While things have been quiet for Capcom’s Dead Rising franchise aside from last year’s release of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, a fifth mainline entry in the series was at one point in the works. In an interview with Game Reactor, industry veteran Marie Mejerwall has revealed some details about the cancelled projects, including the fact that it was being developed using Unreal Engine 5.
Mejerwall worked on the NPC team during the development of Dead Rising 5, and she spoke about how one of her favourite things about the project was the sheer variety of enemies that players would get to fight. These enemies would include regular zombies and even more intelligent variants, among other things.
“What I loved about Dead Rising 5, as it was canceled, I was on the NPC team, so I made all the boss fights,” said Mejerwall. “And I loved the variation, the tiers of the enemies. So we both had the typical kind of zombies that are not very intelligent, that will grab you. But then we also have a little bit more advanced, semi-more advanced enemies.”
Comparing the tiers of enemies in Dead Rising 5 to what a player might see in a typical Batman game, Mejerwall noted that there would be regular enemies, as well as stronger variants with more armour, for example. These enemies would have gradually gone up in tiers, eventually culminating in entire mini-bosses.
“So the ones for Batman, for example, would be a typical thug. We had the equivalent also in Dead Rising, what we would call that,” she explained. “And then we had the armored version of that. And then what Dead Rising does really well, that I really love, is they have the mini-bosses. And it becomes a kind of tenant unit.”
“It’s not as common to have it that pronounced in games as we do in Dead Rising. And they were a ton of fun to do, and the way that we designed them was that you should be able to drop them almost anywhere. So they shouldn’t be dependent on what kind of terrain or map that you were having, because they could move around.”
Mejerwall also spoke about how Dead Rising 5 was going to have epic boss fights that could be experienced in their own specially-designed arenas. One of these fights, she said, would take place in a temple environment that she had designed, with the temple breaking down around the player as the fight progressed. Bosses would also get angrier over the course of a fight, which would eventually lead to it using different moves.
“Whereas the biggest bosses that I also worked on, they already had their very unique arenas,” Mejerwall continued. “And it could be stuff like one boss fight that I designed was in a temple environment, where over the course of the fight, the temple breaks down more and more.”
“And it gets more and more intense. And the boss gets more and more angry doing more and more stuff. So we really had a wide range of different enemy types. And richer variation. It was really fun to work on that game, and I’m really sad that it never got to see the light of day.”
Ultimately, however, Dead Rising 5 would get cancelled. Capcom had instead released Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster last year on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
