Dead Space will return in 2023 after a 10-year hiatus. But the remake arrives at a very different landscape than what it left behind. Terrorism has become big business, and once-niche survival horror games are now booming. Resident Evil has returned to its glory, Silent Hill has risen from the grave, and a host of terrifying indies have captured the imagination of players and streamers around the world. The original his Dead Space was somewhat of a gamble for his decidedly mainstream publisher EA in 2008, but the remake will almost certainly hit him in 2023.
As part of this month’s Dead Space-focused IGN First, we sat down with members of EA Motive to discuss how the original Dead Space changed survival horror and why the genre is so popular today. , and explored how the evolution of technology has brought the game back to life. even more terrifying.
One look at Dead Space and you instantly know where its roots lie. “I think something like Resident Evil 4 changed the landscape of survival horror at the time,” says EA Motive environmental artist and Dead Space series veteran Taylor Kingston. “Dead Space certainly inspired me a lot. [it]”
But while Resident Evil 4 certainly inspired Dead Space’s approach to over-the-shoulder combat and haunted house-level design, much of the original game’s direction was inspired by movies like Aliens, The Thing, and Event Horizon. pulled from
Dead Space Art Director Mike Yazijian said: “And over the years, clearly Dead Space, whether it’s Silent Hill or Resident Evil, has brought a lot of emotion to it. Actually, it’s much more than the old video game stuff. felt immersive and much more mature in tone…a horror game.”
Dead Space Remake creative director Roman Campos-Oriola believes the original game’s dedication to cinematic-style realism has broader implications. “I think one of the things that Dead Space has pushed further is one of the things that has inspired so many other games: it’s just immersion,” he says. “since then […] Since Resident Evil 7, I think there’s been a growing movement in survival horror to be more immersive in order to make it scarier. “
Strangely enough, it may actually have been Dead Space’s influence that froze it for ten years. Survival horror was changing when Dead Space 3 came out in his 2013. The Resident Evil formula had fallen out of fashion, and spooky indie hits like Amnesia and Outlast were redefining the genre. These games had a renewed dedication to first-person immersion, dialing up the intensity of horror. Third-person horror has kind of gone out of fashion and even Resident Evil itself has finally switched to first-person cameras.
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But years later, Resident Evil has returned to its third-person roots and is more popular than ever.
“Why do I think [survival horror is] Come back? That’s because it’s making a comeback, not just in games, but in the broader entertainment industry,” Campos-Oriola theorizes. “It’s been a while since [came] Back to the wider entertainment industry.If you remember when the original Dead Space was [was released], or even before that, if you wanted to go see a horror movie, you had to find a theater showing it in your town. “
Yazijian agrees. “I love how it’s making a comeback,” he says. “But what I love about it now is that it’s almost going mainstream, right? With so many games coming out and so many movies coming out, people are watching more horror genres than ever before.”
The current popularity of survival horror makes 2023 an ideal time for Dead Space to make a comeback, but the biggest upside is advances in technology. “As developers, we have more tricks and tools,” explains Campos-Oriola. “So we were able to go back to the original inspiration for Dead Space: The Thing, Aliens, Event Horizon, those kinds of movies. Due to technical limitations, or not even attempted, [could not] do it. We can do those things today. “
“If you think about the original Alien, when you enter a big room where the eggs are all hidden in the fog, the fog is more than atmosphere, it’s part of hiding,” he continues. “Okay, now we have really dynamic physical fog. Yeah, we could hide creatures in them. You could actually lose an enemy in the fog. His footprints and , we can trace how he splits the fog and how it closes behind him.”
The new technology available in the Frostbite engine means the team at EA Motive can improve the core of Dead Space, a fully immersive experience.
“I think the most important thing for me is the atmosphere, right?” says Yazijian. “Since we look at the three main pillars of Dead Space from an art direction perspective, […] Horror was the best. […] So we wanted to go back to that horror. Then ask, “What’s the scariest thing in a horror movie?” It is a sense of light, light and dark, and the play between the two. So playing the game now is darker. […] Enemies move as the player moves through the environment. You can see the play of light and dark in the environment. “
To further enhance the immersion, Ishimura transformed from a series of separate levels into a fully interconnected spacecraft. You can walk the full length and backtrack freely. It’s a feature that makes it feel like a real place rather than a series of video game missions. But this conversion meant more work than just creating the areas that linked the original game’s maps.
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“Once you have this one ship, you have created another problem that needs to be filled,” explains technical director David Robillard. “So how do you fill that empty moment? […] Well, we created this Intensity Director. This is more than just an AI spawner. It creates moments that make you freak out, and that’s the whole point of it, following an intended intensity curve that the level designer puts into the level and adjusts based on where you are within the mission-her brief. “
Somewhat similar to Left 4 Dead’s praised AI system, the Intensity Director can analyze the experience’s action-fear curve and trigger events if things have been calm for too long. “There are nearly 400 events that can be triggered,” says Robillard, and dropping enemies on the map is just the beginning.
“It’s not just AI,” he reveals. “There are sound bites, animations, environmental triggers. Fans start, ships creak, lights flicker, lights go out, psychotic events. It can happen in Director, where it blurs the lines and makes it hard to see what’s scripted and what’s not.”
Immersive horror was at the core of the original Dead Space. And now, with horror more popular than ever, now is the perfect time for it to return and use the latest technology to push its immersion to the next level. Environments can recreate the cinematic influences of the original game, and Intensity Director ensures that immersion aids gameplay and atmosphere. For more improvements in the Dead Space remake, see how the EA Motive team created a new version of the Necromorph transformation scene, and how the story was rewritten.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK news and features editor.
