Dead Rising 3 Kinect and Smartglass integration detailed
Dead Rising 3's optional use of the Xbox One's mandatory Kinect gifts its zombies with a level of situational awareness you may not want them to have, truth be told. "They can hear," a Capcom representative told us during a demonstration at E3. "If you want to call a zombie or distract [a zombie], you just yell at your Kinect and they'll respond to you."
Sounds useful in a stealth situation, but what if you're not as good at staying quiet as you'd like, or your roommate comes home at a tense moment, taking the frustration of his lousy day out on your front door? Are the zombies listening that closely?
"That's part of the joke," executive producer Josh Bridge said. We asked whether the zombies would respond to specific words or just sounds in general, and while exact details regarding the mechanic won't be revealed until further into production, "for the most part, zombies don't understand English." Bridge added that the microphone sensitivity will be tuned to a "threshold that makes sense," so that attracting zombies will, by and large, feel like an intentional decision. Of course, the functionality can be disabled entirely.
Smartglass, meanwhile, grants the player situational awareness of a different sort. Dead Rising 3's Smartglass feature set provides the player with exclusive missions that unlock apps within Smartglass, such as the ability to call in air strikes, drone support or area-wide flares for distracting thousands of zombies at a time.
Smartglass can also be used to locate specific types of items and abandoned storefronts, which Capcom supposes could lead to an interesting form of couch co-op -- one player plays the game proper, while their Smartglass-equipped couchmate plays a supporting role, locating useful weapons, setting waypoints for mission objectives and so on.
"But that stuff is totally optional," a Capcom representative told us. "If you don't want to fool with Smartglass you don't have to, but we tried to develop features that enrich the experience of Dead Rising; help you find weapons, help you find stores, help you get to the stuff you want to get to, as well as cool explosive boom things that are pretty to look at."
