To say that it still stings that Dead Space developer Visceral Games is gone (and along with them for the time being, the Dead Space franchise) is an understatement. It’s a sad reality of the industry when your game underperforms and your owner decides to cut its losses. There’s still that lingering question of “what if?”. Well, in an interview with Eurogamer, former creative director at Visceral Ben Wanat discussed just what the team would do had Dead Space 4 been given the green light.

For starters, Wanat talks about how after Dead Space 3, humanity would be on the verge of extinction thanks to the Necromorphs. As a result, the gameplay in Dead Space 4 would be more focused on the non-linear aspect of exploration that was touched on in DS3. “The notion was you were trying to survive day to day against infested ships, searching for a glimmer of life, scavenging supplies to keep your own little ship going, trying to find survivors,” explains Wanat. “The flotilla section in Dead Space 3 hinted at what non-linear gameplay could be, and I would have loved to go a lot deeper into that. I figured you’d start in a section of space, maybe following a trail of ship carcasses to an orbital station you think might have the parts and fuel needed to get your ship Shock-capable.” (In the Dead Space universe, the ShockPoint Drive was a means of interstellar travel invented by an astrophysicist named Hideki Ishimura.)

Speaking of those abandoned ships, Wanat says that the opportunity to go from ship to ship scraping up supplies would’ve opened the creative doors for the team to go crazy in terms of creating some interesting environments. “The ships you would visit are where the game would get really diverse. The Ishimura had some inkling of that diversity with the variously themed decks. But imagine an entire roster of ship types, each with unique purposes, floor plans, and gameplay. Our original prototypes for the Dead Space 3 flotilla had some pretty wild setups that I wish we had been able to use.”

As for the weapons system, Dead Space 4 would’ve revisited the crafting system introduced in DS3, which in his opinion, took away from the synergy that made the weapons special. “I think in our exuberance to really lean into Isaac’s mechanic background, we managed to diminish that synergy with the Dead Space 3 crafting system. I love that it gave players creativity in putting together their weapons, but it became very difficult to tune when you allowed players to break the primary and alt-fire pairings. There would have needed to be a focus on re-perfecting the weapon balance while still giving players plenty to tinker with.”

And then there’s the topic of series protagonist, Isaac Clarke. The ending of Dead Space 3 left the door open for Isaac, Carver or Ellie to take on the Necromorphs, or even have an entirely new character at the helm. “With the apocalypse, there was the opportunity for a clean break,” Wanat said. “It wouldn’t be necessary for the story going forward to include any of them.” In his view, however, Wanat said he’d have loved to do a game with Ellie at the helm and had always “imagined her as the protagonist of Dead Space 4“.

To read the rest of the interview, including Wanat’s opinion on the future of (if any) Dead Space instalments, you can check out the link above.