In an interview with Edge-Online, Dead Space Executive Producer Glen Schofield has revealed that his team studied photos of car crashes in order to create some of the nastier parts of the game.
"In the story of Dead Space, there was a war that happened on the ship before Isaac, the main character, gets there," Schofield explained. "So he’s going to find a lot of nasty stuff, corpses in various states of annihilation.
"We knew this would be difficult to portray, because sometimes gore in games looks cheap and unrealistic," he went on. "Sure enough, the first few corpses that we did, just weren’t convincing enough. I rejected them.
"This sounds horrible, but we had to go look at pictures of car accidents and war scenes and things like that because we had to get it right; we had to portray scenes of terrible carnage and realism. It’s a big part of making that experience convincing."
Dead Space seems to have benefited from this rather grisly approach – the Metacritic score average is sitting pretty at 88%.
What do you guys think? Is this a step too far in the name of entertainment?
The game is released today in North America and on October 24 in Europe.