Dead Space 3 aiming for "quad-A" with series evolution

Dead Space 3 executive producer Steve Papoutsis says Visceral is going above and beyond "triple-A" with the horror sequel.

"We want to excel. We want to deliver a game that's quad-A, that's beyond what we've done before," the developer told CVG.

"A lot of people say 'triple-A' and that's kind of become the norm, with all the 'big triple-A games' yadda yadda. No. We want to go beyond triple-A. We want to push to the next level. We've taken up just saying 'quad-A' all day."

The term "triple-A" came into common use as a way to describe high production value projects and is now frequently used to differentiate between big-budget traditional games and new wave release.

This notion going beyond industry standard fits with Papoutsis' description of Visceral's other aims with Dead Space 3; using the game's audio as an example, he said the series has noticeably evolved. The narrative will follow suit.

"We asked ourselves: 'what's everything going towards?' - and it was going towards a big showdown, towards getting answers for the questions that have been laid out," he said.

"And with that concept, we needed to go to Tau Volantis."

Dead Space 3 is due on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in February 2013.