According to producer Mike Jones, "In terms of building the game, we originally developed it on PC and everything we were doing was breaking the bank on 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."
Moving to the Xbox One allowed the team to expand its vision.
"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," Jones described, "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."
He noted, "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."
How big is Dead Rising 3? "Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 1 together can fit into Dead Rising 3 multiple times over. It’s exponentially larger," Jones stated.
Microsoft is co-publishing Dead Rising 3 with Capcom, as is expected to be an exclusive Xbox One launch title.