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The newly announced Dead Space remake won't have any loading screens thanks to its focus on new-gen consoles, and developer Motive has also specifically omitted microtransactions from the game.
In an interview with IGN, senior producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola discussed Motive's plans for the remake. The remake has leveraged the capabilities of the Frostbite engine to enhance the game's atmosphere through upgraded audio and visuals, and as part of that process, the team worked to remove barriers to immersion, including any sort of noticeable loading.
"[The faster SSDs of new consoles mean] there's not going to be any loading," Campos-Oriola said. "There's not going to be any moment where we're going to cut your experience, where we're going to cut your camera. You can play it from the start screen to the end credits seamlessly."
The original Dead Space, like other games of its time, hid plenty of loading screens behind doors and other transitions, and it also had plenty of full-fat screens between levels (and respawns). I'll kind of miss the brief safe space that the tram loading screens would provide, but a seamless Dead Space is too tempting to pass up.
"We're also learning from mistakes such as microtransactions, which we will not have, for instance, in our game," Ducharme added, indirectly hinting at the blowback to the premium items in Dead Space 3. Loading screens were never especially egregious in Dead Space, but the microtransactions in the later portion of the series definitely wrinkled some noses, so it's good to see the remake avoiding that chapter in its history.
The remake will integrate some other lessons from the rest of the franchise, too. Campos-Oriola said that while the story of the original Dead Space was the foundation for the remake, Motive is looking to integrate ideas from elsewhere in the series and layer in references or links to the wider Dead Space universe. It's not just the narrative, too; Ducharme told IGN that "we're also looking at it from a feature standpoint in the improvements and some of the content that evolved throughout the franchise."
The original Dead Space earned a spot on our list of the best horror games, so we can't wait to play through it with fresh eyes and better hardware.
