Dead Space 3

Dead Space 3
Executive producer Steve Papoutsis on why co-op really works for the survival horror series

When Dead Space 3 was revealed with co-op, there was a concerned reaction from fans. Did you  expect this reaction?

To be honest when we sat down to unveil the game at E3 we thought there was a couple of ways we could go. We could show what we’d shown before for a Dead Space game, and players would probably feel ‘Oh, it’s just another Dead Space game’. Or we could show the innovations we were bringing to the franchise, so we opted to do that. We showed a bunch of new stuff: exteriors of Tau Volantis, new enemies, human enemies, a giant boss, an epic sequence with the giant drill – we showed a lot of new stuff.

What we wanted to do was show new stuff and show people that we are evolving the franchise. The
addition of co-op on its own – a lot of people are going to have questions about it, we knew that was going to happen. But hopefully by showing people the video game [at events] they can see with co-op that we’re taking it in a very Dead Space direction and we’re innovating with a feature that nobody’s ever done before.

Are you concerned people will just play through single-player only?

A lot of thought and content has clearly gone into co-op. Absolutely. That’s one of the challenges when we started the video game – we knew that we were going to make content that some people just weren’t going to look at because they just don’t want to play co-op. That’s okay. It’s their loss, because they’re missing out on some of the cool stuff that the team’s done.

But hopefully when people see it, read about it, hear about it on a forum and read about how our
co-op actually works and how it’s actually additive through an article like this, people will become more interested and want to play with their friends. One of the goals with adding co-op was to have people be able to experience Dead Space with a friend – the feeling of going to a horror movie with someone. You can go to a horror movie with somebody and you can both be really into it, it’s tense and you’re on the edge of your seat, or you could go with a friend and you’d be drinking your sodas and eating popcorn and laughing but having a great time – we wanted players to be able to experience the game in a number of different ways.

So are you confi dent it will retain the same level of horror as the previous games, even with co-op?

I think it’s going to be similar in terms of what people say at the end. Some people think Dead Space
is really scary, some people don’t think Dead Space is really scary – if you read forums you’ll see a varying opinion. It’s very subjective. I’m not going to make a claim that it’s the scariest game or it’s not the scariest game – it’s up to the individual. The most important thing for us is that we’re making a Dead Space game – a Dead Space game is composed of many things, survival, horror, tension, action, immersiveness and atmosphere. All of those things.

When did you look at co-op? Was it something you considered after Dead Space 2?

Co-op was something we even talking about with the original Dead Space. At one point quite late in
development we had the engineering team set it up so we could play the game in co-op – at that point all we had was another Isaac, it literally was a tacked-on Isaac, and we ran a test and we thought ‘this could be kind of cool’. But we weren’t going to do that unless that character had a meaningful story and was integrated into the story – we couldn’t deliver co-op on that game at the level that we wanted to, so we didn’t do it.

The decision to make Isaac speak split the audience somewhat – how do you feel it’s worked out?
That’s another one of those decisions that’s born out of the story and what’s happening. My feeling was I thought it made a lot of sense in Dead Space that Isaac didn’t talk, because there weren’t a lot of people to talk to; he’s not going to go around talking to himself, that would be weird.

In Dead Space 2 he’s around a lot more characters, plus he’s got a lot on his mind – and he’s kind of pissed off that he’s been incarcerated and they’re pulling shit out of his head, so he’s got some things to say. That was a natural evolution of the character, just like showing his face more often – we wanted to develop more back story around Isaac, more personality around him.

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