The Dead Space remake is a faithful recreation
of the 2008 sci-fi horror classic.
Well, mostly faithful.
EA Motive has seized the opportunity to improve on the original,
and so some sequences play out differently than you remember.
An early example is the moment in which protagonist Isaac Clarke
watches a corpse transform into a necromorph for the first time.
If you’re unfamiliar with it,
here are the talented developers to explain the scene.
In the original version It was a lot more toned down.
Isaac comes into the morgue
and then an Infector comes through the vent, attacks the body, converts
into Necromorph and it bursts through the glass and attacks Isaac.
But that's an opportunity where we wanted to make it feel a lot more interactive
and we wanted to make it feel more immersive.
In our version, you come in and there's actually a door.
so you actually go into the autopsy room itself.
There's a very low fog, it's kind of eerie.
You enter the room where he is at.
He rolls the body over to retrieve the rig on the Captain's back.
And as he's removing his rig.
Boom. An infector falls from the ceiling.
The infector is now infecting the captain,
which is the catalyst that begins the full transformation.
And then the Captain starts to transform into this elite slasher.
All his clothes started to peel, start to transform into flesh.
You're seeing all manner of goo and goop and disgusting transformation
right in front of the camera.
And then as it's screaming at Isaac he uses Kinesis, grabs
a fire extinguisher, clocks it across the head and manages to get up.
And then we move from there into gameplay. Quite visceral.
To find out how the new version of this sequence was created,
we spoke to several members of the Dead Space team
to explore their roles in bringing the moment to life.
That started, of course, with the original scene, alongside
a core concept: how to make it even more immersive.
There's a lot of scenes in the original Dead Space
that happen behind glass, and there's a reason for that
in a lot of cases, but where possible we want to bring that action out.
It kind of leads into the through line of telling the story
of what the Necromorphs are. What are these things?
Where do they come from? Oh, they’re transformed corpses.
This is the first time we're seeing a full transformation.
We wanted to make sure we convey
just how bloody disturbing those transformations could be.
It's also possible to miss that transformation in the original.
You can walk into the morgue and just be like, “Oh
well I'm going to look at what's over there”.
It also means that a crucial piece of information can get lost,
which is these things are transformed corpses.
and you see bodies on the floor and you feel compassion for them,
and now everybody on the floor is a potential threat.
That's one of the things that from day one,
we wanted to have a lot more in the game.
We said this would be a good opportunity
to do that in that scene where you actually get to see
the captain transforming and then really surprising the player.
With all the goals of the scene established,
it was now the job of the narrative team to come up with the exact
step-by-step actions of both Isaac and his necromorph foe.
The plan was for this version of the scene to better communicate
the terror of being confronted by a freshly-transformed necromorph,
as well as improve the portrayal of Isaac and his capabilities.
We want to bring this scene out from behind the glass.
Okay, well then how does that look like?
How does that feel?
How do we want the player to feel?
How do we want Isaac to be seen?
So with that in mind I talked with Joel McMillan a little bit about it.
Obviously he’s going to be disarmed in that moment,
but obviously Isaac's never completely disarmed.
He has kinesis, and it was immediately a really great sort of visual of him
even when he is sort of helpless to grab that fire extinguisher and go for it.
It was a really good chance to show how quick thinking he is.
I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty paralyzed in that kind of moment.
I began blocking down some storyboards.
I had some movements in my mind that I really wanted to see the Captain
go through throughout his transformation.
Just in my own home, we're all working through Covid,
so we're all at home,
so I had my girlfriend take photos of me acting out the transformation.
I would sketch over those
with the limbs of the slasher, ‘cause
I didn't have the same amount of appendages as a slasher would.
So I'd have to draw in the arms and show where the animation would be going on
those arms and where the weight was and all that kind of thing.
There's a lot of back and forth with them about what we want that scene to be.
Every scene is an opportunity to develop Isaac's character,
show who he is, as well as really getting that terror
of a Necromorph transforming inches away from your face.
Moving Isaac into the room and just inches away from Captain
Mathius would mean players would see every single movement in detail.
To achieve results that would stand up to such
close scrutiny, this entire sequence needed to be performance captured.
But this wouldn’t be a simple sequence, as one of the actors would somehow
have to become a corpse with blades for arms.
We went through and choreographed that through photographs and sketches on
top of that to get the general staging and choreography of the scene laid out.
Then from that, the talented team of animators started to block
that in 3D using our rough models that we have on the project at the time.
I think aside from doing the scripts, honestly, I think the most fun
was the P Cap because we had a lot of fun putting that scene together.
The two performers that we had really got into it.
They actually spent a long time
kind of working together, kind of figuring out the logistics.
“Okay, you're going to do this and I'm going to turn this way and come”.
And it was actually very fun to watch that come together and watch them work.
