Dead Space Preview

The survival horror genre was in need of a shake up a few years ago and Capcom's Resident Evil 4 did just that. Since then we haven't really had a game that's come close to challenging the mighty series, but EA might be the company to do so. Dead Space has been labelled 'Resident Evil in Space' by some, so we caught up with Chuck Beaver, Senior Producer, and David Yee, lead gameplay engineer to find out how EA went about creating a survival horror game and if game development has changed over the years.

VideoGamer.com: What was your approach to the horror content in Dead Space?

Chuck Beaver: With the horror design of Dead Space, we're trying to be true to the horror genre in film. We have a lot of psychological scares and psychological drama set up across the entire game, and as we've got 20 hours to get through it can't be the same jump-out jump-out jump-out joke every time! That would get old really fast. So we found ways to systematise the scares. We have a fear system attached to the sound, so we can turn that on or off. And we also have a vent system, where if an enemy sees you in the distance it can climb into the air ducts and pop out anywhere close to you. So you think you may be safe, and then suddenly things are appearing all around you.

VideoGamer.com: So that's all totally unscripted?

CB: Yeah, it's procedural. So say you're running away from something - you run into a room and you think you're safe. But if there's a vent in there, you're not! You can't really get away from the enemies at any point in time. So that's one of a number of procedures we have for fear. The big one we have is the immersion idea, that you're never stopping the action during play. That's especially important for things like the HUD and your inventory - we want to keep you immersed in the game, so there's never a moment when you can take a breather. Also, the combat is lethal - if the enemies get a hold of you, you're dead. You can't just stand there and let things happen. So once you figure out that the enemies are lethal, and there's no pausing, the game becomes very tense. You're afraid about what's out there. So that's one of our biggest fear factors: the fact that you're crawling around every blind corner, nervous about what's going to happen.

VideoGamer.com: How much time has been spent on balancing the pace of the game? Too many scares tend to actually reduce the fear factor in games like these, but equally if they're too infrequent then it lets the player relax, right?

CB: Absolutely. We started out with a lot of "boo!" moments, with things jumping out at you, or coming out of the ceiling. But then we realised they can get really old.

David Yee: That's with the more traditional scares. But to get back to what Chuck talked about with the systems... On the engineering side of things we tried to build out lots of level mechanics and games systems that our designers can play around with, try things out. So we actually had situations where level designers would get together every week to show off their new level. Since everyone's so immersed in their own stuff, a lot of the time they wouldn't normally get to see the levels that other people have created. So we all get together in a room that's very dark and has this great sound system, and people can try out each other's levels - see which ones are scary and which aren't really working. So that helped a lot in terms of trying to mix things up, not using the same tricks all the time.

VideoGamer.com: Does the fact that you have so many level designers create additional challenges on a game like this? How do you ensure that the game remains a single, unified experience?

CB: That's really the task of our creative director (Bret Robbins). He's the one who's filtering all the input and deciding what gets stuck together in the final experience. Like Dave said, there's always a mix of what's working and what's not working and that gets filtered through by the master creative team.

DY: We've had daily play-throughs of the game. The creative director plays, and it's basically his job to constantly be on top of the game and to know it from start to end.

VideoGamer.com: Game development is getting more and more expensive. Do you think there's a lot of pressure on projects like this that the increased budget has to be immediately reflected in sales?

CB: Yeah, it's fair to say that the pressure is enormous, with the current state of things! We're in Northern California, it's a very expensive place to build games, and there's huge pressure to outsource as much as possible. The comic industry has been doing it very successfully for decades, right? They've been in Korea and India and everywhere with these outsourcing models, and we're going to have to follow that pretty fast. We have to work out which bits of our games can be outsourced and which have to stay in house for creative control. We're already on a path to get there. But yeah, we live or die by our numbers as a studio, right? If the game doesn't sell... It may be a big critical hit but if it can't financially stand up on its own, it's not going to make it.