Speaking to staff at CVG during an Xbox One event held in Sydney, Capcom producer Mike Jones has spoke about the technologies in Dead Rising 3 that allow the Xbox One to achieve game mechanics the Xbox 360 wasn’t capable of. This includes procedural generation of the zombies in Dead Rising 3 and the handcrafting of the environment the game contains.
“You’re looking at more custom work and less reuse,” Jones said. “We’re not using the same textures over and over again, nor are we using the same geometry over and again. Every building and every interior in Dead Rising 3 is hand made and hand crafted. You’ll never see the same building twice.”
When asked if consumer demands for more detail in next-gen titles has lead to increased costs, Jones agreed saying,
“Absolutely it costs more money and more time, but ultimately it yields a more unique experience and you’ll run through the world and know where stuff is without looking at the map because everything has its own feel.”
When commenting on the procedural generation of zombies Jones said,
“You’ll never see the same zombie twice, it’s all procedurally generated: hair styles, clothing, colours, textures. And the gore is too: missing jaws, missing eyes… it’s all totally dynamic. That’s a whole system that we built. We didn’t just model the zombies, we had to model the pieces and the system puts them together.”
Whilst Dead Rising 3 may now be a Xbox One exclusive, the title was originally planned to be released on current-gen systems but Capcom found the hardware to be to restrictive to achieve all of what they hoped to with the title. Jones described a consultative approach between Microsoft and Capcom.
“We dropped them [Microsoft] an early prototype showing what we wanted to do that wasn’t going to happen on current-gen. So they started giving us some guidance on what to do, these are some memory limitation to work with etc. Ultimately we made a prototype for them and they said ‘we need to put this on Xbox One’. And this was years ago.
“If you look at DR2, it actually looks barren compared to DR3,” Jones continued.
“You can have rose coloured memories of DR2, but until you go back and look you don’t realise that it’s so flat, there’s no lighting and there are barely any zombies on screen. So we’d try to push all these things, and when we ran into barriers Microsoft would help us with the development kit or even make adjustments to some of the hardware or software to help us achieve what we wanted to do. They’d provide feedback to us as well. The main meat of the development was a back and forth. It was a game we wanted to make which we’d never been able to do on 360.”
Dead Rising 3 will be released as an exclusive for the Xbox One alongside it’s release on November 22nd.
With all of this new information are you any more excited for Dead Rising 3? Let us know in the comments below.