Yeah the Infector was the theater of the imagination and Noshir,
because he's a very experienced mocap
actor, he was able to mime the corpse being attacked
and then we were able to bring it in later.
That scene actually cost Noshir’s arm extenders.
That scene when he comes down and brings the slasher blade comes down,
that actually broke one of Noshir’s arm extenders.
To make this scene work as the team envisioned,
the camera would need to be uncoupled
from its usual over-the-shoulder position and move around Isaac and the necromorph.
Thankfully, EA’s in-house engine was able to be adapted to the team’s needs.
In order to show just how disgusting and visceral
and horrific that sequence could be, we needed to get that camera
as close as possible to the captain.
And so this sequence was also a testbed for decoupling the camera
from Isaac's shoulder and trying to find our camera language.
What is our camera behavior and camera language going to be
when it's not player controlled on the back of Isaac's shoulder?
With the performance capture data and tools ready, it was time for the art
and cinematic teams to put the scene together.
Because there’s no dialogue, all focus would be on the visuals,
and so the artists worked hard to ensure every element of both Isaac
and his gruesome foe were rendered in the most realistic way possible.
We started from the actual characters, making sure that all the detail is there
and that would hold up to the camera, because you would see it up close.
We would often say
it should look like a bowl of soup that's being poured out onto Isaac's lap.
And then, yeah,
this is where the limb would stretch and break and then turn into a spike and
hoist his weight.
This is where the jaw should swing and drop off.
And so we went through in layers like that and built
in every single piece of detail that we could think of.
It was really important to show the transformation well,
and to keep also this idea that everything is seamless.
So it was really a good way for us to be very close to the action,
show very well how the necromorph appear,
and to keep the player always in control and engaged as much as we can.
That desire for a seamless transformation meant that there was no way
that the captain’s model could be swapped out for a necromorph;
that corpse had to morph into a space zombie in real-time.
But thanks to the game’s new peeling system, the art team had everything
they needed to create a realistic transformation scene.
whether it's that transformation
or any other Necromorph in the game, we started from scratch.
We started from the base layer
layer, building the skeletal system that's accurate to that character.
And then we built the muscles, the layers of fat,
sinew, bones.
All of that stuff is built layer by layer so that in the game,
depending on the weapon you use,
you get to dismember them in kind of the way that you want to as a player.
The challenging part
was making sure that it holds up, because you do get to see it quite close.
The rest of the game, you'll usually dismember the Necromorphs
at a distance, but in this one it really was up close and personal.
So all of that had to work perfectly.
The timing of it,
the lighting, the effects, animation, the entire scene had to look flawless.
Beneath all that artwork
is a serious amount of technology, and the technical team worked in parallel
with the art team to ensure that all of the animations would play out flawlessly.
We do a massive mesh swap there to allow
for the transformation itself to happen on top of Isaac.
The Captain falling onto Isaac, that whole camera is going to the floor
and coming back.
There’s a mesh swap happening there so that we can have the proper transform happen.
So there's cool tech behind it.
But a lot of it, like I said early on, is the animation team did a massive,
massive job of just animating and going
pixel, pixel-perfect on what they wanted for the transformation.
Then it was a question of us
making sure that we can afford it in that context.
The bond between art and technology is what makes this scene possible,
but it’s the smaller elements that really make the moment come alive.
Like everywhere else in the Dead Space remake, there’s much, much more detail
in this scene than there was in the original version.
when you remove the rig from the captain,
it is kind of some clips that you detach from the back.
Suddenly for me gives my imagination logic of, “Okay, it's logical.
It’s attached by clips and you can remove it like this.”
It feels natural and logicial. A kind of little detail that
don’t add big value but that ground the fantasy of everything.
I really appreciate those little details.
I really love how they got all the uniform shredding off his back
and there's a really good moment when Isaac sort of hits the floor
and the low lying fog on the floor of the morgue kind of blows away.
As with every individual moment in every video game,
the final result is the product of people working together.
For the team at EA Motive, it was exciting to see all their individual
contributions combine to create such a gruesome and effective scene.
From day one, it was one of the things
that we wanted to have more of that in the remake.
It felt very satisfying to actually see a transformation so up close.
It’s a good mix of witnessing the transformation, being fascinated
by what you see, and knowing that okay, you need to act very soon.
So I think this moment was really well done.
It is a team effort and all I do is just work with the team and help them,
guide them.
But they did all the work and I'm super proud of them.
so it comes down to what I like best about working in games is just working
with a lot of different people and different mindsets.
It’s a challenge, but it's also very rewarding once you solve it.
I feel that that sequence
retains the original vision the closest of any of the sequences
we have in the game.
And there's a ton of very elaborate sequences in the game.
But that one from start to finish retained the core vision as closely as possible.
For more from Dead Space, check out how the EA
Motive team rebuilt the game’s iconic guns and re-wrote the story.
And for everything else, stick with IGN.