Something to look forward to: On Tuesday, Motive Studios, the developer behind the upcoming Dead Space remake, held a live stream on Twitch to go over some of the aspects of the game. Currently, the project is in very early production, so some of the clips they showed were pretty rough.
Senior Producer Philippe Ducharme and Creative Director Roman Campos-Oriola explained that they wanted to be transparent with the Dead Space community about the direction of the Dead Space remake, so they put together a Twitch live-stream to show what they have in mind. The game is still very malleable, and the studio eagerly wants community feedback to help form it into what the fans want and expect to see.
That said, Motive has nailed down some details of the game, which are not likely to change. One is that Gunner Wright is returning to voice protagonist Issac Clarke. In the original trilogy, Clarke was a man of few words (none in the first game). That is not changing.
Motive has two hard-and-fast rules for when Issac can talk. The first is that he "will primarily only speak when spoken to." The second rule is that he will sometimes speak when in situations where it would seem strange for him not to say something. So, as before, Wright's not going to have any problem remember his few lines.
Limb dismemberment is being completely overhauled. In a nutshell, shooting off limbs will appear more realistic. Necromorph flesh can be torn away, which acts as a visual indicator of how much damage the player is dealing. Remember, the original game strove not to have a HUD. Instead Issac's health had shield condition display as part of his armor. Visually indicating enemy health seemed a natural extension of that concept instead of having large glowing bulbs to target.
Another thing the team plans to do is develop the story and characters a little more.
"We are not going to change the foundation of the story because that story is really iconic," said Campos-Oriola. "The things we want to enrich in terms of story or narrative, it's really about the bigger universe of Dead Space. We want to have more ties with what came after, whether it's the books, whether it's the anime, whether it's Dead Space 2, we want to put the original in a better way inside that broader universe."
So players should not be surprised to see a few details and overlap with the original series and some lore from other sources thrown into the mix. Of course, the team did not reveal any specifics of the narrative.
One thing the producers feel the original game lacked was a well fleshed-out supporting cast. For example, Issac's personal quest in the game is to rescue his girlfriend Nicole Brennan, yet we know virtually nothing about her. Campos-Oriola says things like what happened to her and how she got into her predicament in the first place will be revealed.
The team did not reveal if these details would be provided as the player progresses or would require active exploration to uncover them. In either case, it should be more immersive to know more about the extended cast instead of them only serving as props to guide players through their various tasks.
Rumors of a Dead Space remake first surfaced in June. EA confirmed the project the following month. Unfortunately, the game is still in pre-production, so Motive does not even have a broad timeframe to announce. It might be quite a while before we see anything completely solid or see some alpha builds.