Dead Rising 3 is one of the 20 launch titles for Xbox One when it launched on 22 November. But this zombie video game from developer Capcom Vancouver and publisher Microsoft Studios, will have no two zombies looking similar.
Mike Jones, producer at Capcom, told CVG at an event in Sydney that the next-generation Technology in Xbox One has allowed them to do work on various issues that Xbox 360 was not capable of.
He cited an example of the previous Dead Rising games and the upcoming title. He said that in the previous versions the studio was reusing the textures of old ones, but in the new one it was completely handcrafted.
"You're looking at more custom work and less reuse," Jones said. "We're not using the same textures over and over again, nor are we using the same geometry over and again. Every building and every interior in Dead Rising 3 is handmade and hand crafted. You'll never see the same building twice."
He also said that consumers wanted the game to be as detailed as possible and it is an expensive process in pursuit of a detailed texture.
The studio also introduced the zombies that were procedurally generated.
"You'll never see the same zombie twice," Jones said.
"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."
He also revealed that Dead Rising 3 was planned for current-generation consoles and added that the hardware in Xbox 360 will not be able to meet the requirements since Capcom had planned for a 'seamless open world without loading screens and hordes of zombies onscreen at the same time'.
He also revealed that a prototype was developed to show Microsoft why they cannot bring the game to current-generation consoles.
"If you look at DR2, it actually looks barren compared to DR3," Jones continued.
"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."