EA bucks convention with preview of extremely unfinished Dead Space remake

Thirteen years after EA first scared gamers with Dead space, the publisher has confirmed its intention to remake the classic sci-fi survival horror from the ground up. The brief cinematic sizzle reel of grim follow-up shots and environmental gore from July’s EA Play event was followed this week by a behind-the-scenes look, full of clearly unfinished content, rudimentary “gray boxes” and a ray of hope that EA’s attitude behind this story might be the right one.

The 40-minute show with Motive lead producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola was, kind of like Dead spacethe protagonist of the working class Isaac Clarke, quite skinny and utilitarian. Right now, what we still don’t know about the remake could fill a haunted wreckage infested with ravenous space zombies – and that’s intentional.

Right off the bat, Ducharme and Campos-Oriola emphasized that the preproduction version they ran on the Frostbite engine was far from representative of the final gameplay. Instead, they offered only the slightest hint of how the developer behind Star Wars Squadrons plans to tackle a faithful, but more gruesome, reinvention of the 2008 original for modern hardware. What we have seen are a few working environments underway for the decrepit mining cargo ship USG Ishimura, an approximate in-game model of Clarke’s engineering combination and a lesson in destructible necromorph biology in an entirely unfinished setting. The reason for this unusually straightforward approach was to provide a sounding board so that the Dead space the team can get as much feedback as possible from fans of the game.

Stripped

Ducharme and Campos-Oriola spent most of the feed telling rather than showing in a loose question-and-answer format. Discussing the team’s larger vision, they touched on several familiar sounding highlights: Motive’s desire to maintain authenticity and honor the legacy of the original game; how the series and the gaming industry have evolved over the past 13 years, paving the way for new gaming opportunities; and how the oppressive and stressful atmosphere of the Ishimura remains a mainstay of the remake’s design principles.

To reintroduce the entrapment of the planet Ishimura, the developers showed a series of slides detailing how the art team came back to Dead space The assets inherited from 2008 as a reference to embellish a Extraterrestrial-esque passage with more environmental details – added material shaders, lighting and volumetric visual effects – before moving on to Clarke moving through the finished L-shaped room.

While clearly only representing a first visual pass, Clarke’s bulky suit and interior of the ship looked like the room, though apparently without any of the next-gen bells and whistles like ray tracing that Motive has planned for the final product. With less than a full year of work on the game under the team’s belt, it’s safe to say that the core visuals should see improvements as development continues.

Peel of their members?

Motive also demonstrated their so-called “dismemberment gym”, an incomplete, gray-boxed test room where developers could press a button to generate a low-level necromorph for target practice. . The difference from the original game is the “peeling system,” a crude term for a new body destruction system that will allow players to separate the skin (and, in turn, the gooey pieces underneath) from the body. ‘a monster.

To give a basic idea, Ducharme and Campos-Oriola demonstrated a small X-ray gore tool visually “cutting” a T-necromorph. Much like a clinical technical demonstration, the tool cut the top dermal layer to reveal the musculature and skeleton below. The developers have sprouted the potential to peel off the fleshy layers Dead spaceThe cast of Critters and has promised bold upgrades to the game’s infamous dismemberment damage modeling. Motive hopes to make wounds disturbingly real, right down to bullet entry locations and hyperspecific physics. It even includes graphic scenarios like torn ligaments leading to hanging limbs.

The remake will also host a few modern design changes, replacing the original’s surface-to-surface superman leap with the full suite of 360-degree zero-G movements from Dead space 2 and 3. Ducharme and Campos-Oriola have indicated that this change will offer new interactive ways of probing the dark spaces of the Ishimura which were previously only cutscenes. In a nice narrative link with Dead spacethe sequel to, Gunner Wright, whose gritty voice brought Clarke to life in Dead space 2 and 3, will play the engineer in the remake. This change removes the mostly silent protagonist from the original, with the caveat that he will only speak if there is a good narrative reason.

A more transparent EA

Realistic guts and a fear of turning your stomach are great benchmarks, but what’s really fascinating here is that EA has allowed Motive to show everything the remake has soon. After years of being sued by fans over microtransaction scandals, Star Wars Battlefront IIthe lootbox debacle (and a generally sloppy deployment for IP until 2019 Jedi: Fallen Order), and indifference to its consumer base, perhaps the publisher finally understood the merits of being open and honest from the start. We were wowed by the original game when it first released, describing it as an experience that “takes all the best parts of the genre and makes them better, while avoiding almost every pit that similar titles fall into.”

While it remains to be seen whether Motive will maintain this degree of transparency throughout the remake’s development, even this rudimentary first look seems to be on the right track.

Listing Image by EA