14 DAY TRIAL // Capcom has confirmed that its ambitious plans for Dead Rising 3, such as a the huge open world, could only be achieved with the help of Microsoft, as its Xbox One team helped the developer with making sure the game ran great on the new console.
Dead Rising 3 is one of the next-gen titles coming from Capcom, and its Vancouver studio has benefited largely from the proximity to Microsoft's regional division, which helped it with all sorts of aspects during the development process.
"In terms of building the game, we originally developed it on PC and everything we were doing was breaking the bank on [Xbox] 360. The number of zombies, the streaming stuff we wanted to do, memory budgets for the number of environments and items and physics and all of that stuff. Our tech team partnered with Microsoft to get early specs and figure out how we were going to get it on new hardware," Mike Jones, producer at Capcom Vancouver, told Siliconera.
The developer emphasized the many different areas where the game benefitted from the Xbox One's new features and power, including the size of the open world, its zombie density, and the fact that it has no loading screens, thereby keeping players connected to it at all times.
"The biggest things for us have been the size of the world, the density of the world, the streaming spaghetti of getting everything working with no load zones and seamlessly streaming. Also, how we build missions in a much larger world like that – how we send you to different districts and how we get you to explore all of these nooks and crannies in the environment."
"The world building tools, mission scripting tools, and the updates we had to make to our engine, a proprietary engine called the Forge engine we built at Capcom Vancouver, have been the large developer obstacles over the last few years."
This partnership required a lot of effort on behalf of the two teams, according to Jones, as each group visited the other on a weekly basis.
Fans will be able to admire the finished product in the form of Dead Rising 3 for the Xbox One in November.