Below is our interview with the Senior Producer of Dead Space, Chuck Beaver. Special thanks go out to Andrew for getting Chuck to sit down and answer our questions!
HF: Were there specific games or movies that served as inspiration for parts of the game?
CB: We're just huge horror and sci-fi fans. We're influenced by so many of them, but we don't want to be exactly like any of them. Our goal was to create something new and fresh that could live in the sci-fi universe without being identified and compared. We aspired to have a frame of Dead Space be as uniquely identifiable as a frame of Blade Runner, where when you looked at it, you knew immediately where it came from. Certains game in our genre also got a lot of things right that we are trying to do as well, specifically RE4 and Half-Life 2. We were inspired by all these, and maybe subconsciously some of their stuff made it into our game, but we wanted to be unique. We've also got some Japanese horror influences in our looks and approach to horror, as in our fascination with tentacles.
HF: How did the phrase “Strategic Dismemberment” get coined, and how will it affect the gameplay?
CB: It pretty much requires you to chop off every limb before they stop coming at you. This is fine if just one is around, but becomes quickly panicky in a crowd. Plus, there's restricted ammo, so if you waste shots in the body, you'll be standing there with an empty clip being torn into pieces really fast. And of course, we mess with your head as the game progresses, and just as you get dismemberment down, new enemies appear that put a twist on it, and burst open with other enemies if you get it slightly wrong, or flat out surprise you even if you get it right. It's a very addictive mechanic..
HF: I've noticed that in the gameplay footage I've seen, there doesn't seem to be a traditional HUD present. What was the reasoning behind that choice? Were there any special challenges presented by moving in this direction?
CB: It mostly began as an inspiration Glen had to put his health bar on his neck or back somewhere. When that worked out, we decided to see if it could all fit without him becoming a Christmas tree (although we're sci-fi, we didn't want to be too unrelatable). We put his ammo counter and stasis meter on him, and made his air-timer a conditional hologram. Those all worked out well, and was a great encouragement to pursue complete immersion of all the HUD in the game, or “behind the 4th wall”. This all dovetailed nicely with our immersion aspirations as well. The more the player stayed in the game, the more we could scare them. We put the traditional inventory, map and objectives screens in a holographic projection off to Isaac's right, in real space in real time in his world. He even looks at it as you highlight different items. At this point, Isaac's RIG (Resource Integration Gear), or the thing on his back, had become his connection to all things, so we embraced it and made pickups and doors and switches all emit holograms, which interacted with Isaac's RIG to pickup, open, activate, etc. It was all very clean in the end, and worked well in the fiction to boot.
HF: Why did you go with the over-the-shoulder 3rd person view, as compared to the first-person view that seems to be so popular?
CB: It is mostly an aesthetic choice on our part. We wanted you to be able to see what's happening to your character, so we could exploited this to the fullest extent by having a bewildering array of ways Isaac can die. He is as dismemberable as all the enemies, including his waist, plus we have a unique death animations for almost every enemy when he's paired in melee attacks, plus bosses. And you also get to enjoy the cool visuals when he upgrades his suit. And of course, we would not have been able to achieve our HUD-less design the way we did without having Isaac on screen to host all the information on his body.
HF: What can you tell us about Isaac Clarke, the character that you play during the game? Will we learn much of his background/history during the game?
CB: He is an everyday Engineer, assigned to investigate and repair whatever is wrong on the Ishimura after it goes dark and Earth receives its distress signal. His girlfriend is stationed aboard the Ishimura, so he is somewhat concerned. However, these things happen all the time, so there is no cause for immediate alarm. Unfortunately, when he arrives, there is cause for great alarm. We will learn mostly about Isaac's current condition in the game. There is an entire backstory we've written for Isaac, which we used to write his motivations, but it does not get explicitly revealed in the game.
HF: I've spent a couple hours with the NoKnownSurvivors.com experience. Are some of the characters from “No Known Survivors”, like Jane Gauthier, going to make an appearance in the game?
CB: No, those characters are part of the canon of our universe, much the way all the characters in the Comic series and Animated Feature do not cross over into the game, but are part of the story nonetheless. The events and settings and plotlines of the Marker, Unitology, the Ishimura, the Aegis 7 Colony persist across and even beyond the stories told in those properties, with a myriad of characters coming in and out across the timeline.
HF: Dead Space looks like it's going to be first-and-foremost a single-player game. Is there going to be any multi-player elements?
CB: We're trying to stay as true as we can to the horror genre, and for us that means an uninterrupted single player experience. It's not very scary if your buddy come blazing through a carefully-tuned horror setup. So, no multiplayer for us on this game.
HF: With downloadable content being all the rage, are there any plans for new Dead Space content after the initial release of the game?
CB: We'd love to be able to offer the fans something really cool, and we're trying to figure out the development and finalization of those plans now.
HF: Last, but not least, can you tell us what your favorite/scariest part of the game is?
CB: For sure it's the ending, both the final fight sequence and then the way the game ends after that. I obviously can't say much more than that without spoiling it, but I still get chills when I watch the ending, and a little emotional. And the final fight is just spectacularly imagined and executed, with a great fun gameplay twist in the middle. Okay, I've said too much already...