Dead Space remake announced

Well, this was a nice surprise from EA! Dead Space is coming back. During the EA Play Livestream on Thursday, EA revealed a remake of the 2008 sci-fi horror shooter in development at EA Motive.

It's been quite some time since we've seen Isaac Clark fight off against the necromorph, since the series was laid to rest back in 2013. But now it appears EA has decided to go forward with another stab at survival horror and bring back one of the genre's most beloved titles.

The Dead Space series was originally developed by Visceral Games and includes 3 main entries, comics, animated films, and novels. It was part of the era where EA pushed new IPs like Dead Space and Mirror's edge. Now there was some controversy around the death of Dead Space and the closure of Visceral Games. But thankfully most of the team has moved on to new prospects, including Dead Space's original creator and Creative Director Glen Scofield. Who is now working on The Callisto Protocol with other original leads from Visceral.

The news of a remake had been floating around for the last few weeks and now it's confirmed. This is a complete remake of the original 2008 horror title and will feature key improvements to gameplay from the second and third games. From what we can see, this feels heavily inspired by Capcom's massively successful Resident Evil 2 Remake and EA want to follow in the same footsteps.

What should we expect? At this time it's a little uncertain, but it is reported that Motive, the guys behind the pretty good Star Wars Squadrons and the single-player campaign for Star Wars: Battlefront 2, have been getting creative advice from people who worked on the original Dead Space.

Here's the summary of the new remake from EA's YouTube channel:

"The sci-fi survival horror classic Dead Space returns, completely rebuilt from the ground up by Motive Studios to offer a deeper and more immersive experience. Harnessing the power of the Frostbite game engine and next-generation consoles, this remake brings jaw-dropping visual fidelity and improvements to gameplay while staying true to the original. Dead Space will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC."

In an interview with IGN, the Dead Space remake's developers at Motive confirm that everything in the game is being remade from scratch in Frostbite. "We are not porting them, it's not uprezzing the texture or adding more polygons to the model. It's really rebuilding all these elements, shooting all the animations," says creative director Roman Campos-Oriola.

So as mentioned before, it sounds like the Dead Space remake will follow the same line as Resident Evil 2 and have key elements from the original game, but be massively reworked and tweaked. This is great as people can still play the original game easily and we can expect to see some much-needed improvements the original game needed. Such as story pacing, repetitive objectives, and some awkward controls. But the original game is a horror icon, with its oppressive design, phenomenal sound design, creature design, and outstanding horror elements.

But we can expect new elements, such as unused ideas and concepts for the original game. Also, EA Motive is also planning expanded accessibility options and incorporating links to Dead Space 2 and 3 in the story. Which will make things more coherent in terms of the overall narrative.

It has been strongly stated that there won't be returning is Dead Space 3's microtransactions: There will be none at all in the remake. This is great, but let's face it, that should be the case already.

EA Motive says the trailer above is an "atmospheric benchmark" for the studio to target. Meaning we might have to wait sometime for the remake to actually come out. But we're sure the wait will be worth it.