We want the player to feel alone as they’re exploring the Ishimura, along with Isaac who is also alone, and if we had him constantly chatting, it would have betrayed and depleted that tension. Because as a player, if you hear that running commentary going, as you’re playing through the experience, you start to develop an unwanted comfort level. “We wanted to be very cautious of having Isaac constantly commenting on what was going on around him. “There was a set of ground rules for how we would write Isaac’s dialogue in order to not have him end up being too verbose,” MacMillan continues. However, Isaac is a character who goes from silent engineer to bloodthirsty space marine over the course of a trilogy, so interpreting the beginning of that journey realistically wasn’t going to be easy. There were initial doubts Wright would return to the role, but once he was on board, it meant they didn’t need to fully reimagine this character or alter his personality to better fit a new interpretation - only to draw from the past while simultaneously looking towards the future. In order to do that, we needed to voice him, and we decided very quickly that we needed to.” “When we started this project one of the first things the core leadership team decided we needed to address was wanting to provide Isaac with a better sense of agency, and make him feel a little more relatable.

While the end result has paid off, it’s all a consequence of consistency throughout production that MacMillan was surprisingly willing to delve into. “There are sequences and moments and arcs and relationships that build throughout the game, and Gunner does a great job getting into that pocket, getting into that tone, since I appreciate that some of those could have been challenging, but they all came out fantastic.” “One exciting thing about our version of Dead Space in the remake is we had an opportunity to develop a little more emotional range with Isaac,” MacMillan says.

Dead space action figure