Interview with Mike Jones, producer at Capcom Vancouver

Dead Rising 3

What are you most excited about in developing for the next gen consoles, with the new technology and being able to explore now?

For Dead Rising 3 what we’re most excited about is that we’ve been able to take the experience of Dead Rising, of course we had lots of zombies, of course we had lots of weapons, but they’d always been confined to very small gameplay spaces. We had always partitioned load zones into either a mall or a casino resort but now we’ve got more memory we’ve got more horsepower, we can do a fully streaming open world, a city just full of zombies, no loading, totally streaming more zombies more weapons more physics objects more stuff than ever before. It’s one of our biggest, most ambitious games and we were only able to do on Xbox one, there’s no way we could do make this game on 360. The visual upgrade that comes along with it, now we can afford more dynamic lighting and shadows, we can afford better materials, the game just looks better. For me personally, I’ve spent three years on Dead Rising 3 but after we get that thing out there and we’ll talk about the next game and the future, I think that computing and living worlds that we are able to do that now that we weren’t able to do on current gen consoles is going to allow for people to do some really cool stuff with games. Even Sunset Overdrive is starting to do some really cool stuff, they’ve got some cool ideas. The Division, they’re doing some really cool stuff with smart glass and their living worlds and so we’re really excited to start exploring those avenues for our next game.

Were you tempted to create a new IP for Xbox One, or were you looking forward to revisiting an established franchise such as Dead Rising?

We wanted to make the biggest and baddest, best Dead Rising ever. We wanted to make the Dead Rising that always deserved to exist, that’s an open world, streaming game, no restrictions, co-op, tons of zombies, survive in a city, play your own way, take it seriously if you want, goof around if you want, we’re not going to tell it has to be funny. Just an open world zombie game that is all about player freedom. That’s what we wanted to do and that’s what we’ve been able to do. We’ve got a long history with Microsoft too. Dead Rising 1 on 360, Case Zero and Case West only on 360. They love the franchise, we love working with them so it’s just been a match made in heaven.

Is there much of a storyline focus in Dead Rising 3?

Oh yeah. Our demos that we’ve shown at at E3, Comic Con, Gamescom and TGS have really been more about the sandbox nature of the game, the gameplay systems and what you can do in the world but we absolutely have a story. We have story missions, cinematics, boss battles, we have side missions, stranded survivors, we have psychos still in the game tons of collectables, blueprints. A huge world to explore, we have two play online co-op, we have a massive amount of content. We just announced the game at E3, a couple of months ago, so we’ve really only been able to talk about it for a short period of time and there’s so much stuff in the game and we’ve had trouble getting it all out there. But absolutely there’s a whole story there. We haven’t talked a lot about it because we want people to experience it for themselves. We don’t want to give it all away. It’s tied into the previous Dead Risings, we have cameos from from previous character, we’re going to answer stories and mysteries from previous Dead Risings. So we hope people will be really satisfied. Even the main character Nick, he’s totally tied into the history of Dead Rising. Hopefully everybody will be satisfied.

Will Dead Rising 3 eventually be available on PS4 or PC?

Absolutely not. This is an Xbox One exclusive. We’re not going to be on PS4, we’re not going to be on PC. This game is actually published by Microsoft so they’re totally invested in their launch portfolio, this is a game for them. We were able to focus on the quality of the game and the performance of the game on one system. We see a lot of this online, a lot of people like ‘oh it’s coming out on PS4’ and it’s not. It’s XBox One only baby.

Fair enough. One of our readers did want to know, are there plans for a follow up to the Gargoyle/Demon’s Quest series.

Wow, that’s some deep cuts!

Well we’ve seen the return of Killer Instinct

Yeah, that’s the whole Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, and then the whole spin off Demon’s Quest. Somebody knows some Capcom stuff. So I’m just here talking about Dead Rising 3 and Capcom Vancouver. Obviously we’ve got a whole rich history of Capcom franchises, Street Fighter, Devil May Cry. I would love to make a new Dino Crysis. We’ve actually talked about making a new Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, we’ve talked about a new Demon’s Quest, we’ve talked about all those things. We’d love to revitalise those things. It may not work for a fully fledged title, it may work better for a digital title. But trust me we still have those conversations internally, we still try to figure out what’s the best thing we can do with them. We don’t have anything currently in the works that we can talk about but absolutely we still have all those discussions internally. So you can tell your readers that there are people internally who know about those games, who loves those games, who still want to make those games and we’re working on it.


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