My Reaction to the EA Announcement of the Dead Space Remake.

 

On Thursday, July 22nd, during their EA Play Live 2021 event, EA Games announced that they will be releasing a remake for Dead Space.

I had heard rumors for a while now that following Capcom's successful remakes of Resident Evil 2 and to a lesser extent Resident Evil 3, along with EA's successful release of the Mass Effect Trilogy: Legendary Edition that the next remake that EA would/should announce would be for Dead Space.  I was very much hoping for either an announcement about either a remake or even an HD Edition with a release on current-gen consoles (is the Switch considered current or last gen?), leaning more towards the HD Edition because that seemed like the least expensive option for a company hellbent on microtransactioning everything in a video game.  I was about 80% not expecting a remake and reboot of the entire series and I have somewhat mixed, but also very high hopes for the game.  So when this trailer aired during EA's event, I was pretty excited, to say the least:

I have a lot of questions, none of which I expect answered for quite some time, as well as some hopes for how Motive Studios approaches the Dead Space universe.

• How much of the story from the first Dead Space is going to happen?
• Is the main character still going to be Isaac Clarke?
• A major part of the game and story was Isaac finding out about Nicole's fate so I'm not sure if doing the exact same thing would have the same effect.
• Is Isaac or whoever is the main character going to have a speaking role as in Dead Space 2 and 3?
• I would not be upset about a gender swap and the main character now being Ashley Clarke (also being a reference to Evil Dead).
• How much of the story will Motive take from the movies, the prequel, the sequels, the novels, and the comic?
• How will the stories/events from the aforementioned Dead Space media affect the Dead Space remake?
• B.K. Evenson wrote the only two Dead Space novels, Martyr and Catalyst.  There were some great moments in both of those books that really put the effects of the Marker on human minds and why someone slitting their throat in front of Isaac while singing a lullaby was completely rational in their own minds.  After reading those books,  I decided to go back through Dead Space with those descriptions in mind and it made the game so much creepier and sad at the same time.
• Dead Space: Mobile is an entry that I rarely hear people talk about.  This was an amazing mobile game that had some of the best sanity effects since Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem.  And by sanity effects, I mean that things that would happen to the main character Vandal like seeing their reflection in a mirror moving in the opposite direction, walking from one room to another only to loop back into the same room, and having grotesque images appear on the screen of the phone around where you have your hands to distract you from aiming your weapon.
• In a similar event, at the beginning of Dead Space Extraction, there was an event where the main character was killing necromorphs, only to find out that they had been hallucinating and were actually killing P-Sec enforcement and other engineers.  This type of hallucination I felt was a lot more effective than Isaac frequently grabbing his head or seeing people who were there precipitated by a flash of light.  The hallucinations need to be seamless with their reality.
• I assume that Motive will be using a new composer for the remake, curious to know who it will be and how influenced by Jason Grave's score the music will be.
• I know a lot of the Dead Space fanbase has a hardon for Dead Space 2 and I have talked about my own reaction to the move away from survival horror to action horror, but I hope that they focus more on what made Dead Space a great survival horror game and not just make a game that is Dead Space 2 with the story from Dead Space.
• How much influence is EA Games going to have over the final product of the Dead Space remake and how often are they going to have a say as to what is put into the game and how it develops?

IGN did an interview with Motive Studios Senior Producer Philippe Ducharme and Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola which did answer some of the questions I posted above, but a lot of the questions came across as generalized answers.  I did appreciate that they addressed the issue with microtransactions (in Dead Space 3), however EA's Chief Studio Officer Laura Miele said regarding Motive Studio that "their general expertise in the action genre made it the right studio for this project.”  This has me worried for my last bullet point, because Dead Space should not start out as an action game because Isaac Clarke is not an action hero, but an engineer looking for his girlfriend and thrust into a hellish situation using mining equipment to defend himself.   Although I do not have any issues with it eventually turning into an action-horror game by the third installment especially if the games follow the same main character because, presumably, they will become more experienced and efficient at a necromorph outbreak.

So those are my general thoughts after hearing about the Dead Space remake slated for. . .some date in the near-ish future.  It is going to be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox X/S, and Windows, so I will either need to upgrade my laptop (a la buy a new one) or buy one of the consoles that can handle it because I do not want to end up waiting another five years before I play this game like I did with the first Dead Space.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
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