![]() It’s tempting to say that it’s a relief when the enemy finally appears, but that’s often when the Director throws in another one of its favorite tricks: the “but wait, there’s more!” So, when it doesn’t, the entire situation grows even more uncomfortable. Something should happen shortly, one thinks. It’s nice at first, but the expectation for action keeps growing in the back of one’s mind. While playing, there can even be long stretches of eerie quiet. ![]() With this Intensity Director, EA Motive has developed a way to procedurally toy with players’ expectations and use them to keep Dead Space scary. Sometimes a room will be filled with the sounds of nearby Necromorphs, but there are none to be found. Sometimes the monster will come running up to Isaac, loudly snarling all the way, and sometimes they’ll creep up silently from behind. Sometimes those vents will burst open, but nothing will be there. Necromorphs still burst from vents with all the fury of a 2008 jump-scare, but that’s not the only trick anymore. As described in a developer blog post from a few weeks ago, the Intensity Director is always working behind the scenes to keep players from getting comfortable. It might even outright eliminate this problem thanks to how it handles enemy spawns. This is probably still true of the Dead Space remake, but EA Motive’s “Intensity Director” does a great job of slowing it down. In other words, the games were actually only tense and scary for a short time. The same was often true in Dead Space 2 and most of Dead Space 3 too. Once one figured out that the Necromorphs always spawn from the vents, it became easy to just fall into a pattern of finding all the vents in a room and then either catching the creatures as they spawned or trying to bait out the spawns in order to clear the room and make it safe for looting. Much as fans might remember otherwise, the original Dead Space, like most horror games, got quickly predictable. EA Motive’s solution to this is the “Intensity Director,” and it solves this problem brilliantly. Once players learn things like enemy spawn patterns and audio cues, the horror tends to melt out of the experience. It set out to solve the age-old problem that’s plagued horror games since the genre’s inception: players getting used to it. Honestly, it’d probably have been more than enough to make Dead Space the visual feast that it is, but Motive went further than that. This new version of Dead Space is fantastic in terms of both the visual and mechanical embellishments the team made to the original.
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