A former Dead Rising 5 developer shares some insight on the cancelled project

During our recent visit to DevGAMM in Portugal, our Spanish editor-in-chief David Caballero met several prominent figures in a range of fields, with a focus on gaming. One of them was Swedish veteran Marie Mejerwall, who has been in the industry for over two decades in several important roles, not least as game director and lead game designer.

She was previously involved in Dead Rising 5, which unfortunately was never released, but we took the opportunity to ask her about it and if there was anything in particular she liked about the project. She says she recalls it was developed with Unreal Engine 5 and continues:

"What I loved about Dead Rising 5, as it was canceled, I was on the NPC team, so I made all the boss fights. And I loved the variation, the tiers of the enemies. So we both had the typical kind of zombies that are not very intelligent, that will grab you. But then we also have a little bit more advanced, semi-more advanced enemies."

The Dead Rising series has huge amounts of undead enemies everywhere, and Mejerwall explains the setup with mini-bosses that we unfortunately never got to experience:

"So the ones for Batman, for example, would be a typical thug. We had the equivalent also in Dead Rising, what we would call that. And then we had the armored version of that. And then what Dead Rising does really well, that I really love, is they have the mini-bosses. And it becomes a kind of tenant unit.

"It's not as common to have it that pronounced in games as we do in Dead Rising. And they were a ton of fun to do, and the way that we designed them was that you should be able to drop them almost anywhere. So they shouldn't be dependent on what kind of terrain or map that you were having, because they could move around."

The bigger bosses would have their own arenas and she goes on to reveal a little about how they would have operated:

"Whereas the biggest bosses that I also worked on, they already had their very unique arenas. And it could be stuff like one boss fight that I designed was in a temple environment, where over the course of the fight, the temple breaks down more and more.

"And it gets more and more intense. And the boss gets more and more angry doing more and more stuff. So we really had a wide range of different enemy types. And richer variation. It was really fun to work on that game, and I'm really sad that it never got to see the light of day."

You can check out the entire interview with Marie Mejerwall below, where she had several interesting anecdotes to share.