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twmac

Dead Rising 3

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So, I know there are plenty of people on here that are backing the PlayStation 4 I was just wondering if anyone is getting an Xbox One and if anyone was planning on picking up Dead Rising 3.

 

I really wasn't and then the videos got to me. Someone at work had already put in a pre-order so I took that off his hands and now I am going to play this game.

 

I've never been the type to be an early adopter but for some reason DR3 has its hooks in. Go figure.

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That and Forza are pretty much the only launch games on the X1 that interest me. Unfortuantely, that's not enough to justify me picking up the console. Heck, I only recently beat DR2.

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DR3 is about the only game on the XB1 that I am really interested in right now.  Everything else (like Titanfall) is at least coming to PC as well.  I was hoping that the era of 3rd party exclusives would mostly die out with the coming generation, but it's not looking that way. 

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I'd consider myself a pretty big fan of the first two Dead Rising games, i think the first one is probably actually one of my favorite games of the entire last console generation, but DR3 being rid of the Groundhog Day-like structure and the clock has made me far, far less interested in it. They've somehow omitted the most defining attributes of the previous games.

I loved the way the clock could force you to make choices about abandoning a line of questing or even people in tow because pursuing those objectives was putting other things at stake by eating up too much of your time, or the way the ticking clock compelled you to wade through those hordes of zombies instead of carefully and slowly skirting around them, and also the way it played into this loop of... Just flailing horribly the first time you play, everybody's getting killed, you're missing all the deadlines, you get a horrible ending. You start over, your character progression is intact and you've learned a lot about the quest flow and the environments, you try again and do a little better and get a different ending. You keep doing this until you can save everybody and get the true ending.

It feels like they don't understand what Dead RIsing was, because when they're trying to quell concerns about 3, they just keep going on about how you can still dress the protagonist up in stupid outfits.

I understand there's still going to be a clock in some manner of ultra-difficult hardcore mode, but relegating it to the status of an unlockable ensures that it won't be as refined as the implementation in the first two games, and supposedly tying it up to the game's highest difficulty mode isn't right either.

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Dead Rising was a marquee title when the Xbox 360 came out; it was one of those first games that put hordes of NPCs and enemies in your way, creating the generation's defining gameplay attribute: crowd mechanics. I was very impressed when I first saw it, but when I played the game a few years later (for the first time, mind), I was horrified at the controls. I just couldn't get through it, it controlled so poorly. Shame.

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If the control is an issue, DR2 controls much better, i just find its environments and quests to be a little less interesting. (Quests is the right term here, i think, because Dead Rising is really an RPG in disguise.)

Also, DR1 had the camera.

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DR3 keeps the time mode in Hardcore difficulty.

 

Going back and getting my girlfriend to play Dead Rising 2 and then playing Co-Op with a friend who isn't very good at games there was this startling realisation as to why Dead Rising 3 has made the timed mode optional. It makes the game better for everyone.

 

I doubt I will play the game in non-timed mode (as long as it is unlockable from the start) but I know a lot of people who might actually play it due to it no longer being massivel y stressful.

 

It is weird because only about a month ago I was all against it but watching my girlfriend struggle up against that instant fail scenario in Dead Rising 2 (where your daughter will die for lack of Zombrex) and give up was an epiphany for me.

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So I have now done 3 play-throughs of Dead Rising 3 on Nightmare mode. The first time I think I made it to chapter 5 before failing. The second I almost beat chapter 7 and the third I bust all the way through.

 

This is a very different game to the first two and in some ways I feel that it actually comes off better than DR2 as a result. DR2 felt like a developer trying to please both parties (the fans and detractors of the first game) and, as a result, pleasing no one.

 

Dead Rising 3, even Nightmare mode, pretty much throws out anything from DR that made it what it was. It still has weapon combos, but you aren't limited to where you make them, there is still a time limit but it just means that you ignore all the side quests and once you've done a couple of playthroughs it is not like they have any real value anyway. This is because everytime you pick up an item or get in a vehicle it is automatically stored in a Data Base for you to retrieve at a safe house (clothes and weapons) or garage (vehicles). This means that after a while most of the time combo weapons become pointless because you can just make a quick run to safe house a get a couple.

 

At the end of the day it doesn't really matter because when you charge into a group of hundreds of zombies, in a dress, luchador boots and a gimp mask while swinging Mjolnir (it is called the Electric Crusher but it is the same thing) it all just gels brilliantly.

 

All of things mentioned above also don't end up mattering because the developers have decided to just let you explore the content at the pace that you want to (I had a couple of people who were utterly bewildered when they randomnly dropped into my game to find me swinging a sword that set everything on fire and using a makeshift grenade launcer from the back of motorcycle-steamroller hybrid) and for what this game is - or at least I feel it is - and that is a developer being allowed to breathe their own personality onto a franchise it makes perfect sense.

 

I am sad to see that it has moved even further away from Dead Rising but happy that it has ended up being such a blast.

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That generally seems to be the popular consensus that i've seen, that it's no longer particularly recognizable as a Dead Rising game, but is still pretty good on its own merits.

How is the performance holding up? Is it getting really framey at all? That seems to be the thing people are freaking out about the most.

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You know what? It does drop frames, but I am the worst person to talk to about this as it doesn't bother me at all. I remember the Giantbomb crew freaking out about the framerate on Far Cry 3 for consoles, I played it and the framerate was the one thing I didn't have a problem with.

 

It does chug a couple of times but I am fine with that, it reminds me of EDF, in that the slow down feels kind of cinematic.

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So thanks to the current Humble Bundle I finally started playing this.  And I had forgot how much I love this dumbass series. 

 

I was originally put off by the lack of a significant timer in Normal mode, and what sounded like poor time balance in Nightmare.  Plus the PC version was reported to have some technical problems early on. 

 

But it turns out that I don't actually care about the timer all that much?  At least not for a first playthrough.  It's just fucking joyful to ducktape a couple of things together and then wade through a bunch of zombies.  And the first boss fight was wonderfully absurd in the best way, fucking car combat with a biker gang. 

 

Sometimes dumb goofy things are good, and it's nice to remember that.

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Yeah, sadly the DLC didn't really live up to the full game so I would recommend not bothering with that.

 

Multiple playthroughs are less fun to be fair.

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On 7/18/2017 at 4:49 AM, twmac said:

Yeah, sadly the DLC didn't really live up to the full game so I would recommend not bothering with that.

 

Multiple playthroughs are less fun to be fair.

 

I finished this up tonight, and I see what you mean about multiple playthroughs.  With both the other DRs, I was ready to restart right away after finishing, usually to take a shot at some of the harder challenges or saving everyone, or whatever.  But none of the PP Trials are interesting at all, I saved all the survivors the first time, so it would just be rushing through the story on Nightmare, which doesn't sound all that appealing. 

 

Still though, totes worth playing once and I had a bunch of fun with it. 

 

Sadly DR4 sounds like a train wreck.  Continuing to simplify stuff down to just being an untimed open world game where you buy stuff from merchants for currency, just like every other open world game. 

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