A little late to the Dead Space 3 versus Lost Planet 3 discussion but Siliconera has an interesting post where Capcom producer Andrew Szymanski and Spark Unlimited game director Matt Sophos, who’s currently working on Lost Planet 3, offered their takes on the similarities between both games.
Szymanski stated, “Well, from the Capcom side, it’s a very much a situation of when I saw the coverage coming out of E3 for Dead Space 3, the first emotion was flattery. I felt flattered, because we’ve done snow and ice since 2006 with the first Lost Planet game and we felt we kind of own that space, and when we came out in April at Captivate to announce, LP3, one of our core concepts was to push that even further. Basically, ‘Hey, we want to be the game about snow and ice planets.’
“All of a sudden, we see Dead Space 3 come in with the ice planet setting, and it’s kind of like, ‘OK, well, thanks for the nod!’ You know, that’s cool. And in an interesting case of parallel evolution, we’re trying to be more nuanced with our gameplay, instead of just the old school third-person shooters with the Vital Suits.”
Sophos agrees, and talks about how the similarity of the ice settings. “Yeah, I can’t speak for the Dead Space crew or anything like that, but like Andrew said, the similarities are at the superficial level. The hallmark of their franchise for a long time has been the survival-horror aspect of the game, and they’re incorporating the ice planet and things like that. But our focus is on creating this level of variety of gameplay for the player, so you aren’t stuck doing this one thing for any specific length of time.”
Dead Space 3 is due for a February 3rd 2013 release while Lost Planet 3 is also expected some time next year.