The Dead Space Remake was released to both critical and consumer acclaim on January 27th, 2023, and according to EA Motive, the game only took about 2.5 years to develop.
With Dead Space‘s recent success, the development team took to Reddit to participate in an Ask Me Anything. While a number of topics arose such as whether they’d be tackling other entries in the series one truly unbelievable note is that the remake only took 2.5 years to develop. Senior Producer on the project, Phillippe Ducharme responded to one fan saying that the EA Motive team only began development on the Dead Space Remake in September 2020 just after the release of Star Wars Squadrons.
We started in September 2020. Most of our dev team came from the ramp off of Star Wars Squadrons which released around that time!
Phillippe Ducharme – Senior Prodcuer at EA Motive
It’s almost impossible to believe a game of Dead Space‘s scale and ingenuity took that little time to make. There was also an internal discussion about adding a 180-turn element to the game. This would have been an interesting addition and also would have harkened back to the original game’s inspiration of Resident Evil 4.
At the begining we wanted to add quick 180 turn to Isaac. But we decided to not do that cause it was breaking the combat loop of Dead Space. The core combat loop is about a scary and almost unstoppable threat coming at you. If you can turn around and flee to fast it changes a lot the experience of the fight. So we ended not doing that.
We are all fans of Dead Space, and not just the first game. And one of our goal was to try make DS1 “”acknowledge”” more the rest of the dead space universe.
Roman Campos-Oriola – Creative Director at EA Motive
Ducharme also took the opportunity to note how proud everyone at EA Motive was of the achievement.
From a dev team perspective, there’s an incredible amount of pride at what has benn delivered and what we accomplished. User scores, Metacritics, Press headlines have been great but also validation that…you know, we didn’t f*** this up in the eye of the DS Community and Devs of the original game!
Internally, we also had many praise coming from Andrew, Laura, Sam and other executives for the quality of what was achieved.
Phillippe Ducharme – Senior Prodcuer at EA Motive
