Motive Studio and Electronic Arts have confirmed that the upcoming Dead Space remake has hit alpha and have even given the title a specific release date. The remake of the classic horror game is coming out on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC on January 27, 2023. A gameplay reveal is scheduled for October and will be “close to Halloween-ish,” which will be 14 years from the month of its original release.
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Alongside the release date announcement, Motive hosted an in-depth stream giving eager fans a behind-the-scenes look at different aspects of development. This includes deep dives into visual effects, character models, environments, and lighting, all key aspects to recreating the tense atmosphere of Visceral’s original. The hourlong livestream is comprised of sections made up of those aforementioned parts.
It’s very detailed and dense, but gives a look at how Motive recreated assets with more detail, how those assets are placed, how fog and fire interacts with the environment or player, the intricacies of Isaac Clarke’s suit, how Necromorphs break apart, the more realistic lighting and lighting sources, and more. The full video has some additional developer commentary after each section, while the separate videos on the game’s channel only have the scripted bits. And like the last livestream, it ends with a more complete demo of the game that puts all of the parts together into one vertical slice.
As Dead Space will be a current-gen release, it will take full advantage of modern visual technology, including a version of the Ishimura fully rendered in HDR and lit through ray tracing. Despite that technical wizardry, the game will tell the same story of a lone engineer fighting off a horde of Necromorph monsters. However, protagonist Isaac Clarke will now speak in the remake, but only when spoken to or when it would be weird if he just stayed silent.
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The original Dead Space trilogy was released from 2008 to 2013 and developed by the now-defunct Visceral Games. It was part of a push for original IP from EA that also included Mirror’s Edge, Dante’s Inferno, and Army of Two. The fact that only Dead Space is coming back around just over a decade later shows how hard it is to make franchises stick in the games industry, but Visceral’s original work certainly deserves another day in the spotlight.
