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In a recent interview with CVG, Capcom producer Mike Jones explained just why Dead Rising 3 won’t be available on current consoles. It’s not just that Microsoft threw a wad of cash at Capcom to make it an Xbox exclusive, although I’m sure that had something to do with it. However, looking at the size and scope of the game, it just doesn’t look like something that could be accomplished on current gen consoles.
You’re looking at more custom work and less reuse. We’re not using the same textures over and over again, nor are we using the same geometry over and over again. Every building and every interior in Dead Rising 3 is hand made and hand crafted. You’ll never see the same building twice.
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.
In addition to hand crafting all of the buildings in the game, Capcom will also be using procedurally generated zombies.
It’s all procedurally generated: hairstyles, clothing, colours, textures. And the gore is too: missing jaws, missing eyes..it’s all totally dynamic. That’s the whole system that we built. We didn’t just model the zombies – we had to model the pieces and the system that puts them together.
We can all attest to how off-putting it is to see the same enemies cloned repeatedly and thrown into the game world. However, one does have to wonder if that’s something that gamers are really going to notice all those enemies’ unique characteristics when you’re mowing down hundreds of them at a time.
Dead Rising 3 was originally planned for current gen consoles, but Capcom soon discovered that all of what they had planned just wasn’t going to work on current hardware. Jones says that Microsoft guided Capcom along with what they could do on a next gen console, where certain memory limitations were, and so on.
While this isn’t the first time it’s been said, but as for how Dead Rising 2 compares to Dead Rising 3? Jones had this to say:
You can have rose coloured memories of DR2, but until you go back and look you don’t realize 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 wanted to make which we’d never been able to do on the 360.
I get the feeling that when Dead Rising 3 releases, Microsoft’s Xbox division execs will shed a tear a baby they helped to create, all grown up.
[Source]
