IndustryGamers comes back with yet another in our ongoing series of character design and development. This time we sit down with Wright Bagwell, Creative Director at Visceral Games to discuss Isaac Clarke, the protagonist featured in the horror genre hit Dead Space.
With the success of the original title and the even bigger success of the sequel, we aim to find out how much impact Isaac Clarke plays on the world of Dead Space.
The intent of the series, again, is to find what motivates consumers to pick up titles and how much the protagonist plays into that equation. We hope to form a baseline on what motivates studios to develop and create characters. That in turn will help us form an idea as to what drives gamers to purchase games.
While Halo gave us the strong silent type from first person and Fable gave us the choice to drive our character toward good and evil, Dead Space offers up a fully developed character that has his own opinions and objectives in the game. While the game serves to immerse the player in a world of shadow and horror, we are companions, rather than guides, privy to Isaac’s redemption away from guilt.
We talk more on the subject with Bagwell.
Control Questions:
IndustryGamers: Developing a character is assuredly a major concern for a game. How important is it for the development of Dead Space?
Wright Bagwell: It was very, very important in Dead Space and in Dead Space 2 for a couple of reasons. The first is that we felt that the games need to be scary and I think that you need to have a certain amount of investment in your character to go beyond just simple scares. You really need to feel that you care about your character on screen. You don’t want to see him die; you feel some sort of attachment to him, and so we wanted to build a character that was actually compelling. Right from the start when we made Dead Space, we wanted to make sure that we could expand the franchise. We were interested in doing the comics, novels, animated films, and all those kinds of things. If we made a character that wasn’t really interesting, it would be really hard for people to take us seriously, so we would go and write stories. The third thing is that we really wanted a franchise to feel that was based on realism and that we really wanted to make a game that was extremely immersive and atmospheric. We felt, again, that in order to really immerse the player, to make him forget that he is playing a video game, you had to create a character that was believable and compelling.
IG: What led to the design concept of the protagonist? Was this concept developed from the start, or did the characterization portrayal change over time?
WB: On Dead Space, he went through so many iterations. Right from the start we knew that we wanted you to play a guy who was kind of an everyday guy. Again, we didn’t want you to play a superhero, and we didn’t want your character to be a space marine as well. We wanted to feel that you were a normal everyday kind of guy so that it felt like it made the game a little bit more believable again and a little scarier because you didn’t have super powers at your disposal. At the start, we were sort of doing concepts of what this guy would look like in an engineering suit. We thought an engineer would be a believable kind of character to have in this universe. We started thinking about the story for Dead Space, and the idea came up that you would be going to this ship that was stranded in space. Of course it makes a lot of sense that you send an engineer out. And that gave you a lot of interesting things to do in this world as well.
IG: Why did you decide to develop the character in the way you did?
WB: We’re always thinking of ways to create gameplay that makes Dead Space a little bit different than our competition. It felt like a lot of games where you're given a gun, you walk around and you solve all of your problems by blowing stuff up. So the idea that he was A.) believable and B.) an engineer gave us the opportunity to do things that set us apart from a lot of the other games that we compete with. Visually, we wanted to portray him in a believable way; the way he moves, his posture, the kinds of things he’s capable of doing with melee. He doesn’t do roundhouse kicks; he doesn’t do combo attacks and things like that. He moves like a guy that is an everyday guy who is wearing a big, heavy space suit. So all of those things came together again to reinforce the believability and again, to create a role for him in the universe that gave us some interesting kind of gameplay because of the kinds of things he would be doing as an engineer.
Dead Space Specific Questions:
IG: Isaac Clarke makes a transition from silent protagonist to fully developed person between the games, what was the decision process behind this?
WB: Well, it came from the fact that we started thinking about the story from Dead Space 2. The first thing that made us think that Isaac would have to talk and that we’d have to show his face was that it would be ridiculous if Isaac showed up in Dead Space 2 and the Necromorphs showed up again and everybody started bossing him around and telling him what to do, and he didn’t acknowledge what he had been through before. I think that any character that had gone through what Isaac Clarke went through in Dead Space would be A.) pretty pissed off if it happened again and B.) pretty pissed off if somebody tried to tell him what to do in those circumstances; someone telling him how to handle the situation or what he should be doing at any moment. We wanted to make him feel like, and we wanted the player to feel like, he had been through this once before and had a little bit of insight and opinion on the subject. So we knew that we couldn’t make Isaac just walk around and have nothing to say.
The second thing is we wanted to change Dead Space 2 from being a game where people are basically making you an errand boy. In Dead Space, you just basically got phone calls the whole game and people would say “Isaac, go fix this. Ok, thanks. Well now that you did this, go fix that.” It was a little repetitive and I think people lost interest in the story and the characters a little bit because after a while it just felt like it was tiring just bossing you around. In Dead Space 2, we wanted to feel like Isaac was a little more self-directed. If someone called him and said, “Hey, you need to go here and do something,” he should have an opinion about it. He might be in a situation where he has no other choice, but at least he should feel skeptical and at least he should sound like he’s not there to just serve everybody. So we had to make him talk so he could express opinions about things.
