Trying to make sure that he feels like Isaac, he doesn't feel like another character. ‘How does he react in this moment? What's his sense of humor like? How does he react under pressure verbally? What's his speech pattern like?’ And it was just trying to get that personality correct.

“There was a lot of looking at Dead Space 2,” says Berry, “and looking at key scenes. 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. The once-silent protagonist now has a full script, and will chat with both other characters and himself. The first significant change you’re likely to notice is that Isaac Clarke can now speak. 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.” You change that direction very slightly and it can take you to a very different place. 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’. “As a player, generally what you want is to have the same feeling again, feel like you're playing it for the first time. “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.

Dead space language change