The new thing to do with open-world games regarding the size of the map is to talk about things like it's an e-peen measuring contest “Yeah, you know that one thing? It's bigger than that other thing... like, twice as big!” Capcom's launch title for the Xbox One, Dead Rising 3, is bragging about its map schlong because, well, it's bigger than Dead Rising 1 and Dead Rising 2's maps combined.
Polygon spotted the story on the Financial Post (and for crying out loud, does every single website and their butler have a gaming section now? Jeez and I thought getting put out of work by YouTubers was the only worry we had) where executive producer on Dead Rising 3, Jeff Bridge, commented about the game's massive new map.
While it's not as big as Grand Theft Auto V or Just Cause 2, it is a heck of a lot bigger than previous entries in the series and it will require a heavy use of vehicles to get around the area, with Bridge saying...
“With the Xbox One, we had the ability to make a way bigger world, and way more detail that can go into that world,”“We wanted to go truly open-world this time around. No more load screens, with the biggest world that we’ve been able to make, with loads of zombies. And in doing this, we needed to hold on to the brand pillars of Dead Rising: everything and anything is a weapon, as well as the ability to play the way you want.”
Those aren't just empty words, though. The Financial Post was given a map of all three games where you can see that in the upper left hand corner is Dead Rising 1, below it is Dead Rising 2 and next to the two of them is Dead Rising 3. Quite mammoth, yeah? Yeah.
I wonder how much playtime a map like that will offer, though? I mean, will it be the sort of thing you blast through like Call of Duty and never return, or is it something you'll want to dabble in from time to time?
Well, that amazingly non-obvious segue above that leads into the next quote is addressed by senior producer Jason Leigh, who stated that...
“We’ve been taking some flack over ‘oh, you’ve just gone Call of Duty,‘ but we’re not just one note,”“There’s a huge spectrum of it being serious and mainstream, but if you delve in you can do some really ridiculous stuff.”
Well that's good news.
Dead Rising 3 is expected to be on display at the Tokyo Game Show in Japan next week, as one of eight games showcased for Microsoft's Xbox One. I'm quite confident that Microsoft will be running the game on actual consoles or dev kits and not Nvidia GTX-powered Windows 7 PCs.
Dead Rising 3 will be one of many games launching with the Xbox One come November 22nd, just one week after the release of the PlayStation 4.
