Written to be “one of the largest cities in Southern California”, and feeling like a general riff on Los Angeles, the map itself is made up of four districts, each comprised of different neighborhoods, buildings, and layouts meant to capture a different kind of cultural and socioeconomic environment (mansions and rich people are in the hills, for example) with an interconnecting highway system in between. So, taking place 10 years after Dead Rising 2 (and 15 years after the first game), Dead Rising 3 sets its zombie outbreak in the sprawling, fictional, California city of Los Perdidos. According to the devs, after two games, Capcom Vancouver wanted its world and its zombies to feel scary again, and so, thought the visuals, environment, and overall tone should follow suit. But the larger world of Dead Rising 3 was being shaped by the developers desires to re-inject feelings of fear, survival, and reality into the series (it might also be worth noting that the popular TV show The Walking Dead had begun airing in 2010). Past Dead Rising games visited more fun, “stuff filled” places that had been sharpened to a satirical point to comment on and indulge in the lights, activity, and excess. When the game was shown off at E3 2013, many fans were taken aback by the darker lighting, the lack of bright colors, and what looked to be a bleaker, less glitzy and silly world. However, while the developers desire to push the technology of the time can be appreciated and understood even now, how they filled their open world (and their stated desire to see the franchise “mature”) would bring more changes made to the Dead Rising formula and aesthetic than any previous installment. Developers would later explain that the early builds were plagued by technical issues on the Xbox 360 and PS3, and so, out of necessity, the partnership and exclusivity with Microsoft was made to give developers a more powerful console to make their open-world vision possible, buy the team more funding, another year of development, and a larger marketing budget. 2013 saw the likes of Grand Theft Auto 5, Saints Row 4, Assassins’ Creed IV: Black Flag, and Batman: Arkham Origins, and the ways Dead Rising 3 would try to be those games was, for some, what upended the experience as whole.ĭespite promising to be the biggest and, in a lot of ways, most accessible Dead Rising game yet, one harsh detail announced early on was that, while Dead Rising 2 had been been on both Xbox and PlayStation consoles (a first for the series), Dead Rising 3 would stay on Xbox One, and would only, eventually, get a release on Windows. However, while previous Dead Rising games were their own early and focused novelty within an emerging sandbox genre, AAA conventions of the time had changed what a sandbox game had to be. The developers, in many ways, were pushing the series’ sandbox formula to meet the limits and standards of the time. Early release material boasted three times the zombies on screen as Dead Rising 2, and also aimed for no load screens, short load times, and a large, open-world that could fit both maps from the previous games inside. In November 2013, seven years after the original Dead Rising and three years after Dead Rising 2, Capcom Vancouver would deliver Dead Rising 3 a game in a tug of war with the times and technology, and one ultimately unsure of how much it should embrace, or reinvent, its own roots.Īs a launch title, and exclusively for the Xbox One, the sales pitch leaned into what was one of the original’s biggest selling points: what this new and powerful hardware was going to bring to the table.
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