More Dead Space Remake details are said to be coming in mid-October along with new gameplay footage following yesterday’s press event. The release of the Dead Space Remake is still about four months off but EA/Motive Studios have been ramping up media coverage for the upcoming game.
Yesterday press were invited to an event where they were given the opportunity to play parts of the game, still in development, for a few hours. It is expected that footage of this will be released once the embargo lifts next month. For the most part, early impressions are very positive and the game is said to be in a “very good place” and that it’s a “remake done right” and despite some changes, it was felt to be respectful to the original. This should come as a relief for fans of the franchise who are worried that the remake could take extensive liberties with re-interpretations of the original that raised the bar for space horror.
Motive Studios also launched a new developer blog yesterday. In it, the team shares more Dead Space Remake details and their feelings about the goals of reviving the iconic game for a new audience and original fans alike.
New Developer Blog
Remaking #DeadSpace is about rebuilding the game from scratch and expanding on what made the original so great in the first place. Learn more in our blog. https://t.co/YDZMm1lUnB
— Motive (@MotiveStudio) September 28, 2022
“First, we honor the legacy,” says Senior Producer Philippe Ducharme. “We look at the original game with the utmost respect. So the core foundations will remain the same. However, we are making several enhancements to the experience to make it enticing for both new players and returning ones.”
“And we want the fans of Dead Space to rediscover Dead Space as if for the first time,” says Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola, “but with everything feeling familiar and recognizable. That’s something that’s really important to us.”
Project Technical Director David Robillard agrees. “It’s a very iconic game for a lot of people,” he says, “and it has a very strong cult following. A lot of people reference it as one of the best in the genre. So we wanted to make sure we understood well what made it the best, and we wanted to make sure we kept that.”
New engine for modern tech
One of the other key points for the remake is making the most of modern technology to achieve goals not originally possible for the first game. There will be new side quests and characters that may have only been encountered via the original game’s audio logs who will now get expanded parts but then this is only the tip of the iceberg for what is being done. Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola says that “every asset—every animation, every texture, every effect or piece of enemy behavior—has been rebuilt in the new engine.” The remake is being made in a new Frostbite engine that allows for a more immersive approach than the original. From movement to lighting, the visceral visual aspects of combat, to fog effects, many gameplay mechanics have been improved upon.
“We’re also actually creating the entire game as one sequential shot,” says Philippe. “From the moment you start the game to the moment you end the game, there are no camera cuts or load screens—unless you die. The Ishimura is now fully interconnected, so you can walk from Point A to Point Z, visit the entire ship, and revisit locations you’ve already completed to pick up things you might have missed—that’s all new. It’s now a completely unbroken experience.”
“How you move around in zero-G is also something we felt we could improve in terms of experience and immersion,” Roman says. “So there’s much more 360-degree freedom; now when you play Dead Space you feel like you’re in space. This also allows us to revisit some of the old content and create new ways to navigate, new paths, and new environments with new challenges.”
“And with the computational power we have now, we’re able to push lighting much, much, much further, “ David adds, “both from a pure lighting perspective and also a shadowing perspective. And the ‘peeling’ and dismemberment system we have now is really cool and it adds quite a bit to our gameplay; it feels more dynamic, more strategic.”
“Right, when you start shooting, you see the skin and the flesh getting ripped from the enemy’s body,” says Roman, “and then you start to see the bones underneath, and then you can cut the bones and it cuts the limb, and so on. It looks amazing—but it also gives direct feedback to the player about the amount of damage they’re doing.”
“And we’re doing a lot with volumetric effects like fog,” says David, “and how that plays with everything: with our shadowing, with our lighting, and also with our physics. We would not have been able to push that at the same level before.”
The Dead Space Remake is set to release on PC and consoles on January 27, 2023.
Source: Insider Gaming