Two leads on the Dead Space remake have announced the game will not have microtransactions, along with how the game is being developed.
Issac Clark is an engineer, discovering the USG Ishimura starship he is working on has gone to hell. The crew are slaughtered, turned into blood-thirsty necromorphs, and his girlfriend is lost within. Now Issac must fight through the nightmarish monsters, while using his engineering tools to slice through the deadly alien menace.
Senior Producer Philippe Ducharme and Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola spoke to IGN, discussing how the game is being entirely remade in the Frostbite engine. Campos-Oriola revealed the team also have access to older iterations of levels, and all the original assets of the first Dead Space.
“In terms of visuals, sound, gameplay, everything, we are rebuilding all of these assets,” Campos-Oriola explains. “We are not porting them, it’s not uprezzing the texture or adding more polygons to the model. It’s really rebuilding all these elements, shooting all the animations, et cetera.”
Campos-Oriola also explained how the developers want the player fully immersed, using the technology of the latest PCs and gaming consoles to avoid load times all together. Ducharme explained the team’s objective was to keep the player playing the game, and may have revealed more about the game’s total length.
“As an objective that we gave early on to everyone, what we’re trying to achieve is an immersion where you never want to put your controller down. “Dead Space is not a 60 – 100 hour game. Ideal scenario, you don’t actually want to get up to go to the bathroom because you’re so immersed within the universe and you want to play it through in one sit-down.”
The diegetic UI will also be maintained in the remake, keeping Issac’s health-bar on his back, and making as many UI elements exist within the world. Along with using modern graphics and audio effects (such as volumetric effects and 3D audio), the developers also want to improve, but not replace, the original story.
“For us, the foundation is the Dead Space 1 story,” Campos-Oriola. “So, by default, that’s what is canon. But then there are some improvements that we want to make to that story.”
“And not necessarily improvements because those things were not really working in the original, more improvements because of what came after, and we’re like, ‘Aw man, that’s interesting if we could reference that, or if we could make a link to that’.” This would possibly include other media set between Dead Space and Dead Space 2.
“We’re doing it from a narrative standpoint,” Ducharme added, “but we’re also looking at it from a feature standpoint in the improvements and some of the content that evolved throughout the franchise.” One element that will not be returning from later installments in the series is microtransactions.
Dead Space 3 was infamous for micro-transactions for crafting materials for guns, or otherwise have to wait for a scavenging robot to pick up the materials over time. “We’re also learning from mistakes such as microtransactions,” Ducharme added, “which we will not have, for instance, in our game.” He also confirmed the team “never” had plans to introduce them into the remake.
Campos-Oriola and Ducharme also stated the gameplay will be refined; such as how Dead Space 2 handled the zero gravity segments. The dismemberment system will also be made gorier, and the developers are hoping to evolve it to allow more accessibility.
“Something that is also really important for us that was not there 12 years ago… is all those options or different ways to play the game if you need it,” Campos-Oriola explains. “All those elements of accessibility will definitely be something important for us in terms of opening the Dead Space experience to a broader set of people that didn’t necessarily have the opportunity or could play the game when it came out.”
Development has also been aided by the fan community, providing feedback every three weeks. This fan feedback is also being implemented across other EA games at large.
The Dead Space remake coming soon to Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Image: YouTube
