Dead Rising 4’s Lack of Timer Was “The Right Way To Go”

Capcom’s Dead Rising 4 will be the first of many big titles to launch in December but it’s been provoking plenty of debate since the decision was made to remove the famous timer. In previous games, there was a timer that dictated how much you could explore and accomplish. Dead Rising 4’s lack of a timer for the campaign has been explained by Capcom Vancouver executive producer Bryce Cochrane and studio director Joe Nickolls. They noted that it offered more freedom to explore the world they created.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Cochrane said, “I think it’s really to do with the expanse of our world. We wanted a huge world you could really explore and find things in. With Dead Rising 3 and the rigid timer, it meant people missed so much of what was in that game. So we decided to go in a different direction, remove that, keep it in multiplayer, but really allow somebody to have a new experience in single-player, dive into the world and explore to their heart’s content – do what they want, have time to experiment, time to figure things out. It is a change of direction, but we really felt it was the right way to go.”

Nickolls also noted that, “We didn’t want to limit people from finding the hidden stuff, the bonus content. Not everybody’s a completionist, but most people do want to feel like they’ve seen most of the stuff, and that’s one of the reasons we made the decision we did with the timing. It’s always been super-polarizing.”

The lack of a timer also means better pacing and allowing the town of Willamette to feel more realistic. “When you had the timer you had to throw everything into the player’s path. Here it’s trying to make the player explore the world and find out things about it.” This extends to the new bosses, the “Maniacs” as well. “They feel like they lived in that area before they went weird. We didn’t go with the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ idea just to put something in there. We wanted all the people who attack you to have a reason to be in Willamette.”

Dead Rising 4 arrives on December 6th for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs.