Will Dead Space Return?

Will Dead Space 4 Ever Happen?

Let me start by saying that survival horror is one of the best genres of video games. Similar to horror movies, the budget can be low and the team doesn’t need to be large to succeed. Mostly all you need is a fresh idea to make it work. Sadly, truly good horror games don’t come along too often and there have only been maybe a handful of games that were truly terrifying from start to finish. Most horror games and even movies usually come off the rails by the third act, wasting all the tension that has been building up.

It’s hard to pinpoint just what makes a great survival horror game, instead it’s more like a special sauce that you can’t quite put your finger on. However, there are certain elements that feel crucial, such as walking tight, claustrophobic areas where terror is constantly waiting. Making the player feel like they are scraping to survive with limited resources just hoping that the next room might have the one thing needed to keep going.

In the best survival horror games, you aren’t a member of some elite special force task unit, you are just an average human trying to survive a bad situation, essentially a fish out of water. Finally, I think one major component is that the game needs to have fear of the unknown. What we don’t fully understand as humans is one of the most terrifying things of all. If you combine all of these elements with a great setting then you have the recipe for a great survival horror game.

Dead Space Inspiration

Resident Evil is easily one of the best survival horror games of all time. There is no question that it laid the foundation for the genre and set the blueprint for any game that followed it. There have been many other cult classics including Silent Hill, a game that took all the elements of the RE series and gave it a psychological twist. Silent Hill had this supernatural, post apocalyptic setting that really emphasized the horror. The dense fog that encapsulated the small town made the easiest of tasks difficult. It took things that shouldn’t be scary like the fog and static on a radio and turned them upside down. As soon as you heard the static on your radio you instantly felt uneasy. I haven't even played this game in over 20 years but that’s how much it resonated.

As a youngster I remember playing Resident Evil 2 for the first time, having to turn off the PlayStation and turn on all the lights until my parents came home. I never thought I would experience that as an adult but PT basically recreated what I felt as a child playing RE2. I quit the game, took off the headphones, turned on the lights and needed a break to process what was happening. I eventually went back to the game to finish it but PT was terrifying to a grown adult. Using the blueprint laid out by games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil perfectly by creating claustrophobic environments, with an average protagonist and fear of the unknown.

Survival horror games share a lot of the same DNA. Imagination is always worse than what actually is real in most cases. In Resident Evil, it’s the creaking of the environment or the noise of something rustling around the next room. With Silent hill, it was the threat of what could be in the fog and the static created fear using basic things. Finally PT used the fear of what was behind the next door to keep things terrifying. PT kept you in this loop of going through the same house over again with each version being worse than the one previous.

Dead Space Origins

Dead Space took inspiration from the early Resident Evil games by borrowing many parts of the formula and setting it in space. Dead Space was a breath of fresh air when it was released back in 2008 from EA of all companies. At the time when games were trying to go open world, Dead Space put you aboard the dark and claustrophobic corridors of the Ishimura. Normal protagonist? Check. Fish out of water? Check. Fear of the Unknown? Check. Claustrophobic environments? Check. Following the blueprint of games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, Dead Space ticked all the boxes.

What helped Dead Space become the cult classic it is today was that it didn’t just follow the formula, it also made plenty of smart changes, that at the time were new to the genre. It removed the clutter of the heads up display by displaying health on the back of the suit and ammo as a holographic projection when using your weapon. These changes, although sound small, drastically increased the immersion of Dead Space. 

The biggest change that Dead Space made to the formula was the introduction of the dismemberment system. This new combat system always kept you out of your comfort zone when confronting enemies. All of these revelatory changes in addition to using what worked already in the genre resulted in one of the best survival horror games to this date. One of the benefits of being published by EA, was that it likely had a higher budget than your average survival horror game. You can see extra mile the budget afforded in things like lighting and sound design which create their own element of fear.

Resident Evil Blueprint

There has never been a better time for Dead Space to go back and start fresh, refocusing on what made this game special in the first place. Dead Space and Resident Evil have both walked a similar path during the early years of the franchises. The farther Resident Evil moved away from survival horror and became more action focused, it became boring and uninspired. Gamers are still looking for grounded experiences but Resident Evil 5 and to a greater degree, Resident Evil 6 took the series away from everything that made it special in the beginning.

This caused an inflection point for the makers of Resident Evil to go back to the drawing board and see what made the series popular at first. Despite commercial sales of Resident Evil 6, Capcom clearly had data showing that the fanbase was falling away. This paved the way for the series to hit the reset button with Resident Evil 7 and go back to the basics of the series with one big change. The move to first person perspective although seemingly odd at first, suited the series very well. Resident Evil 7 started in a small confined plantation house with average protagonist out of his elements dealing with an unknown horror. These are all parallels to the formula of the original Resident Evil.

RE7 did critically and commercially well as it has sold around 6 million to date and has an average review score of 86. Rebooting Resident Evil and going back to the roots probably wasn’t an easy decision as it forced Capcom into making a bold new engine for the series but this has paid great dividends as the company decided to remake RE2 from the ground up using the RE Engine.

Resident Evil 2 Remake was a smashing commercial and critical success. The remake sold over 3 million copies in its first week alone and currently has an average review score of 91. Capcom has since remade Resident Evil 3 using the same engine and in 2021 will release Resident Evil 8 which looks to build on success of Resident Evil 7.

