The Dead Space remake comes with over 1200 new scares, will monitor your stress

There’s less than two weeks until the release of the Dead Space remake (set for January 27, 2023) and the developers at EA Motive seem to be ready to make us wish the game was here already. Every announcement they make about the title gets us more excited and the latest update on the official blog is the best example. In it, the studio describes a new “artificial intelligence” that’ll keep a track of our stress during every moment of gameplay, and which can cause over 1200 different new scares. This is what they call the “Intensity Director”.

“The Intensity Director is a way for us to control the stress level for the player, to be sure there’s always something happening,” says the game’s director Eric Baptizat. Other members of the team chipped in to explain this new mechanic: “It lets us control the emotion and tension, and to always keep the player on their toes, to keep them careful. So we monitor the amount of intensity the player is going through while going from room to room. There might be an easy room with just a few sounds here and there, but that’s it. But then you might go into another room and suddenly, there’s a Slasher spawning from a wall vent, plus the lights turn off, plus there’s fog in the environment, and it becomes a lot more intense.”

“But then we give the player a break. Because we do essentially track the peaks and valleys of tension, to make sure that it’s not just back-to-back-to-back high-intensity events. Because that would be emotionally exhausting; you’d be like, ‘I can’t take this anymore”

“It’s a content organization, spawning, and pacing control system,” says Senior Systems Designer Dan Kim. “And depending on how we count things, the system has more than 1200 unique events, with a massive variety of combinations possible. Different elements, like audio or lighting changes, fog or steam, enemy spawns—all that combined together in layers to create encounters that feel like hand-made situations.”

We’ll be anxiously waiting for the game to release on the 27th, but something we can’t deny is that this new Dead Space is looking better and better.

Source | EA Motive