A “new entry”, not a Dead Space 2 remake

Developers atDead Space remakecreators EA Motive were pushing to make a “new entry” in the sci-fihorrorseries before EA shelved it last year, according to the latest in a recent outbreak of Dead Spacey rumours and revelations that have spread through the bulkheads of the internet, coating everybody’s devices with necrotic slime.

Today’s injection of mutagenic insider gossip comes fromBloomberg, who claim that a small team at Motive spent a few months working on a “new entry in the series”. These plans were never greenlit, however, as EA are said to have put the whole franchise on ice last spring. Since last summer, the team in question have been exploring other game concepts, while the majority ofDead Spaceremake developers have moved onto other projects.

As Matt reported overnight, Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb recently claimed thata Dead Space 2 remake was once in the works, only to be shelved following lower-than-hoped sales of the first remake. According to Grubb, the DS2 remake was in the “concepting phase”, “definitely pre-production”. EA themselves have said that “there is no validity to this story.” As Nic’s just pointed out to me, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has disagreed with Grubb’s claim over Xitter, commenting that EA Motive used the same codename for several projects, not just Dead Space, and that the new game was “never really aDead Space 2remake”.

Let me clear this up: Motive used the same code name to describe whatever project that the Dead Space team was working on next, hence the confusion on Jeff’s part.It was never really a Dead Space 2 remake, and for nearly a year it’s had nothing to do with Dead Spacehttps://t.co/Z3YKPhrRlh

So who should we believe? Was the new game a Dead Space 2 remake or an original Dead Space game? “Concepting” teams tend to chuck around a bunch of ideas, of course - it’s possible there were pitches or proto-pitches internally for both a brand new game and the Dead Space 2 remake.

I would probably trust EA Motive with an original Dead Space game, though I disliked how the Dead Space remake recontextualised some of the original Dead Space’s gamier elements (such as its silent protagonist) to fit the narrative universe it would spawn. The studio definitely has sci-fi chops to call on: their past projects includeStar Wars: Squadrons, one of two VR games I unambiguously love, and support work for Amy Hennig’s cancelled Star Wars game Project Ragtag. So it’s a bit sad that they’ve been rededicated to work on checks notes…Battlefield again. Well, I guess Battlefield has its sci-fi elements.