Dead Space Remaster

The whole tangent of Resident Evil shows the near exact path that EA’s Dead Space has taken. Dead Space was very intimate, scary and strong on survival. The second game expanded on that system with a little more action and larger set pieces but overall remained a tight, focused horror game. Then unfortunately, very similar to Resident Evil, the series lost its direction with Dead Space 3.

Gone were the elements that made the first two games of the series terrifying and introduced were large, open environments, cover shooting and co-op. These were all elements that destroyed what the franchise had established. This might have been caused by EA wanting better sales from the series and trying to make it a little more flavour of the week.

Dead space 3 was not what the fans wanted at all. It wasn’t even as competent as some of the other third person shooters out at the time such as Gears of War. As much as people enjoy a good co-op game, playing with a friend removes a lot of the fear, although you could play alone if you wanted as well, it wasn’t designed that way. Dead Space 3 did not do as well critically or commercially as the previous entires in the series and as a result we haven’t seen an entry since.

If EA would like to revitalize Dead Space, then the key would be to follow in the exact footsteps of Resident Evil. Similar to the RE2 Remake, you keep Dead Space great and infuse that into a new, modern engine. Dead Space being an EA property is perfect because I cant think of a better idea than to use the frostbite engine for this and we all know how much EA loves their FrostBite engine. In the right hands, it sounds like It is one of the best things EA has going for it at the moment and it would be much cheaper than creating a new engine for the series Imagine the endless possibilities of thinking you are safe and then a necromorph breaks right in through the wall or the floor at any moment as opposed to just vents and doors.

Once you have done a full remake of Dead Space, then you reboot the series just like RE7 and just like RE7 they should leave the original character Issac Clarke and everyone else in the original but somehow link it to the original entry. I would love to know more about that universe and some of the people that were affected by the events that took place.

EA

Obviously, one major hurdle in the way of a will there be a Dead Space Trilogy or will there be a Dead Space remaster is whether or not EA thinks it makes sense. Back in 2015, EA was pretty set against remakes and remasters when at the time COO Peter Moore spoke with IGN. “It feels like pushing stuff out because you have run out of ideas. We’re a company that just likes to push forward. For a lot of companies, remakes are a great way to drive revenue. It’s a sub cost, it’s an IP thats there, you can remaster, and thats great. We don’t do that here. I don’t think that’s ever been in our culture”

There is a lot to unpack from that quote. First, clearly a lot has changed not only at EA but also in the industry. Peter Moore is no longer at EA as he moved on into the world of soccer and has done quite well for himself since. EA have also changed their opinion of doing remakes and remasters as we have seen them dip their toes into the pool of both since 2015. Most recently we have seen Burnout Paradise, Command and Conquer, the upcoming Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, as well as a strong rumour. This is also a company that doesn’t consider the slightest of changes to their annual sports titles in the same category.

The other major hurtle is that Visceral doesn’t exist anymore. The studio was closed down in 2017 after a series of commercial and/or critical failures. Dante’s Inferno, Dead Space 3, Battlefield: Hardline, and Army of Two: The Devils Cartel likely didn’t set any sales records. Most of these games have a devout following but in 2017, it made more sense to EA to absorb the studio into the other core EA studios then to keep it operating on its own. Based on the information I found, Visceral was around 80 employees at the time of its closure and I’m sure there are still some of those people are still working for EA.

EA is a publicly traded company which means at the end of the day they are interested in the bottom line. It wasn’t too long ago that many experts and gamers said that single player gaming was dying and everything was going multiplayer. Single player games wouldn’t sell and all games needed to be persistently online to be successful and profitable.

In defiance of that, over the past couple of years, we have seen some of the best games both critically and commercially be either single player only or single player focused. Games like God of War which sold 3.1 million copies in its first week, Spider Man sold over 3.3 million copies in its first week, Horizon Zero Dawn which sold over 7.6 million in its first year, Breath of the Wild has sold over 18 million and Red Dead Redemption 2 sold 17 million in its two weeks. These sales figures prove that single player gaming is far from dead and is still a very lucrative opportunity for developers.

When it comes to remakes and remasters, the industry overall has changed a lot since 2015 with a lot of companies, revitalizing their old IP for a new generation with high production values. The biggest ones that come to the top of my head are RE2, Shadow of the Colossus, Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot, FF7, and every WiiU first party title.

One of the brightest glimmers of hope about the potential for a Dead Space remake is the large amount of speculation regarding the Mass Effect Trilogy. If EA was set against remakes and remasters at the start of this generation, their tone has drastically changed and they have now come full circle. Will Dead Space be remastered? Considering that a Mass Effect trilogy sounds very much like a reality, it leaves a good possibility that something with Dead Space will happen after.

Moving into a new generation with increased processing power, the timing for a Dead Space reboot or remaster is near perfect. Seeing the new PlayStation, Unreal Engine demo means a lot for the survival horror genre as this generation is not about the massive jump in graphical power, but instead it looks to be about heightening everything around them. Lighting, audio and load time are all ways to immerse the player deeper into the game. These are all essential and crucial elements of survival horror. Remakes and remasters aren’t going away anytime soon and after opening the airlock, I will be holding my breath for Dead Space this generation.