Isaac Clarke Still Hates His Life and His Job in Dead Space 3

When we met Clarke in the first Dead Space, he was a quiet guy. A little messed up, but a quiet guy. Kept his mask on. Never saw his face. Never said anything. Well, except for grunting after curb stomping the crap out of something nasty. But first and foremost, he was kept to himself, and he was an accomplished engineer.

He knew how to fix things, and maybe even improvise if he had to. He could hack a couple of wires, fix some fancy sci-fi core to get something else back up and running… He had the smarts about that. But when it came to Necromorphs? Well, he definitely had to improvise with an engineer’s tools. After all, he was only on the USG Ishimura to fix the damn thing, not fight an army of creepy crawlies.

The same could be said of Dead Space 2. Once again, Clarke awoke in a dark place filled with the same old creepy crawlies, having nothing but the tools of his trade. An assault rifle might have seemed a little out of place, but he knew enough to point and pull the damn trigger.

And did he enjoy any of this? No, not at all. As the unwilling volunteer from the audience in these life-threatening creep shows, Isaac Clarke isn’t the gung-ho “Yeah let’s get ‘em!” soldier guy. No, he’d much rather solder things closed, put the power cells in the right place, and make sure the right pieces are working for whatever he was working on to turn on and drive away.

What we’ve been shown so far of Dead Space 3 has fans utterly divided. Is this an action game now? What about the horror? And is Isaac suddenly okay with his role, holding a plasma cutter in one hand, an assault rifle in the other, and posing heroically?

Visceral Games’ Executive Producer Steve Papoutsis said that this is definitely NOT the case. Isaac Clarke still hates his role in this whole sick and twisted play, and he certainly won’t be the first to go running into battle with a gun cocked.

“He by no means is a vigilante for hire or any nonsense like that,” said Papoutsis in an interview with Joystiq. “That’s not what’s going on with Isaac. And I don’t want to get into the details too much ’cause that would kinda spoil the fun for folks, but let’s just say after the events of The Sprawl — which was, as you may or may know if you played it, a massive disaster — he’s kind of laying low. And he kind of wants to be left alone.”

For those of you who haven’t finished Dead Space 2, the best spoiler-free version is this: lots of things go incredibly wrong, there’s a lot of explosions, and…there’s a lot of non-closure. Clarke’s mantra right now is, “I just want to go home.” He’s got you beat, Dorothy.

“The events that kind of thrust [Clarke] into action in Dead Space 3 will reveal themselves when people play the game, but by no means is he a willing participant in the story that’s gonna unfold,” continued Papoutsis.

If Visceral is looking to up the ante after giving us the pulse-pounding opener for Dead Space 2, we might end up suffering a heart attack. But will this be the last time we ever see our most favorite limb-hacking reluctant hero? Papoutsis was pretty tight lipped, predictably, but did say that Dead Space 3 will bring a lot of answers to a lot of questions.

“We didn’t set out to make a trilogy,” said Papoutsis. “We would love to create many more Dead Space games, there’s a lot of stories to tell of the Dead Space universe.

“With Dead Space 3, it’s definitely Isaac’s story and we’re trying to bring answers to this story. There’s a lot of questions that have come in Dead Space 1 and 2, and with Dead Space 3 we really wanna answer a lot of questions.”

Via Joystiq.