The Dead Space remake is officially out and bringing everyone back to the very first time they sliced off a Necromorph’s limbs. While the folks over at Motive Studios did an excellent job in retaining what made the original so special, they also made some necessary improvements. Some of the biggest improvements involve one of the most infamous scenes in the game - the turret section.
Speaking with GamesRadar+, the game’s creative director Roman Campos-Oriola shares the approach that the studio took when deciding where to make changes. It basically boiled down to where improvements could be made using today’s technology. After all, Dead Space first crawled onto our screen back in 2008 and video game tech has changed since then.
For those that have never played the original game, it featured a sequence where you had to protect the ship from a storm of asteroids, doing so by shooting projectiles using a turret. This asteroid blasting section became pretty infamous among the fans, mainly because of how difficult it was to keep the ship safe.
So, when it came time to handle this section for the remake, Campos-Oriola and the team knew that wanted to completely redo it. However, they had to balance a complete overhaul with retaining the “fantasy of being on a gigantic spaceship that’s being rained down with asteroids”.
So how do you balance that fantasy but add something new? Well, if you're Motive you put players face-to-face with those asteroids: "So now you're literally outside on the hull of the ship with the asteroids coming at you, trying to fix these cannons. And then once you fix the cannons, well, you have to synchronize to retrain them to target the asteroids.”
Campos-Oriola also went into detail on some of the thematic reasons for the changes, "So basically, we try to capture the original fantasy of that sequence, and we tried to add a bit more of a space engineer fantasy to it. Because in the original it was Hammond fixing the turrets and Isaac shooting them, but Hammond is the soldier, so that's kind of weird. So we try to improve on that and make that sequence better in terms of pacing."