Blijkbaar hadden Dead Space en Dead Space 2 er heel anders kunnen uitzien. Dat vertelt Wright Bagwell, creative director bij Visceral Games, in een interview.
Aanvankelijk wilde men een survival horror-game maken in de stijl van Resident Evil 4, dat door het team erg werd gesmaakt. Dergelijke games hebben meestal een ietwat onhandige besturing, zodat de speler beperkt wordt in zijn mogelijkheden en zich hulpeloos voelt, wat uiteraard beangstigend overkomt. De eerste versies van Dead Space gingen uit van hetzelfde mechanisme: de speler beperkte controle geven. Blijkbaar was de feedback op die eerste versies niet al te positief, en dus is men dieper gaan nadenken. Zo kwam men tot de conclusie dat je even goed kan focussen op atmosfeer, de juiste timing en zaken die effectief eng zijn. Als die dingen goed zitten, kan je de speler ook meer ruimte en controle geven.
“There’s an interesting story from Dead Space and Dead Space 2, which is that when we started building Dead Space, we basically started with a mechanic set that was really similar to Resident Evil 4, the [people on the] team were really huge fans of that game.”
“We kind of started — we had never made a survival horror game — by saying, ‘Well, I think in order to scare the player, you really need to sort of cap how much control the player can have.’ So in RE4 and a lot of those survival horror games, they all have these pretty clunky control schemes that don’t let you do all the things that you can do in most other shooters, for example.”
“Eventually we got kind of tired of hearing people complain about it, and we said, ‘Hey, we should be trying to scare players by doing things that are actually kind of scary rather than making them just feel helpless.’
“We turned up the speed that [the character] rotates. And we turned up the speed that you could run and things like that. … What we found is that as long as we focused on making the game really atmospheric and putting you in freaky situations and getting the timing of everything right, you didn’t really have to disempower the player that much in order to scare him. … that’s the direction we went with Dead Space 2 as well.”
Wat wij van Dead Space 2 vinden, kan je morgen alvast lezen in onze review.
Bron: thesixthaxis.com
