Postmortem: Dead Space
In space, no one can hear you conduct a postmortem with Senior Producer Chuck Beaver (real name).
1/27/2009 6:13 PM | 6 Comments | Page 2 of 5
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Beaver: Making the game difficult to get into definitely wasn't part of the design. But what might cause [the slow-burn effect], at least in some part, is the controller. We have a very full controller. By the game's second level, basically every button on the controller serves an integral purpose. It takes a while to master all that.
The slow-burn, as you call it, might also have something to do with our brand of survival horror mechanics. Because it's a new world, a totally new place, it doesn't easily map onto other experiences you've had. Yes, it's similar to
Resident Evil 4. But in our game, enemies constantly surround you; they're coming from 360 degrees. In
Resident Evil 4, they're predominantly in front of you. I think that adds another level of helplessness to the proceedings, and makes you feel more underpowered and more vulnerable.
Crispy Gamer: The game opens with an extensive, very filmic cut scene. But then it pretty much ditches cut scenes for the remainder of its duration. And yet the whole production somehow still manages to feel, at least to my mind, very cinematic, very filmic.
Beaver: We made a conscious decision to take out cut scenes. We wanted players to be completely immersed in the game, and to feel connected to the game. Cut scenes, in our opinion, disconnect players from the story; they disconnect you from your belief system. We've created this scary world for you to explore, and we wanted to keep you in that world. So all cinematic staging needed to happen in that world. Messages from other characters are delivered while you're still in the world. The same goes for the heads-up display. We did away with a traditional HUD, and tried to give players all the information they needed on the screen, in a more organic, believable way. Everything is fictionalized and justified within the world.
Another big piece of the storytelling that most gamers aren't aware of is conveyed via set design and set dressing. Every room you walk into is a story. It's been crafted as a story. You see a corpse over there. You think, "OK, they tried to escape through that door. They didn't make it. And they were dragged this way..." We always say that first we had to create a vision of the future; then we had to make it into one big crime scene.
[Laughs]
Crispy Gamer: You removed the cut scenes, but you left in other old-school tropes like distinct chapters and traditional load screens.
"Are those Bugle Boy jeans you're wearing?"
We actually have the technology to do the entire game without any load screens. We could have done it as one continuous, streaming experience. But we made the decision to do it as a series of chapters.
Dead Space is a very intense game. We thought that people would want to get to the end of a chapter and feel a sense of accomplishment. Chapters are the player's chance to feel this sense of accomplishment. They go, "Whew, I made it through Chapter One. I survived." People need psychological breaks in this kind of game.
