The Dead Space remake is nearly upon us. While we didn’t get the game before 2022 wraps, it will be one of the first few big title releases for 2023. Naturally, with such a behemoth of an IP, fans are eager to dive right back into the desolate corridors of the USG Ishimura. But don’t go into this ship expecting everything to be the same as the first title. While developers have tried to stay close to the original title, veteran players should still find a few unexpecting moments. Fortunately, it looks like players can still expect an atmospheric experience.
Horror games, in general, require quite a bit of attention to the atmosphere. Fans praised the original Dead Space game over the chilling environments as they made their way through the campaign. With modern hardware, this should give players an even more immersive and atmospheric experience. This is also something that the developers kept in mind at Motive Studio. Recently, the development team offered another blog update regarding the atmosphere in Dead Space.
According to senior game director Eric Baptizat, there were a lot of enhancements the team went into during the remake’s development. As a result, there’s more depth now with modern hardware providing some truly dynamic visuals, audio, and lighting effects.
There are a lot of enhancements in terms of visuals, audio, lighting—everything is more dynamic. By having more depth here, we’re able to have more control over the player’s feelings of stress and excitement.
But there’s another area that the studio is hyping up for the Dead Space remake, and that’s the Intensity Director. This is a feature that helps craft some unexpected moments within the game. This system allows the game to tweak lighting, fog, and audio cues to even where some Necromorphs spawn. It’s apparently a system that will further add some jump scares. Audio director Olivier Asselin stated that players could sometimes hear cues that would make players think a Necromorph is spawning, but the system could tweak it so that only the audio cue triggers without bringing an enemy with it.
But it’s always about putting the player in a place where they don’t know what to expect. So say you hear a Necromorph in a vent, then hear the vent break, then the Necromorph spawns. If I hear it again, but it doesn’t spawn, I’ll go to the vent and expect something to happen that doesn’t. If I don’t hear it in the vent, but I hear the vent break and it spawns, suddenly I’ve got a jump scare, because I didn’t expect that. And if I have the vent break without a spawn, then I’m adding something else. So for one possible outcome the player is thinking of, we have five, six, seven ingredients, or recipes, that could lead to something else.”
With such a beloved survival horror classic, it should be interesting to see how veteran fans take to the remake. Currently, Dead Space is set to launch on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC platforms next year January 27, 2023.
