Dead Space returns in 2023 after a decade-long hiatus.
But the remake will arrive to a landscape very different from the one it left;
terror has become a big business,
and once-niche survival horror games are now booming.
Where the original Dead Space was somewhat of a gamble for the distinctly
mainstream EA back in 2008, the remake is
practically a sure-fire hit in 2023.
As part of this month’s Dead Space-focused IGN First,
we sat down with members of EA Motive
to explore how the original Dead Space changed survival horror,
why the genre is so popular today, and how the evolution of technology
has made the game’s return even more terrifying.
Take one look at Dead Space
and it’s immediately obvious where its roots lie.
Resident Evil 4 changed the landscape of a survival horror
at the time, which Dead Space certainly took a ton of inspiration from.
That's what we were told it was going to be, was Resident Evil 4 in space.
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 drawn from films such as Alien, The Thing, and Event Horizon.
I think throughout the years we've seen games being influenced by feature films
and bringing a lot more of those cinematic techniques and influences into games.
Whether it's Silent Hill or Resident Evil, obviously Dead Space.
brought a lot of that feeling into it.
It actually felt like
it was a lot more immersive,
a lot more mature in tone.
One of the elements that Dead Space really pushed further
it's that thing about immersion.
Since then, if you see the most recent... starting with Resident Evil 7,
there's been a bigger push I think in survival horror,
to try to make them more immersive in order to make them more scary also.
I think Dead Space was a precursor.
Strangely, it may partially have been Dead Space’s
influence that put it on ice for ten years.
When Dead Space 3 arrived in 2013, survival horror was mutating.
The Resident Evil formula was falling out of vogue, and creepier
indie hits like Amnesia and Outlast were redefining the genre.
These games had a new-found dedication to immersion via their first-person
perspectives, which dialed up the intensity of the scares.
Third-person horror became a sort of antiquated thing of the past, to the point
that even Resident Evil itself eventually switched to a first-person camera.
But, years later, Resident Evil has returned to its third-person roots
and is more popular than ever.
In fact, the popularity of survival horror games
as a whole is seemingly higher than it’s ever been.
So survival horror, it's like horror.
It's always been a niche.
If you remember when the original Dead Space came,
or even before that, if you wanted to go see a horror movie.
You had to find the one theater in town that was playing horror movies.
Now today, most of the horror movies gets national release.
I love how it's making a comeback.
Something that used to be more niche before, if you said you like
horror movies, or games, you're like, “Oh, okay.
It's not a huge market for that.” But what I love about it
now that it's becoming mainstream almost, right?
There's so many games coming out, there’s so many movies that are coming out
also that are popular and people are watching the horror genre more than ever.
While the popularity of survival horror right now certainly makes 2023 an ideal
time for Dead Space to return,
the biggest benefit is the advancement of technology.
We have more tricks and tools and so we were able
to go back to the original inspirations of Dead Space
like The Thing, Alien, Event Horizon, these types of movies,
and look for elements in those movies
that either were tried and did not succeed that much in the original
because technological constraints,
or were not even tried because we cannot do that.
Today, now we can.
But if you think about the original Alien, when they enter that big room
with all the eggs hidden in the fog, the fog is more than ambience.
Well now, we have real dynamic in physical fog.
So yeah, we could hide creatures in them.
You could actually lose an enemy inside the fog.
The new technology available in the Frostbite
engine means that the team at EA Motive are able to improve
on the very core of Dead Space: a fully immersive experience.
I think for me the most important thing is the atmosphere.
So we wanted to come back to that horror.
And we go, “What's the thing that's the scariest in a horror movie
is the sense of lighting, light and dark, the play between the two.”
So when you play the game now, it's darker.
So as the player is moving through the environment, the enemies are moving.
You can see the play of light and dark.
In the quest to push the immersion further, the Ishimura has been transformed
from a series of separate levels into a complete, interconnected space ship.
You can walk the entire length of it and then backtrack, a feature that makes
it feel more like a genuine place rather than a set of video game missions.
But that transformation meant more work than just crafting areas that linked
the original game’s maps.
If you've got this one ship, then you’ve sort of created
another problem where you need to fill it and you need to,
because there's a lot of going back, the way the mission structure is built.
So, how do you fill those empty moments?
How do you fill that “Dead Space”, if you will?
Well, we created this Intensity Director, which is more than just a AI spawner.
It creates moments for you to freak out and that's the whole point of it.
And it follows you through an intended intensity curve
that the level designers place in their levels and modulates
it based on where you're at within your mission briefs.
Somewhat similar to Left 4 Dead’s lauded AI system,
the Intensity Director is able to analyze the action and horror curve
of your experience and trigger events if things have been calm for too long.
There are close to 400 events that the director can use,
and dropping enemies into the map is just the start of it.
It's got sound bites, it’s got animations, it's got environmental triggers.
So you'll have a fan that'll start up, you'll have creaking from the ship,
you'll have lights flickering, you'll have lights turning off,
you'll have psychosis events happening.
So it's everything.
So, everything that happens in the script can happen with the Intensity Director
and that's how we manage to make sure that the lines are blurred
and you're never really sure what is scripted and what isn't.
Immersive horror was the core of the original Dead Space.
And now, with the popularity of horror at an all-time high,
it’s the perfect time for it to return, use modern technology
to push that immersion to the next level, and redefine survival horror once again.
To see what else the Dead Space remake is improving,
take a look at how the EA Motive team created a new version of the necromorph
transformation scene, and how the story was re-written.
And for everything else, stick with IGN.