We said in our long-ago review of Dead Space 3 that it suffered from an “identity crisis.” Series star Isaac Clarke very suddenly went from being an engineer in a tight spot (and with a precarious grip on reality) in the first two games to a full-blown action hero in the third: “Isaac fights wave after wave of monsters while saying things like, ‘I turned my back on the world because I couldn’t face what had to be done’—and he’s not talking about an oil change or repairing a carburetor.”
We still liked it quite a bit despite that shift from survival horror to horror-shooter, but in an interview with CaptainBribo (via PCGamesN) producer Chuck Beaver said that if he could do it all over again, he’d take a very different approach.
“I would redo Dead Space 3 almost completely,” Beaver said. “I would keep the lore beat that it’s predicated on, keep the lore you find out. I would have Ellie there but a different relationship, and I would redo the entire main story. I would throw away and rewrite.”
“I would just start from complete scratch, and I would make this—like we talked about—in Dead Space 2, he’s broken. And now, this is the adventure of Isaac in Dead Space 3—broken Isaac. He tried to do the thing, tried to do the truth, it broke him. Now we’re in the consequences of him being broken. Now I would just make it, literally, I would make it like a Tyler Durden thing: An unreliable narrator, and you’re like, what happened? And the player maybe doesn’t even know, Isaac certainly doesn’t know, and is it him? Is it really him? And maybe it is … I would keep that question alive for most of 3, until you realize at the end, it maybe actually is something real.”
Beaver also said he “wouldn’t even look at” the love triangle between Clarke, Dead Space 2 NPC Ellie, and Dead Space 3 add-on North, and would also probably forgo the game’s co-op gameplay, which he said was “not necessary,” caused technical headaches, and drove up the cost of making the game: “You don’t need that at all.”
I never played Dead Space 3 so I can’t really comment on the specificity of Beaver’s comments, but I do distinctly recall that the shift in tone was a big part of why I skipped it, and so my feeling is that he’s probably on to something. You don’t play Dead Space because you want to be a tough guy with a gun, after all, and especially after the events of the first two Dead Space games (which can be fairly described as “mildly upsetting” at the very least) turning Clarke into a more generic “guy with a gun” just didn’t wash entirely well.
It’s been 10 years since Dead Space 3 (which was also the last Dead Space game made), but the topic is relevant again because of the success of the Dead Space remake released earlier this year. It’s very faithful to the original game, but optimistically, it could also serve as a reboot of the entire series that ends up staying more faithful to its roots. That may not be terribly likely, but given that Dead Space 3 effectively ended the series, it doesn’t seem entirely out of the question that EA might decide to take the remade sequels in a different direction.
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