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Visceral has promised it won’t “cheapen” Dead Space by churning out games set within the science fiction horror universe.
The developer insists it’s focused on quality, despite having mapped out “plenty of games worth of stuff”.
Dead Space 2, due out some time between January and March next year, will be the third game in the series.
It follows 2008’s Dead Space and last year’s Wii exclusive Dead Space Extraction.
“I’d like to make, like, a thousand Dead Space games if people want them,” executive producer Steve Papoutsis said at EA’s recent spring showcase in London.
“That’s the big thing, right? Just like with anything, you get to a point where it’s like, ‘ah, another one?’ We don’t ever want that to happen with Dead Space. So we’re going to take it one step at a time.
“We’ve mapped out plenty of games worth of stuff. But there has to be an interest, right? We don’t want to cheapen what we’re doing. We’re really focused on quality with it. Hopefully if people like this one, we get to make another one.”
Papoutsis joked: “But honestly it would be great to just keep making more and more of them. We’re thinking kart racer, a fitness game… joke! Making sure you guys got that. RTS.”
Loads of publishers capitalise on successful franchises with more frequent releases, of course.
Activision’s plans for the phenomenally successful Call of Duty brand include the release of three titles from three separate developers: Call of Duty: Black Ops from Treyarch, an unnamed Call of Duty game from Sledgehammer Games, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 from Infinity Ward. And they’re the only ones we know about.
Dead Space, though, looks set for expansion through alternative means, such as comics and novels.
“Ginormous. Massive” was how Papoutsis described the Dead Space universe.
“We’ve got the whole world and mythos mapped out to thousands and thousands of years. In order to create Dead Space originally, we didn’t just wake up and go, ‘we’re gonna make this game’. We sat down and were like, ‘okay, when was the first marker found? Who found it? What did they do when it happened?’ We’ve actually mapped out quite a bit of the universe.
“As you can see in the comics, the animated feature, the graphic novel, the novel that’s coming out later this year, there’s quite a lot of story. Dead Space Extraction… I mean everything’s interconnected. Actually the cannon is quite huge.”
Dead Space 2 is due out on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC early next year. According to our hot off the press preview, it looks proper scary.