The final reason is that we wanted Isaac to become a more compelling character because he was a vehicle for the players’ thoughts. What I mean is that it’s really frustrating I think in a game (and it’s bad game and character design) when you create games where your character on the screen is saying and doing things that you don’t necessarily think he should be doing at that time. I’ve seen a lot of games where you go into a cutscene and your character will say “gee, it’s obvious at this point in the game this is what I need to do now.” I think games like Alan Wake did this quite a lot where he would narrate and say, “Well, I knew at that point that I needed to go through the gas station,” or something like that. It made me feel like I lost connection with the character because I didn’t know that’s what I had to do and it made me feel like I was watching some other character on the screen as opposed to feeling that was me on the screen. Traditionally, the best way to accomplish that is the old ‘Gordon Freeman model’. If you don’t have your character ever speak, there is no chance that he’s going to say something that is in discord with what the player is thinking and feeling. So when we wanted him to talk, we knew it was going to be a big challenge to get him to say things that didn’t alienate the player from being Isaac Clarke. And so, we wanted the player to feel a tighter bond with Isaac, so we focused a lot on having him say things that we thought were situationally appropriate. So he expresses anger when people are bossing him around and expresses relief when good things happen, and we have him do little things like having him curse when you mash the stomp button too often. We found that when players are doing that, they are usually frustrated or trying to get revenge on a corpse and having Isaac doing little things, like curse when a player expects him to went a really long way in making people feel like they bonded with Isaac. They felt like they were in control of Isaac and that Isaac was expressing their thoughts.
IG: There is a solid feeling of immersion in the game, yet the perspective is third person. Is this an attempt to ensure Isaac as a stand-alone character, or are you looking to engage gamers as the character, rather than an audience?
WB: Well, I think for us, we didn’t want the player to think he was in control of a puppet. We wanted the player to have a really tight bond with the character on the screen. You’re looking more at why we made him third person?
IG: Looking more at the immersion with the HUD and controls, is this really a chance to view Isaac, or to view yourself as Isaac?
WB: Our goal is to view yourself as Isaac. We did want to create a specific character. We could have gone the first person route and made our lives really, really easy by not putting anyone on screen and again, going with the classic first person voiceless model, but we felt for a variety of reasons that this wouldn’t suit our game. So we did want you to feel like Isaac was an extension of yourself; we did not want him to feel like you're playing some well known character, that you're sort of living that fantasy of playing that character because he was some spectacularly confident guy or some superhero. We wanted Isaac to feel like an extension of the player.
IG: The relationship between Isaac and Nicole shows an interesting perspective in Dead Space 2;how were you trying to translate the rift between reality and fantasy in his interactions with his own mind, and why was this element in the character development of Isaac?
WB: We wanted the player to feel like that there was more to Isaac than just that he had to survive through this ordeal. We wanted to give him a lot more depth, and we thought playing on the idea of guilt was an interesting way to make him a more interesting and relatable character, and I also thought it would help the player learn about everything that is going on. In addition to everything you have to go through, you also have this extreme burden of guilt. So we thought that would help with the theme of the game, the horror and depth of Isaac’s character. We also chose it because we feel that it’s something that most people can really relate to – that guilt over your feelings towards a loved one. We thought, everybody has experienced that in some way – not necessarily in the same way Isaac has, but we thought everyone could relate to it. Again, this was done to give Isaac more depth in a way that was really relatable.
IG: While the horror genre really plays to atmosphere and fright tactics, Dead Space brings in an immense psychological factor into the fray as displayed in the “steps.” Can you talk some more about the importance that Stross brings to the arc of Dead Space 2 and his relational aspect with Isaac?
WB: We needed a character that helped us explain what Isaac was going through right before the game starts. Isaac is having a little trouble remembering everything that happens to him right before the game starts. So Stross is a way for us to create a little bit of dialog that fills in the back-story. Hopefully when players start Dead Space 2, they are a little inquisitive about what Isaac has gone through between Dead Space and Dead Space 2, so Stross helped that. When we started thinking about ways that we could resolve the arc with Nicole, that we could resolve Isaac’s guilt over Nicole, and also ways we could play on the theme of childhood rhymes, that worked out really well for Dead Space, we were kicking around ideas and somebody came up with the “Stick a Needle in Your Eye” lines, and that was a really interesting way to bring in those old rhymes and also give us a really, really horrific and memorable way for Isaac to go about resolving that guilt. In the end, it seemed like it was a really nice theme to keep touching on the psychosis that Stross is going through, that he’s got this obsession with eyes. When Isaac finally gets to the point where he goes into that machine at the end, that it makes it feel like it all comes together, that all that crazy babbling from Stross makes sense. And “oh my God, I can’t believe what I have to do to resolve all this guilt.”
IG: Isaac has somewhat stood on his own in the series thus far, a man visibly troubled, but very calm. Besides the necessities punctuated by keeping the game on track, what were you going for in Isaac’s own experience, and how did you try to translate that experience to the gamer? Was it about scaring Isaac, or the gamer?
WB: You know, it’s really more about scaring the gamer. We tried really hard to make Isaac feel like he reacts appropriately. We wanted him to feel like he’s exasperated, exhausted, and just angry that he has to go through all of this. But for us, it was more about scaring the crap out of the player because there were a few times where we tried to make it look like he was scared to death, and it was really hard to pull it off in a way that didn’t make the player feel like he was frustrated with Isaac because Isaac is screaming like a little girl or going “oh my God, I can’t believe I’m going through this!” So we felt like when we have Isaac cross that line and it sounds like he’s terrified, it goes to far. It makes the player feel like he’s been put in control of this guy who’s maybe a little too wussy for his tastes. Again, we want Isaac to feel like he’s believable... [but] never to the point where you feel frustrated with him. You never want to feel like you want to reach into the TV and slap him and say, “Dude, come on and get it together.”
IG: Thanks, Wright.
