Dead Space interview: a painstakingly precise remake for old and new fans
Someone had once said you could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there. It was perfectly true. I recount the shock that I felt when I first saw Dead Space (much too young to be playing horror games) to the remake’s technical director, David Robillard. Overwhelmed, I thought, they couldn’t do that, could they? It couldn’t get any worse, could it?
The answer is, of course, it can - especially in space. The team at Motive Studio has been working hard to guarantee that this is Dead Space, but not as we know it.
“The first ‘wow’ moment I had was during chapter two when you're reaching the morgue,” said Robillard of the improvements to the original, specifically speaking about a meteorite that burns through the ship and stops our hero Isaac in his tracks. “That was like ‘Holy shit, okay, this is something else.’ I haven't seen something like that in a long time. And that was like, ‘okay, if we can hit that, in terms of moments for the game, that's going to be great.’”
Last month, we spoke to the technical director about the level of effort and passion that’s gone into reanimating Dead Space for familiar audiences and space cadets who have no clue what they’re going to get into. Bless their cotton socks.
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From the get-go, it’s clear that Robillard is thrilled to be on board for this remake, though there was admittedly a journey to reach that point. “As a gamer, survival horror wasn't my thing until I started the project,” he explained. “I played a little bit of Dead Space 2 and got the fright in me pretty solid, very early on. I’m a fan now but it was quite the adventure for me.”
Remakes must settle into a sweet spot between elevating that experience and honouring the work that brought us that game in the first instance. It seems a straightforward task on paper, if not a simple one in practice. We’ve had plenty of remakes in the past that are total swings and misses in their reinvented visions, after all. One of the major gameplay changes from the original Dead Space is the addition of zero-G navigation, a feature that was utilised much more frequently in the second and third games.
“The hangar where the [USG] Kellion crashes into the Ishimura is probably, say, twice as big as in the original, from all kinds of shapes and sizes, and opens up naturally to the exterior,” explained Robillard. “You really feel like you're in space and traversing zero-G and there's this sense of like, you're not on sure footing, you’ve got to watch out.”
Expectedly, I am extremely enthusiastic for even more scares to emerge from this expansion of the original, but it comes at a cost. Dead Space is skipping last-gen consoles. I wondered if this was a difficult decision for a team who would want everyone to experience this new game.
“Obviously, our visuals are enhanced compared to what we could have done on PS4,” said the director. “But in terms of simulation, we have our recreation of the Ishimura which is a completely traversable ship that is filled with lived-in set pieces and lived-in props. There's about over 9,000 dynamic props scattered around the Ishimura that will react to the player and to the necromorphs.”
“Immersion” is the key here for Robillard. It sounds like this marriage of artistic and technical aims would not have been wholly possible with a cross-gen release, and this choice was made with the interests of the team themselves too.
He explained: “I've had that situation on the previous generation shift, it is more difficult, you have to make concessions, right? So, first, you likely need a bigger team - that was my experience - and you have less focus on what you're really pushing because you have to figure out where is it that I can put my chips to make this feel like this is a new kind of next gen, better, shinier system.”
With these leaps and bounds in technology alongside a team of developers who have a lot of love for the original game, we are now treated to the “peeling” system in combat encounters. Necromorphs’ injuries will expose layers of flesh, tendons and bones that react to the weapon that incurs the damage.
“The peeling system will react to collision events from either projectiles or environmental and it will react to the shape of that collision event and the intensity of it,” Robillard said, getting into the maths behind the grossness. “That will determine you know, based on the contact points, how much of the outer mesh it should be removing, what area and what thickness of it should or shouldn't be removing, and basically kind of giving you this visual progression of how are you progressing to defeat this enemy without needing a health bar or knowing that it takes an amount of hits to kill to kill an enemy.”
Robillard added that the mechanic has allowed the team to be a bit more creative with weapons that had been overlooked in Dead Space, like the force gun. Don’t get me wrong, I completely appreciate the level of detail that’s gone into that peeling system, but I have felt perturbed in the past when other horror or gory games have required their teams to view real life research for these effects. “For us, it was such a central part of what the experience is,” he replied.
“You're gonna be doing that the entire game, it has to feel right, it has to feel good and it has to be visually coherent,” said Robillard. “You want your weapons as you're shooting to have different impacts and that those impacts look like what a line projectile would do to a necromorph, this looks like what bullets would do, this looks like what fire would do to a necromorph, this is what you could expect from fire affecting flesh, for instance, very gory details. But that's what we worked on. It took a lot of time to get where we are. Overall, I think we're pretty happy with the results.”
He clarified that this real research was supplemented with pointers from other squelchy games and touchstones like The Thing and The Fly. “It's features like this that are usually the most rewarding ones to work on because it involves a lot of different trades. You're talking to automation, you're talking with riggers, you're talking with tools, engineers, rendering engineers, gameplay engineers, talking with realisation directors, VFX sound effects.”
As well as the peeling system and the horrifying realism that it exposes on the monstrous flesh, Robillard spent some time walking me through the team’s achievements when overhauling one of the scariest experiences in the golden era of gaming.
“I think the other one we're really proud of is the interconnected ship,” he said, referring to the lack of loading screens throughout the entire game. “Our tram is actually a physical piece in the ship - once you hop on the tram, you move with the tram, and it takes you to your next destination. You'll be left with the feeling of going through this haunted house.”
This makes for a much freer way of exploring Dead Space’s… spaces, yet, this inadvertently stokes a small problem that all horror media must quash. Pacing. Giving the player a longer leash means they might stroll for some time in safety, diminishing the fear that designers have so delicately woven into the fabric. The intensity director, an artificial intelligence that is constantly watching the player, is the solution to that.
“This is basically a system that will monitor your progress throughout the levels, it will figure out where you are at in your mission beats, and what intensity curve it should be applying,” explained Robillard, stating that the intensity director will select events from a pool of over 350 scares to ensure that the player is never chilled out. These events might be something innocuous like a ceiling fan that clatters to the floor - the classic black cat - or the intensity director might decide that a necromorph encounter is just what the doctor ordered.
“The goal when we started this is it had to feel as good as the scripted events,” he continued. “We had our creative director Roman [Campos-Oriola] play and I think he was close to when you have to go to restart the engine. He had this encounter and he was like, ‘We were not supposed to have an encounter here?’ and we were like, ‘Well, that’s the intensity director doing its thing. He was like, ‘Oh, shit, okay, keep that. That's good.’”
Dead Space comes to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on 27 January, 2023.
Topics: Dead Space, EA, Interview