There’s no denying that The Last of Us is one of the gems in the PlayStation console exclusive catalog. And the Naughty Dog series is envious. Among those envious is Microsoft who, at a time, asked a regular zombie game of a totally different genre to create a Last of Us-like.
The surprising revelation of the day comes from Liam Robertson, famous insider and author of many scoops on canceled projects. In the last video in its Game History Secrets series, it turns out that at the beginning of life of the Xbox One, Microsoft would have asked Capcom Vancouver (Dead Rising 2, Dead Rising 3) to develop an exclusive game supposed to compete with The Last of Us :
Microsoft was looking to add an exclusive survival game to its portfolio to compete with Sony’s critical success in 2013, The Last of Us. Capcom Vancouver sources say Microsoft approached studio executives with the idea that they ‘occupy of such a project.
According to the sources, the two sides would have agreed with enthusiasm on the fact that this “killer of Last of Us” would be a total reboot of Dead Rising for Xbox One. Josh Bridge, then executive producer at Capcom Vancouver and creative lead on Dead Rising 3, would have directed the creation of this game including the code name was “Climber.” […]
His new leadership was much more moderate, moving away from the comic antics of his predecessors. His tone and visual style were darker and rougher. Crafting and associating objects was still possible even if weapons were now more realistic. This new vision drew its inspiration from works dealing with popular zombies at the time like The Walking Dead. But it was also a manifestation of the studio’s strong desire to create something different and more serious. […]
The result was unlike anything Dead Rising had ever offered in the past. Which posed problems.
Artworks from “Climber“its available in our gallery below. If Microsoft was kept informed of progress, sources say that Capcom Japan was not informed of the direction of the project and the direction they wanted to take with the Dead Rising license. In mid-2014, Capcom Vancouver would have presented the project of the managers of Capcom Japan completely dumbfounded. They would not have liked the project at all.
According to a developer from the Canadian studio, the Dead Rising license was not as malleable as they imagined. Such a serious shift was not in the DNA of the series and the development of Dead Rising 4 has been completely restarted (with the agreement of Microsoft). The character of Frank West was brought back to the fore and the direction of the game came closer to what had been done in the past. Very little has been kept from Climber in the title that the players finally got to try.
That said, the staff of Capcom Vancouver called this project Dead Rising 4 and it would seem that this was also the title that had been communicated Capcom Japan. […]
The vast majority of the Capcom Vancouver team worked on Climber for several months in mid-2014. This large team spent millions of dollars to develop an elaborate prototype that showed a complete invention of the Dead Rising series. It would have been an open world survival game with an emphasis on undercover gameplay. This included sneaking behind the zombies to discreetly execute them.
