It means that after a while players will ”know where stuff is” without consulting a map, as each part ”has its own feel.” We’ll also ”never see the same zombie twice.” Pro-twin groups launch petition.
Just kidding, there’s no lobby of identical twins feeling discriminated against… yet. Apparently all zombies will be ”procedurally generated” from hair to political affiliation.
”You’re looking at more custom work and less reuse,” Capcom producer Mike Jones told CVG. Previously the reuse of textures was common practice in the Dead Rising games because of tech limitations. Now that they’re focusing solely on bringing Dead Rising 3 to Xbox One, they can make sure to take full advantage.
”Absolutely it costs more money and more time,” he said. ”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.”
It just wouldn’t feel right if only the physical game world was all unique and full of personality, so Capcom made sure the zombies shuffling onto screen are as unique as snowflakes too; unique flesh-munching snowflakes.
”You’ll never see the same zombie twice,” continued Jones. ”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.”
All of this ”wasn’t going to happen on current-gen,” he explained, after Capcom dropped Microsoft a prototype. ”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,” he remarked.
”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 releases on Xbox One November 22nd. It is capped at 30 FPS and much smoother to play now.
