Dead Space Remake Promises Huge Accessibility Changes

Motive Studio has promised accessibility will be one of the major points of consideration in their upcoming Dead Space Remake.

Now, they have not been specific about how they exactly will be implementing accessibility into the game. However, they did mention that they will put particular focus on the dismemberment system.

Motive have already revealed many significant improvements they will be making to this game mechanic. For one, they want the game to provide feedback so that you can more easily tell if a weapon is more effective against a particular enemy or not, and/or if you can even kill the enemy with said weapon. The plasma cutter’s abilities are being reined in, so that if you want to cut off a particular limb, you have to strike a particular body part where the bone is visible from your enemy’s body surface. This would indicate, as it would in a piece of Thanksgiving turkey, that that’s a good spot to make an easy and clean cut of a body part.

Motive also talked about making improvements with new features that are available in video games that were not available before. While they were again reticent on details, they did mention 3D audio.

To put it simply, 3D audio technologies are audio tech that simulates the feeling of sounds coming from different locations around the listener, but it does so in a completely different way from surround sound. If surround sound makes you feel the sounds surrounding you by making those sounds emanate from different speakers placed around the theater, 3D audio can reproduce the same sensation, but using more simpler setups, such as front facing speakers, an audio bar, or even a pair of earphones. If you have played PSVR with a headset, you may have already experienced 3D audio.

So, imagine a version of Dead Space, where you can play the entire game based purely on the sounds that you can hear. In fact, audio games like that already exist, such as the groundbreaking Real Sound: Kaze no Regret on the Sega Saturn. There are also speedrunners who do real blindfolded speedruns, who can do these runs because they had memorized game maps and audio cues of these games by heart. Dead Space Remake could provide an experience like that, that would put blind and visually impaired players on a more even level with others.

What we have discussed so far is partly speculatory on the potential of accessibility options that Motive will provide for Dead Space Remake. We can look forward to more clarity on the scope of their ambitions in this regard soon, as the release approaches ever closer.

Dead Space Remake will be released on January 27, 2023, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows. Motive have already indicated they are remaking the game from scratch on EA’s Frostbite engine, and will be designed in such a way to take advantage of the capabilities of current generation consoles so that they will have zero loading screens on those platforms.

Source: GameRant