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 3 of 5
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Crispy Gamer: One more old-school trope that the development team saw fit to include: level-ending boss battles. The fact that the game ends with a very traditional final boss fight was kind of a letdown to me. Even though EA probably would have fired all of you, wouldn't it have been more interesting to have the game end on a more non-traditional, ambiguous note?
Beaver: The question for us was, "How do we end an epic game? Will this or that be satisfying to gamers?" I understand what you're saying. But you can't have an arty, film-noir ending. We wanted to have a traditional big boss at the end. It's hard to know where [the medium] is trying to go these days. There are a lot of big bosses, and these big, epic action scenes. More powerful technology obviously supports more epic scenes of this nature. So there's a temptation to go big. But what we wanted to do in the game's final moments was find our own unique crescendo.
Crispy Gamer: All we ever really see of Isaac (the main character) is the back of his head, and a little wedge of his hairless neck. Why so?
Beaver: We wanted to keep him as a proxy, an avatar, for the player to map himself onto. If [Isaac] decided to speak, it might disturb the fantasy you have going on in your head. He was intended to be a nice, blank canvas for gamers to paint on.
Early design art shows a trio of enemies that eventually got cut from the final game: the three women from Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" video.
Were there any monsters that didn't make it into the game? Anything where you guys thought, "OK, now we've crossed a line. That's too gross."
Beaver: [Laughs] Well, that's interesting. To paraphrase Glen Schofield [the game's executive producer], enemies weren't gross enough, in his opinion. He had a few other ones that he'd cooked up in his mind. He had all kinds of disturbing ideas that didn't make it into the game. He wanted blood to come out of candy bars, and things like that.
Crispy Gamer: Remind me to never go camping with Glen.
Beaver: [Laughs] Exactly.
Crispy Gamer: I had issues with the Locator. Press the right analog stick in and
voilà, a magical blue line appears on the floor, telling me exactly where to go next. Here you've created this incredible environment -- this haunted spaceship -- and then you decide that instead of encouraging me to explore it, you are simply going to lead me by the nose through it.
Beaver: We wrestled with this a lot. We tried a more traditional floating arrow to keep players on track. But we wound up settling on the Locator. Considering that we live in the age of GPS systems and Google Maps, it felt like a nice futurism to us.
But I agree; we created this great world. Why are we pulling people through it? In its defense, you'll notice that the Locator can only be activated if you're standing still. And as soon as you let off on the right analog stick, it immediately goes off. That way, you can click it, you get your hint, and then you move on.
