Dead Rising 3 has been in development for quite some time. Siliconera first had news about the game eighteen months earlier and at that time our sources said Dead Rising 3 would be for current generation consoles. Capcom Vancouver changed directions after they pushed the Xbox 360 hardware beyond its limits.
"In terms of building the game, we originally developed it on PC and everything we were doing was breaking the bank on [Xbox] 360. The number of zombies, the streaming stuff we wanted to do, memory budgets for the number of environments and items and physics and all of that stuff. Our tech team partnered with Microsoft to get early specs and figure out how we were going to get it on new hardware," said Mike Jones, Producer at Capcom Vancouver.
"How has Dead Rising 3 changed when switching platforms," I asked.
"The biggest things for us have been the size of the world, the density of the world, the streaming spaghetti of getting everything working with no load zones and seamlessly streaming. Also, how we build missions in a much larger world like that – how we send you to different districts and how we get you to explore all of these nooks and crannies in the environment," Jones answered.
"The world building tools, mission scripting tools, and the updates we had to make to our engine, a proprietary engine called the Forge engine we built at Capcom Vancouver, have been the large developer obstacles over the last few years."
"Has Microsoft, as a publishing partner, assisted with the transition at all?"
"Our tech teams have been like [makes mushing noise]. They get our builds all the time and helping us optimize it and helping us with performance stuff. They visit us every week. We go down there every other week. We’ve been essentially merged together," Jones replied. "They have done custom work with multi-threading for us. All of the Kinect things, we’re making a game for hardware that isn’t finished that we’re all trying to launch together on day one. Basically, we’ve been in lock step with them."
Dead Rising 3 is an open world game and while the world isn’t as large as say a Grand Theft Auto game it is significantly larger compared to other Dead Rising titles. "Dead Rising 2and Dead Rising 1 together can fit into Dead Rising 3 multiple times over. It’s exponentially larger," Jones explained.
Jones also confirmed that Dead Rising 3 will have cameo characters from previous Dead Rising games. Siliconera announced earlier that Isabella Keyes from the original Dead Rising and Chuck Greene from Dead Rising 2 will be in Dead Rising 3.
