EA finally confirmed the long-rumored return of the Dead Space series during EA Play 2021, and with that reveal comes a number of questions. Fans were questioning if a new Dead Space game would be a sequel, remake, or reboot, and just who would be making this title now that original developer Visceral Games is long gone. Through a press release, we now know that a number of rumors and reports ended up being true.
To answer the biggest questions, Dead Space is a ground-up remake developed by Motive Studios on the Frostbite engine. The studio was founded by Jade Raymond, most famous previously for her work with Ubisoft on the first Assassin’s Creed title. Motive developed the single-player campaign of DICE’s Star Wars Battlefront II. Raymond would leave the studio in 2018, and since then, Motive released Star Wars Squadrons in 2020; EA also canceled a title from Motive codenamed “Gaia.” The Dead Space remake will be the studio’s first title exclusively for the new consoles, with senior producer Phillippe Ducharme leading the project.
Meanwhile, Dead Space co-creator Glen Schofield co-founded Call of Duty studio Sledgehammer Games, but moved on in 2019 to form a new studio called Striking Distance Studios. That team is making a third-person survival horror game set in the PUBG universe called The Callisto Protocol, and observers have noticed similarities between what we’ve seen of that title to Dead Space. Expect the two titles to be viewed as competitors.
