The Dead Space remake boasts a number of improvements when compared to the original from 2008, but a quick turn input to swiftly escape danger isn’t among the changes players will notice when the remake releases. That’s not to say the developers didn’t consider adding it, however. They did think about it but ended up scrapping the idea because it went against the Dead Space formula and wasn’t the type of change they were looking for.
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Quick turns are pretty common inputs for horror games, and seeing how the original Dead Space didn’t have one, we wondering going into our hands-on preview of the remake whether or not that feature would be present now. It wasn’t, and neither were other potential modernizations like automatically picking up loot. We asked creative director Roman Campos-Oriola if a quick turn option was ever on the table, and he said it was but that it didn’t mesh with the “biggest pillar” the team maintained during the remake: keeping the game true to the original.
“Well, it’s a survival world, but it’s a specific type of survival world,” Campos-Oriola said. “It’s a survival world mixed with a shooter, but not your average shooter, a shooter where you need to be a bit smarter. Yeah, headshot, it’s cool, it’s nice, but you need more than that. And there’s physics, and there’s different ways to play with that. And that recipe, in order to work, it has to be pretty precise.”
Players must be efficient in Dead Space to stay alive and conserve resources, Campos-Oriola said, and if something ends up “getting too close to you in Dead Space, it means that you failed.” So even though a quick turn was on the table, the devs decided against it.
“If you add a quick turn to that and give a way for the player when, ‘Oh fuck, I’m fucking it up. Fuck it, no ammo. Ten meters back and I can restart.’ Not saying it’s bad, but it’s a different type of experience than that original experience. So that was not the type of change [we wanted]. We considered something, doing the 180, and then when we thought about it, we’re like ‘No, that’s not the type of change we want.’”
EA’s Dead Space remake releases on January 27th for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC platforms.
