It’s rare that a pistol gets to be the star of the show in a video game, but that’s exactly what happened in Dead Space. The 2008 survival horror classic made the Plasma Cutter, a handgun-like tool that shoots vertical or horizontal projectiles, the most essential tool for dismembering your necromorph enemies. When it came to remaking Dead Space, developer EA Motive knew that it had to do right by this iconic weapon. And so it’s exactly as you remember.
“Who wants to change the Plasma Cutter? It’s perfect as it is,” says Roman Campos-Oriola, creative director on Dead Space at EA Motive. “I’m joking a bit, but it’s exactly the way we approached that weapon during the development.
“Anybody [who] played any Dead Space before remembers that weapon, remembers the distinct click-click when it turns, remembers the sounds of it, the impact of it on any creatures, and just how it feels playing with that weapon,” he says. “So for us it was really important to keep that memory, to fulfil in a sense that memory of the player.”
But while the form and function of the Plasma Cutter is just how you remember it, EA Motive has made some small changes and improvements. At first these may seem invisible, but take a close look at the weapon’s refreshed, high-definition model and you’ll see dozens of new little details. As the rotating muzzle flips from vertical to horizontal format you can see the interlocking components of the mechanism twist in its housing.
“We really had to go back to the drawing board,” Campos-Oriola explains. “With the visual fidelity, both in terms of graphics but also in some of [the] animations that we have today, we had to go much more in detail […] on how that thing actually works. What is each piece? What are those little elements really doing? Whether or not we’re using that afterward in game, we had to really define how that thing would move and behave if it was a real tool.”
It’s with this more detailed approach that the differences between the original Plasma Cutter and its remake successor begin. And the closer you look, the more differences you’ll find. “The plasma cutter is not the same as in the original Dead Space,” Campos-Oriola openly admits. “But you feel like it’s the same, you think it’s the same as you remember it. But obviously the model is not the same, the textures are not the same, the sounds are not the same. We rebuilt completely how it works because it’s a completely new engine. We’re not using any code, any assets, anything from the original. But our goal with that weapon was to be as faithful as possible to the original experience.”
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An element that is more than just a visual update is the new upgrades system, which enhances the lethal abilities of Dead Space’s weapons in various ways. “Every weapon has an upgrade part,” explains game director Eric Baptizat. “You can find a new section for the weapon that you can plug in it and physically attach to the gun.”
“It was really important to create components that look credible,” he added, “that really fit to the weapons, that are perceivable once you see them in your environment, and that are logical to their function. So it was really a job to create those new elements that plug into the original design naturally.”
If this sounds familiar to you, it may be because you remember weapon upgrades from Dead Space 2. In fact, the Plasma Cutter even features the damage-over-time upgrade from that beloved sequel.
“One thing we’ve been bringing from Dead Space 2 and expanding a little bit on is the concept of special upgrades,” says Campos-Oriola. “So those upgrade nodes that actually have a broader impact on the weapon. So one of those upgrades [came] straight from DS2. It’s the fact that when you shoot with the Plasma Cutter, if you have that upgrade, the limb of the enemy that you shoot at is going to catch fire. And so it’s going to burn the flesh and do a bit more damage. So we made some adjustments or improvements like that.”
Despite its cool new upgrades, you can be safe in the knowledge that the Plasma Cutter is more or less exactly the weapon you love and remember. That can’t be said for the rest of Dead Space’s armoury, though, which has been significantly redesigned.
“When we approached the weapon design for the remake, we wanted to rebalance them a bit to make sure that each weapon felt powerful in their own way,” says Campos-Oriola. “So for example, what we did with the Pulse Rifle is that we took an element from Dead Space 2 – in Dead Space 2 [the rifle’s alternate fire] was a grenade launcher – and we adjusted it slightly, because now it’s the proximity mine.”
“We keep, for most of the weapons, the primary fire [exactly the same] because they’re iconic and they serve different functions in terms of the way you fight enemies,” Baptizat explains. “But we [found] out that there [was] something we could push even more to give more tools for the player to do some crowd control with enemies. And we wanted to give a unique value for each weapon.”
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The ideas for the new alternative fire modes were built on the foundations of fiction credibility. “One of our philosophies, for example with the alt fire of the Force Gun, was we want that to be useful in the sense of how space miners would use that,” Campos-Oriola explains.
The Force Gun, once a weapon that simply pushed enemies backwards, now has the ability to create a gravity well that pulls in enemies, much like Zarya’s ultimate in Overwatch. It inflicts no damage, but by grouping enemies together the gravity well can be efficiently combined with something like the Line Gun, which can fire wide beams across crowds, or place laser traps.
“What is super interesting is that you can combine [the gravity well] with all other weapons,” says Baptizat. “So with the primary fire of the Force Gun itself, or with the trap of the Line Gun. So you can have fun [placing] your trap, attracting the enemy onto this place [with the gravity well] and putting them together with the proximity mine of the Pulse Rifle. Basically, the idea was to create new tools to be able to play with enemies and create new strategies.”
Combining elegantly (and gruesomely) with these new weapons is the peeling system, which ‘peels’ an enemy’s flesh apart, layer by layer. This gory addition creates a fun one-two punch with the Force Gun and the Plasma Cutter.
“The Force Gun in the original, it would shoot an enemy, a slasher, he would fall on his ass, stand up,” recalls Campos-Oriola. “You’re like, ‘How much damage did I do to that guy?’ You’re not really sure. He’s all but dead, but you don’t know that.
“Now when you shoot with the Force Gun, the same slasher falls on his ass, stands up, and now he is really skinny because all the skin, all the fat, all the muscle is gone,” he continues. “There’s almost just the skeleton left on that guy, and you’re like, ‘Yeah, pretty sure he is about to die.’ Where it’s become even more useful is that it’s a great weapon to combine with another, because now with just one shot of the Plasma Cutter you will be able to cut that limb because the bones are [revealed].”
This rethinking of Dead Space’s guns means that all of your favourites are still here, and work almost exactly how you remember, but have been changed to be more useful and creative. That seems to be the general idea behind all of the remake’s changes, which we’ll be looking at in more detail this month as part of IGN First. For more, check out the opening of the game in 4K, as well as a comparison between the remake and the original game.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.