Wait, we remember that voice! During the Dead Space remake developer live stream with EA's Motive Studios, actor and voice of main character Isaac Clarke, Gunner Wright made an appearance and announced that he would be back to also voice Isaac in the remake of the game. While the game is obviously in a very early stage of development, the scope of the remake became clear: Dead Space will be more than just a visual update.

In the live stream, the developers showed off early footage of their remake of the 2008 Sci-Fi Horror Thriller Dead Space. 

While it is still very early footage, it's clear that the update to the Frost Bite engine has done wonders for the game, also allowing for technical innovations and thus new content that had previously not been possible with the technology of the platforms around the time when now-closed development studio Visceral Games first developed the third-person shooter in the early and mid-2000s.

Gunner Wright is back as Isaac

Cutting directly into the question of whether or not Isaac Clarke would be voiced this time around, Gunner Wright, voice of the main character from the initial trilogy, cut into the conversation and delivered iconic lines from the initial series. Moreover, he shared his commitment to the project. 

In the original, Isaac didn't talk at all, and we rarely even got to see his real face. In Dead Space 2 and 3, he gained more of a personality by Wright voicing the character. The devs confirmed that in their remake, Isaac will be talking, but only under very specific rules. Either Isaac will only talk when spoken to or when it would otherwise be weird to remain silent. A sense of isolation as Isaac has to operate alone will be kept, but it felt important to the dev team to transport those emotions to the player while also telling the story of an engineer on a spaceship, which at times would be best achieved through speech.

According to the developers, they had taken that decision to embed Dead Space 1 more into the full universe of the series, immersing the player more in the universe. While the basis of the story will be maintained, the team rather hopes to extend the story and how the characters in it interconnect with the narrative.

One example the devs gave where the backstory behind Isaac's partner Nicole, who he is trying to rescue. Throughout the first game, we get very little information of what is happening to her during the entire ordeal, something the remake is trying to improve on while only adding to the base material.

New Next-Gen Systems

Dead Space as a game had previously taken a different approach to hitboxes for a shooter. While other games reward you for hitting the opponent's head or centre mass, in Dead Space, it was all about shooting off limbs. Keeping true to the original, Dead Space's remake will of course also play around shooting legs and arms, and thus it made sense to design new systems around that idea using modern technology to give improved feedback to the player. Therefore, one of the showcased new developments is the feature the devs called "peeling" meaning the visual impact of shooting an opponent. With peeling, the developers hope to transport a more intuitive feeling of whether or not a weapon is effective, how much damage you did to an opponent, how close he is to dying, and more.

 The Dead Space remake is set to launch on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S with a currently unknown release date. Given the scope of the project and the state of development showcased in the live stream, it's likely to take some time, as the developers were careful to use the right adjectives to express that we just got a "very early look" at the game. Given the footage they were confident sharing, this framing of their likely release date appears wise, as the game seems several years out from release. Fortunately, that leaves ample time to play through the full trilogy once again to prepare for its eventual arrival.