Dead Rising 2 Capable of 6,000 On-Screen Zombies?

You "heard" right. The skinny on developer Blue Castle's Dead Rising 2 is that the in-game engine will be capable of boasting 6,000 characters (zombies) at once without sacrificing any horse power. That's a lot of zombies.

The earlier emphasis on "heard" goes with the fact that this is all hearsay and has yet to be confirmed. However, the boastful claims are coming from folks near and dear to the development of Dead Rising 2.

At GDC, the game’s character art lead, Izmeth Siddeek, seemed confident that DR2 will push the limits of zombie masses. “Dead Rising 2 deals with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game,” he said. “Everything else needed to be subordinated to this requirement.”


Such insane numbers of living dead are reportedly possible thanks to Dead Rising's new Mental Mill software, a focal point of Siddeek's presenation. Mental Mill will supposedly allow developers to efficiently render characters without watering down the gameplay or using cheap tricks like decreasing costume numbers.

They hype machine doesn't stop there though. Following Siddeek's presentation, Mental Mill production manager, Laura Scholl, noted that Siddeek said that the Dead Rising 2 development team is preparing to have as many as 6,000 characters on the screen.

Siddeek has yet to confirm or deny this statement. But fans of zombie mayhem should be rejoicing nonetheless. If Dead Rising 2 even approaches half these numbers, the game will still be a visual feast.

We've seen a ton o' zombies. But 6,000?

Source: MTV Multiplayer Blog