EA bucks convention with preview of extremely unfinished Dead Space remake

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  The Dead Space remake is aiming to look even better than this when it launches on an unannounced date. [credit: EA ]

Thirteen years after EA first scared players senseless with Dead Space, the publisher confirmed plans for a stem-to-stern remake of the sci-fi survival horror classic. The brief, cinematic sizzle reel of brooding tracking shots and environmental gore from July's EA Play event was followed this week by a behind-the-scenes look, full of clearly unfinished content, rudimentary "gray boxes," and a glimmer of hope that EA's attitude behind this retelling might be the right one.

The 40-minute broadcast with Motive's senior producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola was, much like Dead Space's working-class protagonist Isaac Clarke, fairly lean and utilitarian. Right now, what we still don't know about the remake could fill a haunted derelict infested with ravenous space zombies—and that's intentional.

Out of the gate, Ducharme and Campos-Oriola stressed that the preproduction build they had running on the Frostbite engine was nowhere near representative of final gameplay. Instead, they offered only the slightest indication of how the developer behind Star Wars Squadrons plans on tackling a faithful—yet more gruesome—reimagining of the 2008 original for modern hardware. What we saw were a few work-in-progress environments for the decrepit mining freighter USG Ishimura, a rough in-game model of Clarke's engineering suit, and a lesson in destructible necromorph biology inside an entirely unfinished framework. The reason for this unusually candid approach was to provide a sounding board so that the Dead Space team can get as much feedback as early as possible from the game's fans.

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