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Well, I never saw this one coming. Eight years after the last installment and the sacking of the team responsible for the series, Capcom has surprise-announced a new Dead Rising game.
If you went back in time to 2006 and asked me what my favorite game was on the Xbox 360, I’d have shouted back Dead Rising within a second. The game combined at-the-time groundbreaking technology with an elaborate mechanical design, all layered on top of some of the most visceral action you could find on the platform. It was mostly about fighting zombies in a mall, yes, but the larger quest structure deftly played around with time as an intense motivator, ratcheting up the tension the longer it took you to perform the game’s mandatory tasks. Its large open mall environment was filled with micro details never quite managed in earlier games, with hundreds of items to interact with and dozens of unique stores and hallways to wander in.
Capcom hoped you would want to replay the game, and they rewarded you for that investment. It had branching story paths depending on how deft you were at juggling the different tasks within its quest system, and upgrades that carried over from playthrough to playthrough. Modern open world games could stand to learn so many lessons from the ways it used time not just as a…
