CPU cores
- Corrects the VSync implementation to use the refresh rate selected in the game’s settings instead of locking to 30 FPS
- Fixes the tracking of Zealot and Hardcore difficulty completions to properly unlock rewards
- Resolves item database conflicts where certain DLC suits incorrectly share IDs with other suits
- Prevents crashes that can rarely occur when the game enumerates save files
- Scales subtitle text appropriately for high resolutions
- Implements proper raw mouse input to fix sensitivity issues
- Blocks all DirectInput devices except mouse and keyboard to prevent unwanted camera spinning from devices like racing wheels, flight sticks, and other peripherals
- Forces anisotropic texture filtering on all textures to improve clarity at oblique viewing angles
- Forces proper trilinear filtering for smoother texture transitions between mipmap levels
- Prevents connection attempts to EA servers at startup and prevents error messages from appearing
- Increases the maximum number of bodies that can remain in the environment
- Automatically sets the game to your screen resolution on first launch instead of defaulting to 1024×768
- Bypasses the EA/Visceral Games intro video on launch [when you enable this option]
- Control which DLC items appear in the store
The patch also does funky stuff with dinputto8 for mod compatibility. I say “funky stuff” because I don’t know what a “dinputto8” is. It could be incredibly routine and entirely non-funky. For all I know, I’m basically saying “the patch does funky stuff with running on computers powered by electricity”. Anyway, all the features can be customised individually. “The patch uses sensible defaults that work for most users, but allows fine-tuning of every aspect,” writes Wemino.
The odds of a full Dead Space 2 remake seem low at this stage. In April 2024, the rumour was mongered that EA had cancelled such a project in light of the original remake’s sales. EA have denied this, and we’ve heard barely a squeak of Dead Space since.
In our Dead Space remake review from January 2023, Liam Richardson (RPS in peace) summarised it as “luxuriously improved in small but considered ways”. I myself enjoyed EA Motive’s fancy reinterpretation of original developer Visceral’s spacecraft setting, but found a lot of it to be adding widgets and sparkle for the sake of it. In particular, I found Isaac Clarke more compelling when he couldn’t speak.