Dead Space remake devs knew they wanted to "completely redo" the game's most infamous set piece

The Dead Space remake devs at Motive went out of their way to ensure the revamped version of the game stayed true to the original, even setting up a room with side-by-side TVs to regularly play and compare both games, but even they knew that the game's asteroid turret section needed a substantial tune-up. There's even a whole new side objectives as part of the changes, involving a Dead Space Master Overide and crew rigs. 

Creative director Roman Campos-Oriola tells GamesRadar+ that the approach to each portion of the game "depends on the elements. We evaluated them. It was part of our discussion, like, are we keeping them like this? Or do we want to improve them based on some of the [design pillars] that I've explained? So the example of the turret section, we're like, actually, we want to completely redo that.

"And that's what we did. But we wanted to keep the elements in that fantasy," he continues. "That is actually quite cool. The fantasy of being on a gigantic spaceship that's being rained down with asteroids. It's kind of cool! It's really dangerous. It's really scary, it's really tense. OK, so that fantasy is interesting. Today, can we build a set piece that is more engaging with that fantasy than the original? And we think that we had the answer to that. 

"So now you're literally outside on the hull of the ship with the asteroids coming at you, trying to fix these cannons. And then once you fix the cannons, well, you have to synchronize to retrain them to target the asteroids. But you're not directly using them exactly like that. So basically, we try to capture the original fantasy of that sequence, and we tried to add a bit more of a space engineer fantasy to it. Because in the original it was Hammond fixing the turrets and Isaac shooting them, but Hammond is the soldier, so that's kind of weird. So we try to improve on that and make that sequence better in terms of pacing." 

As someone who counts the original Dead Space among their most-replayed games of all time, I can say definitely that I won't miss the original turret section. Every time I'd replay the game, that was always the bit where I'd lament that that part is next. Let turret sections stay buried in the mid-2000s along with that tsunami of brown-and-gray shooters, I say. 

Read our Dead Space review for a full breakdown of how this revamp improves on the storied original, or find out all the locations for the Dead Space Rig Upgrades here!