Dead Space: Rewriting and Improving the Story of a Horror Classic First

ign.com:

The original Dead Space is a video games classic, and a horror story fondly remembered by many. The tale of one engineer fighting to survive within the gloomy, corpse-filled corridors of a dead mining ship left a lasting impression, and so when it came to the remake developer EA Motive has been careful in how it approached the narrative.

But there are some changes. Just like the remake looks different, it’s also scripted differently. That’s because all teams working on Dead Space had the same goal.

“Overall it was to give the narrative the same kind of glow-up that everything else had,” says Jo Berry, senior writer on Dead Space. “As a player, generally what you want is to have the same feeling again, feel like you're playing it for the first time. And so some of it was looking at how do we tell this story for people who are newcomers to the series? [...] But for veteran players we wanted to give them a little bit of a surprise, of like, ‘Oh this is a little different’. You change that direction very slightly and it can take you to a very different place. So it was kind of that sort of dichotomy between making sure that newcomers feel welcome but also veteran players are going to be kept off guard, because if you're not off guard you're not scared.”

The first significant change you’re likely to notice is that Isaac Clarke can now speak. The once-silent protagonist now has a full script, and will chat with both other characters and himself. To ensure Isaac’s new dialogue was as authentic as possible, EA Motive looked at other games in the series in which the character speaks.

“There was a lot of looking at Dead Space 2,” says Berry, “and looking at key scenes. ‘How does he react in this moment? What's his sense of humor