Xcast Online

Electronic Arts confirmed today that their Redwood Shores location has been renamed to Visceral Games. Within the press release, it's stated "The studio is currently working on the highly anticipated games, Dante’s Inferno and Dead Space: Extraction, and two other unannounced titles."

Two other unannounced titles, you say? One of those wouldn't happen to be Dead Space 2, would it? You know, the sequel to the excellent and well-received shooter from 2008 that's already been semi-confirmed to be a "go"? Possibly (or they're new IP). On the "about me" section of the website of Salil Nair, a lead character artist at Mindwalk Studios, the 3D designer lists Dead Space 2 as one of his current projects for EA. Hmm.

"Currenly working on 'Dante's Inferno', a fantasy based game and 'Deadspace 2', the second instalment of last year's critically acclaimed sci-fi horror game by Electronic arts."

Mindwalk worked with EA Redwood Shores on the first Dead Space, modeling and texturing "the majority of humanoid primary and secondary photo realistic characters (alive and corpse versions) as well as a number of creatures along with their dismembered pieces and parts," and "an entire level environment as well as a number of props."  Salil says that he was lead character artist "on about 25 characters" for the first game.

Huh. Doesn't take a lot of smarts to guess what's going here here. The words "second installment" make it quite easy, too. Unless Mindwalk are taking their expertise on the next-gen horror game and its technology to work solely on Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii, looks like we've probably got our sequel here. Unless we don't.  But a game that sells 1.4 million copies isn't likely to not get a sequel these days. 2010, then, EA?

---