Bringing the canon of Dead Rising together

We caught up with Dead Rising 3 senior producer Jason Leigh at Gamescom to talk about all things Dead Rising. The Xbox One exclusive looks like a departure from the previous entries at first glance, but Leigh assures us that's not true even if tweaks have been made.

"Just working on the hardware has sort of changed the whole complexion of the series. We've always been a game about density. We've always been a game about lots of weapons. And tons of zombies. But in smaller spaces. And the Xbox One has allowed us to do is actually go up to full city size, fully open streaming worlds. No loads whatsoever and because of that there's even more opportunity for zombie carnage."

Humour has always been important to the Dead Rising experience, but the darker visuals of the new game had us worried that perhaps we would not laugh quite as often while playing the new game.

"This time I think we wanted to create a little more contrast between the humour. Out of the box I think if you've seen any of the gameplay footage it may look a little more serious, a little more mainstream, but we've made sure to keep that humour in there. It's more sort of user access now. You dive in and find the crazy combination weapons and clothing and so on and once you put those elements together the game can look like a classic kind of cooky Dead Rising game."

As far as the structure goes, it will follow your typical sandbox/open world set up where there are missions and a main storyline to follow.

"There's a story and there's a set of missions. We're not really talking too much about that right now. At Gamescom our demo is focused mostly around the sandbox and we wanted to show off tons of our cool weapons. Combo weapons. Brand new feature as well which is our combo vehicles. In the past you've been able take weapons, put those together. Now you can actually take any two vehicles, put those together and come up with these crazy combinations."

"We have more than a hundred combo weapons. More than a hundred base weapons. Tons and tons of vehicles."

The undead themselves have also been given a new lick of paint and perhaps even new brains by the sounds of it.

"The zombies are the heart of Dead Rising so we knew that we needed to push those even further. First of all on the artside we've got a lot more sort of mix and match kit system so there's a lot more variety. On top of variety in just the base horde there's a lot more special zombies. We have zombies that were football players before they were zombified so they still have their padding. They're tougher. They're aggrssive. We have police zombies. We have firefighter zombies. Convict zombies. But beyond just the art aspect of it we knew we had to push the AI. We've got horde awareness now, so when one zombie gets attracted to you they kind of share their awareness. And if you hang around one place for too long all the zombies will start to turn into this big horde and crush in on you. But the beauty of the AI and them being dumb zombies is that you can actually turn their instincts against them. They're attracted to light. They're attracted to sound. And there's a number of weapons in game that you can actually use to catch their attention. Either to distract or to set traps for them."

Jason Leigh also touched on the progression system, the fact that you'll no longer need work benches to craft combo weapons, and refused to talk about possible returning characters.

"This is the third game of the series, it's sort of the end of a trilogy in a way. And because of that we wanted this story to involve elements of Dead Rising 1, Dead Rising 2, and even some elements before Dead Rising 1, and basically bring the whole sort of canon of Dead Rising together into the one game."