I apologize, Glen Schofield did confirm it's just a hallucination.
1UP: We had some [warning: spoiler -- Ed.] questions about Nicole's involvement in the game. If she's really dead, as is revealed in the plot twist near the end of the game, what's the deal with the segment where you had to protect her from Necromorphs? How could she "die" from their attacks, and how could she work on the computer console if she's not actually there?
GS: It's part of the dementia that is affecting Isaac.
It's also worth noting that it's from an
interview just a couple of months after the game was released, well before a sequel was in production and before Schofield left Visceral. He also confirms what I said, that they plotted out a huge, massive universe to be explored with later installments.
He also called Isaac "the icon" and confirmed he was not dead during interviews for Dead Space: Extraction in Game Informer.
GS: It's so soon after the release of Dead Space that we really haven't discussed a sequel too much. We really need to take a break, get some sleep, see our families, and then decide what's next for this great team. But if there were to be a sequel, it sure wouldn't be hard to go in a number of directions with the story. We wrote so much more of the universe when we created this game. The backstory goes back hundreds, even millions of years, and the way Dead Space ends is, well, just right. We'll get back to you on this one.
So Isaac was written to survive before a sequel was in production, and Schofield confirms they have just scratched the surface of the universe Visceral created. And other
interviews confirm he was meeting in-person with the likes of Eli Roth and Wes Craven, so I think that pretty much explains the ending.
Variety also confirmed over the summer something I also said from the get-go, that EA has been
developing a trilogy.
And I can even tell you when I saw the game at the GameStop managers conference in Las Vegas, two months before it came out, their people there were already confirming a sequel.
TEEPO pwned per usual.