Dead Rising 3’s Lazy Video Game Playing Psychopath, Sloth, Revealed

Earlier this year Siliconera talked about a surreal fight in Dead Rising 3 where Nick wanders into a mansion and finds a spoilt adult too busy playing video games to be concerned with a zombie outbreak. Sloth is waiting for a pizza guy to show up while playing a shooter when Nick, the mechanic protagonist in Dead Rising 3, meets him.

All of the psychopaths in Dead Rising 3 are based on the seven deadly sins and Siliconera can exclusively reveal Sloth.

Sloth is this spoilt trust fund guy who is playing video games when Nick meets him. How did you come up with this tongue-in-cheek concept for a boss battle?

Josh Bridge, Executive Producer at Capcom Vancouver: That one was really hard to do. We talked about psychos when working on Dead Rising 3 and coming off Dead Rising 2. We tried to look at psychos, as if under duress or in absence of law enforcement your animal comes out from inside. We wanted to make each one offer a different experience for that sin that we based it on, you know the seven deadly sins.

When it came to Sloth it went through trial and error concepts for quite sometime. For all of the other ones it was relatively straightforward into a gameplay experience. Sloth was incredibly hard because how do you make a challenge for a character that doesn’t want to do anything? We eventually arrived at the completely seen it all and done it all, maybe spoilt, always had a silver spoon in his mouth and then themed it around that. He’s going all of these toys and trinkets lying around him and he’s going to let him do those things for him while gets back to doing what he’s doing whether its playing video games or watching movies during the outbreak.

How does the fight play out? How does fighting Sloth compare to a regular boss like the biker boss?

We wanted to translate the seven deadly sins translate into gameplay. Thinking about that sin, if you can figure out a way in gameplay to agitate it you can then expose a weakness. If you don’t want to play that way and you want to go in with the craziest combo weapons completely leveled up and just want to bludgeon the dude that’s there too. It’s probably a tougher path.

If you strategize – we wanted to add a cerebral level where you can manipulate them and get them out into the open to expose that weakness. When you think of all the different sins and we started looking at Sloth what can you do to get him to come out. Maybe be potentially more passive than him. [Laughs]

How do the regular bosses play out in comparison?

From a gameplay point of view, the one thing we looked at in the other past Dead Risings, is they were essentially built around attrition. You exchange blows, drink some orange juice, and exchange more blows. We wanted to make sure with the boss encounters this time there was a strategy. It’s not like I’m coming up with a profound concept here, it’s just within the series it’s how can we build strategy in boss encounters so attrition isn’t the only path.

We looked at them as multiple stages too, so what you see isn’t just what you get. When you start whittling them down, the boss strategy whether more guys coming out or the boss changes their location and changes their playing field. We wanted these to be memorable moments.

There are other enemies other than zombies and psychopaths too. Like when Dick meets Nick he runs into these bikers…

Ultimately humans are the ultimate evil and the zombies are a symptom of that. We have a world that’s gone awry and lost all of its laws and folks rise to take over the city. There are these crazed bikers looking at this an opportunity to take over the city and run it their own way. You encounter those in gameplay and in boss encounters. There are also opposing factions. There is a military presence throughout the world, but you don’t know if you can trust or cannot trust them.

Siliconera will have more on Dead Rising 3 later this week.