EA’s Dead Space is a more than Triple-A, it’s Quad-A boasts dev

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   September 11th, 2012   |  

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The game’s executive producer explains how Dead Space 3 will make use of the game’s audio and setting to provide fresh scares for players and also categorizes the game as a Quad-A title.

Starting things off with the latest classification of video games, created by Visceral Games in order to hype up their latest instalment in their survival-action-horror series, Dead Space 3. According to Steve Papoutsis, Isaac Clarke’s latest nightmare will break the usual format of scares used in the earlier instalments of the games for one that relies more on audio and the environment.

Taking about the audio side of things, the executive producer explained, “One of the biggest things we’re trying to do with the audioscape in general is bring in more thematic tones.”

He went on to explain how the audio was used in the previous games to build up the tension and maintain it for a certain period of time. “If we look at the music as a continuum all the way from Dead Space 1 to Dead Space 3, the first game was very discordant to really punctuate and accentuate scare moments.”

The latest game will have “musical cues and character themes that crop up throughout the game”.

That was the point Mr. Papoutsis labelled Visceral Studios game as Quad-A. He said, “We want to deliver a game that’s Quad-A, that’s beyond what we’ve done before.”

He explained that Triple-A had “become the norm” and that Visceral wanted “to go beyond Triple-A” and wanted to “push to the next level.”

It will be interesting to see if the game can live up to the Quad-A boast, especially since the studio are tinkering with the core formula of the Dead Space series. The original game gave players very little early on, in terms of ammo and weapons, and players only felt like necromorph slayers later on in the game, once their suits and weapons had been upgraded.

Dead Space 2 saw the period of time between scrapping for one’s life to slaughtering legions of necromorphs shortened significantly but still managed to retain the tension and atmosphere. Whether or not Dead Space 3 focuses more on action or horror remains to be seen but it the title does have plenty of potential, especially on the co-op front.

Visceral seem to be taking a big risk and many in the industry feel that co-op destroys the atmosphere and horror elements of a game of the same nature as Dead Space but according to Steve Papoutsis, the two-player campaign will bring its own unique experience to both the franchise and the genre and believes it will be a nice option for gamers to have, much like watching a scary movie with a friend does.