The release of Dead Rising 4 will actually coincide with the 10th anniversary of the first game’s release, and developer Capcom are hoping to make it a birthday to remember.
Executive producer Bryce Cochrane recently spoke to GameSpot during San Diego Comic-Con, where he spoke in detail about what to expect from the latest open world Dead Rising.
One of the main aims of Dead Rising 4 seems to be fusing the series’ roots with some of the sequel’s modern trappings and improvements.
Cochrane explained:
It’s still fast-paced, but it’s a bit more measured [than Dead Rising 3]. We went way deeper with explorable areas, and dug down into a sewer system beneath the city of Willamette.
The return to the city of the first game, as well as the character of Frank West, was also a deliberate nod to acknowledge the fan love around the first game, and West himself – but it was also apparently a sneaky way to introduce a more methodical kind of exploration.
As Cochrane said:
We brought back the investigation and photojournalism of Dead Rising 1, and that’s what’s going to progress you through the game. It’s all about learning the story of Willamette. You have these choices: ‘Do I want to go with the mission? Do I want to go with side content? Or do I want to go with fun?
Of course, a Dead Rising game would be nothing if it didn’t offer endless hordes of zombies for you to dispose of in increasingly insane ways, and Dead Rising 4 is all set to continue in that grand tradition.
Cochrane also described a number of brilliantly promising ‘exosuits’, which West can craft himself in-game and really go wild on the zombie scum.
For example, one could put together a suit that has a machine gun on one shoulder and a rocket launcher on the other side, although that’s the vanilla option.
Players can even have West attach a Slurpee machine to the suit and strike down the undead with ice cold sugary tornadoes – and I’m willing to bet that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what the exosuit can do.
Finally, Cochrane reassured fans that even with the changes, it’s still a Dead Rising:
We’re still the fun zombie game. We don’t take ourselves seriously. That’s not going to change with Dead Rising 4. There will just be more avenues for you to take if you want to vary the experience.
Dead Rising 4 will be coming to Xbox One and PC on December 6, 2016. A PS4 release is also likely to happen somewhere down the line.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.