Dead Space remake confirmed: here's our first look

It's true: Dead Space is coming back. During its EA Play livestream on Thursday, EA revealed a remake of the 2008 sci-fi horror shooter in development at EA Motive. Motive also developed last year's quite good Star Wars Squadrons and the singleplayer campaign for Star Wars: Battlefront 2.

The Dead Space series was originally developed by Visceral Games, which EA closed in 2017. Some of Visceral's former leads started a new studio in 2019 and revealed their first game last year, The Callisto Protocol, which gave off strong Dead Space vibes. Now it looks like their spiritual successor will be going toe-to-toe with a remake of their original game.

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.

It sounds like the Dead Space remake will closely follow the original game, but won't be 1:1. For example, Campos-Oriola references bits of unused level design that were changed during the original game's development. We might see EA Motive draw on some of those original designs for its remake, in addition to the upgraded graphics and sound.

EA Motive is also planning expanded accessibility options and incorporating links to Dead Space 2 and 3 in the story or pulling in improvements from the sequels. One thing that won't be returning is Dead Space 3's microtransactions: There will be none at all in the remake.

It also sounds like development is very early: EA Motive says the trailer above is an "atmospheric benchmark" for the studio to target. Looks like we'll be waiting for this one for awhile.

Check out the rest of our coverage from EA Play Live 2021 here.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).