Dead Rising 3, the open-world zombie game coming from the fine folks at Capcom Vancouver, wasn’t always planned as a leading Xbox One exclusive. It might seem like the perfect next-generation fit with its engine pushing hundreds of enemies on screen at once, but the only reason the project is on the Xbox One is because the team just couldn’t fit its vision on the Xbox 360.
"When we started making Dead Rising 3, during prototyping we hit the ceiling on what we could do – this is the size of the world we can make, we can stream it, but we can't do it on Xbox 360," producer Mike Jones told OXM.
Instead of compromising the game and cutting integral features, Capcom showed what it had to Microsoft to see what could be done.
"And we took it to Microsoft, and we said this is what we're trying to do with Dead Rising, just to share what we know, and they flipped," he continued. "'This is f**king awesome, this is just the kind of thing you should be doing.' And we said 'Well, there's a catch.' And they said: 'What's the catch?' And we said: 'We can't do it on Xbox 360. It's not fitting. It's not working.'
"And that's when they started talking to us about: 'you guys should start targeting next gen. We'll publish, we'll bring you under our security umbrella, we'll start showing you all our crazy secret technologies, what we're planning.'"
It might not be the most visually impressive game, but Dead Rising 3 is achieving technical feats that would only be possible on new consoles. Look for the launch title when the Xbox One releases Nov. 22.