The Dead Space Remake is set to release in a week on January 27 and one of its developers has shared their feelings about playing the game in an interview with Play magazine. Dead Space Remake developer David Robillard (Technical Director) expressed how the game’s atmospheric audio scape is just a bit too much to handle when playing with headphones at night.
“When I’m playing it at night, I can’t play it with headphones. It’s just too f****ng scary,” Robillard tells PLAY magazine’s issue #22. “Just the amount of realism and, again, atmosphere. Not just visually, right? In the way we handle sound, ambiance, effects, having systems that will try to spook you. These things, you know, could have been done [on PS4], but not to the level we’re doing them today. And they really add a lot to this sort of genre and make the whole kind of experience come together even more.”
Using 3D Audio for Greater Immersion
These remarks from the Dead Space Remake developer re-enforce how 3D audio continues to gain support in games on both PC and consoles. While the Sony PlayStation 5 has its own 3D audio solution there is also Dolby Atmos or Spatial Audio, and it is becoming more common for game developers to incorporate 3D audio options in order to enhance the gaming experience. Fans of the Resident Evil franchise have been able to experience suspenseful moments such as hearing things creeping up on players long before they appear on screen with Dolby Atmos since Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. Senior Producer Phillipe Ducharme adds how anything that could be added to increase the level of immersion was a priority.
“Even when we started this project, I did several walkthroughs of the original game to make sure that I had it really mapped out in my mind – and immersion was one of the strongest selling points,” and, “For us, anything that we could do to try to enhance that immersion was an automatic yes.”
Discussion (5 replies)
Join Discussion →Maybe I've just been jaded since a kid, but never in my life have I found any game or film or TV show "scary".
The suspense of disbelief to be scared by a fictional creation is just too large, and the end result is that whenever creators try to make something "scary" it just comes across as silly to me.
And that's especially true coming from a 3rd person title. You might be able to live into it more and be more immersed if it were first person, but third person can't possibly be "scary" in any way shape or form.
That said, this sounds like more hype along the line of their old ad campaign for the last one "your mom hates this game"...
When I was 8 years old, Poltergeist scared the shit out of me, I won't lie. I still watched it though. I couldn't tell you why, it's not a particularly jumpy movie either. But other than that - yeah... nothing.
News stories about surprise astronomically high medical bills forcing people into bankruptcy even though they have insurance are what give me nightmares today.
These games tend to have a ton of jump-scare-gotcha type of stuff where you have to react very quickly or your character dies. That being said, I'm usually tense in the sense of trying to not die and have to restart. I wouldn't say that any game is really going to be scary on a psychological level but in terms of keeping your character alive, yep there is a fear factor.
Yeah, that's what I thought too, until I played Alien Isolation. I had to force myself to only play it before noon after a few sleepless nights.
The devs for that actually included a toggle in the cfg file for 3D/VR. I tried it once on my 1440p 3D monitor. That was enough.