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“ It has not been a smooth sail.

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Capcom Vancouver can still laugh at Dead Rising 3 After years of grueling development, during which the team uprooted many of the franchise’s defining facets, the guys still giggle and guffaw at their game’s manic sway between serious and silly.“We didn’t want to be funny first,” executive producer Josh Bridge tells IGN. Looking back at the series’ history as he and the team prepared for the another sequel, Bridge wondered about the necessity of absurdity. “It eroded to the point of, ‘Are we even making a zombie game?’ We didn’t want to be clown-shoes with the tone. The goal with Dead Rising 3 then became to bring the focus back on zombies as a frightening enemy.Killing loading zones was also essential to the dev team’s primary goal of enabling as much player freedom as possible. On Dead Rising 2, says producer Mike Jones, “we had to have load zones, there was too much stuff on screen to manage a stream smoothly.” With a next-gen sequel in mind, Capcom Vancouver insisted on broadening the density of objects and objectives without requiring load zones.Art director Alan Jarvie says this put an enormous amount of pressure on the art team. “We want to make a higher fidelity game that looks as beautiful as we can make it, so it’s tailored to balance how many zombies we can put on screen versus how many frames we can render per second, all without loading zones.”Bridge candidly admits, “It has not been a smooth sail. It went between ‘fear, hair on fire,’ to ‘I think we’re going to do it,’ to ‘oh my god, we’re so far away.’” Striking an exclusivity deal with Microsoft helped Capcom solve specific low-level problems they had with hardware along the way, allowing the team to leverage Xbox One to its advantage.“You always have to sacrifice something, visually,” Jarvie says, “but at the end of the day it was reassuring to see how many zombies we could fit on screen and maintain visual fidelity.” At Capcom Vancouver, “We have a very high bar for how we want to look. Microsoft has a very high bar for how they want it to look. And the two partnered together and we push the visuals farther than we ever thought possible.”Even after solving what would make its open-world game definitively “next generation” on Xbox One, Capcom was flying blind once again leading into its June 2013 reveal. It was for two reasons.On one hand, nobody had as much as a screenshot of other Xbox One games to figure out where they stood. “We didn’t see any other titles before E3,” Bridge says. “We’re like, ‘What is next-gen?’ We were quarantined from each other.”The second side of that coin was Capcom not knowing how fans would react to the more mature, realistic art Alan Jarvie’s been fighting to bring to Dead Rising for years. “It was kind of an art direction nightmare,” he says. “You’re trying to do two things at once, it’s a two-faced game,” with its darker horror vibe and shark-suit costumes. “You’ve got to give a nod to both of those palettes at the same time.” He knew to expect backlash -- especially given the complete absence of goofy stuff in the reveal -- but felt confident that dedication to visual quality benefited Dead Rising 3, while also accentuating the stupidity of wearing a banana hammock while wielding a lightsaber.Even if humor took a backseat to other ambitions. The way Capcom Vancouver plays its game is similar to the way many will enjoy it, no doubt. Jones dresses main character Nick in a gimp suit and equips him with a swordfish melee weapon. Bridge cackles like a kid every time a mini-nuke sends 30 zombies soaring into the sky.During staged demos, I’ve seen developers fake their own amusement or lie when claiming “I’ve never seen that before.” Watching these guys make a mess of the world that’s made them slaves, there’s an pure, honest, and infectious sense of glee.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor at IGN. He’s currently reading Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome to the Monkey House. Follow him on Twitter follow him on IGN , and listen to him on Podcast Unlocked