Dead Space: Impressions and EA Interview

EA isn't known for original IP, but that might be about to change. We talk to EA's Glen Schofield and give our impressions of what could be this year's Bioshock.

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Kikizo: How about these enemies - they're obviously a bit different to the ones in James Bond?

Schofield: We've spent a lot of time on trying to come up with some really different enemies, and some really different weapons to kind of 'go with' the enemies. If you think back to the games I mentioned before, like Bond or Return of the King, it's a guy with a sword or a gun, and fairly predictable enemies. Let me tell ya: some of these aliens, with tentacles coming out - you cut one of them off, you cut one leg off and he falls down on the other, or you cut his head off and he's still alive and swinging and swaying - I mean they take a lot of time, and a lot of animation - think about every type of thing that can be cut off and what kind of animations are involved in that.

Kikizo: So is that dynamic as well, the way they might attack you after you've chopped certain limbs off? They have that in Ninja Gaiden 2, it seems like a pretty advanced feature that developers are only now introducing.

Schofield: Oh, absolutely. And it's really up to you on how you want to deal with that, because if you cut off the head of that one enemy, the slasher, he's coming at you alive a little faster, and he's swinging, so it's a different kind of combat there - you can cut off his legs, but now he's crawling at you and he's harder to get. Or you cut off his arms, but then he'll just run at you! So there's no real one-shot kill in the game, and that was intentional. Unless you use a grenade, or something like that, we didn't want to have that sort of headshot that just blows them away, we wanted it to be more like, jeez, I've got back up here, move there, keep the player on his toes. One of the other mechanics that we go deep on is, imagine you have the slasher enemy... he's facing you, and you have one bullet... you cut off his arm, you use the TK Gun, and you can use that slicer in the environment with a bullet and cut off his legs with it, so you can actually kill him with one bullet, and you may only have one bullet, or you may want to conserve ammo.

All the weapons in the game are completely different. The TK gun you always have, it's sort of an energy thing you always have. One weapon is good with crowd control but you have to be stringent about how you use it. We didn't go into like, crazy kill moves and all, because we've got so much going on; TK, your melee, there's a lot in there. We've got this grenade... it's a grenade that cuts, it's got all these lasers that come out! And this weapon [pointing at screen], well...actually it's gone through so many different names right now, that I don't think the team even knows what we're going to call it - we'll have to think about it because the first name we came up with was really dumb.

Kikizo: What was the first name you came up with?

Schofield: No, because you're going to write it down! It was dumb. "Really Dumb Gun"?! [laughter] So then there's also melee; we were thinking, how do we do melee? Do we come up with a knife, or... what do we do? Then we thought, what would you do when you've run out of ammo? I'd just swing the damn weapon! You always have some weapon; you're never, say like Leon [in Resident Evil] with just a knife. You'll have a gun, and it might have no ammo, and that's what you're going to swing. You can carry four at a time, so if you have a light one, you can swing it a few times, but each swing is not going to do as much damage. You can point down and do a stomp or a kick, so it might be good to try and knock him down and then stomp on him. Or, you might find that you've got really good at melee with a big weapon, which is slower but does more damage. One of the technologies that we've just got in now, which is actually pretty hard to do, is knocking back an enemy, he bumps into an enemy, and that enemy bumps into another one, so that might be a scenario where melee works differently.

Kikizo: This is violent and scary. Are you ready to justify the horror on show when the news media get ahold of this?

Schofield: We know it's violent, but you know, our guy isn't killing humans. He's not a killer, or a murderer. He's a guy. And everything he's killing is trying to kill him! I would love to have shown you another level which is a great psychological area, because you open this door and there's just this crazy sound, and the lights are going, it's dark, the sound is so loud and screechy that you want to just run through - there's no one around but it just feels so uncomfortable that you just want to get through it. And you get through it and come to a room that's perfectly quiet, but it's completely corrupted by the aliens; it's pulsating and moving, and looks like guts. There's no one in that room either, but you kind of step through, going really slowly. A real core part of the game is the pacing and keeping you on your toes. You may go twenty minutes without an encounter, but you may be scared shitless in those twenty minutes!

Kikizo: Are there a lot more levels to build, and is there a chance of development running past your schedule to get it out this year?

Schofield: We're well on our way to shipping this game before the end of the year. Some of the things like the main character, we're just focus testing and focus testing him. This is the position that you're normally in at alpha or beta, but we're in this position months before. So we're polishing now and building up the rest of the levels. We developed it differently that we have other games. What we did with this one was first built a few mechanics and showed people that, then we build fifteen minutes of the game. We added characters, weapons and polish. Then, we built one level, which you saw, and is actually a few months old. So we have one level that's sort of completely done, but all the others are being brought up now pretty quickly, because the mechanics are pretty much done. And we have what we call strike teams, a team just for puzzles for example. EA has gotten pretty behind this game right now, so we have the resources, and things are coming along really fast. So hopefully we'll have an official ship date soon. Do I think we're going to miss our date? Something catastrophic would have to happen.

So there you have it. Unique weaponry, sci-fi setting, freaky atmosphere, horrific enemies, zero gravity and EA's finest development talent making the game they've wanted to for years. We think Dead Space could further EA's growing reputation for original IP and quality signings, and could even end up being this year's surprise hit like Bioshock was last year. The Xbox 360 build we were shown is already looking polished. Watch this one closely.

Dead Space is scheduled for release on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC at the end of 2008.

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