Summary
By all accounts, theDead Rising Deluxe Remasteris very faithful to the 2006 original.More of a remake than a remaster, the upcoming release sticks closely to its vision while updating and improving its core gameplay mechanics to make it feel more modern. Our own George Foster called itCapcom’smost faithful remake yetin his preview, keeping all of the small details that earned it its following while overhauling visuals and environments and adding quality of life improvements. So far, so good.
Not everything from the original made it to the remake, though. We’ve known since the reveal that psychopathLarry Chiang has been redesigned, changing him from a blatantly racist caricature of an Asian man to a more racially ambiguous figure that looks like a typical butcher. We also know that Cheryl will have a less revealing outfit, which made the usual suspects, predictably, cry censorship.
Now, we also know that the remakewill no longer reward you for taking risque photos. The “Erotica” photography category, which would previously give Frank experience points and a nosebleed, has been removed entirely, and missions where the category was mandatory have been tweaked to accommodate the change.
Capcom has justissued a statement to IGN, in which it explains its bizarre rationale for doing so. The company says the category wasn’t removed “as a response to a changing cultural climate”, but because it was unnecessary, “not an appropriate reward for survival”, and “not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive for the next 72 hours during a zombie apocalypse”. It then clarifies that players can still take those photos if they want, they just won’t receive extra points for doing so.
There are some very valid arguments against the removal of this category, but they require a little context to understand. Dead Rising’s protagonist, Frank West, is a photojournalist who often capitalises on the sensationalist, the horrifying, and the salacious. You can get points for not just Erotica, but Brutality (violence), Drama (self-explanatory), Horror (loads of zombies and gore), and Outtake (the funny and bizarre).
Dead Rising’s commentary arises from how Frank dehumanises his subjects, reducing them to objectives that will garner him as many points as possible, barely recognising the awful things he’s photographing. Youcouldmake the argument that removing this category lessens the impact of the commentary by removing an intentionally unsavoury aspect of the game. You could also make the argument that the commentary still exists without Frank taking creepshots of livingandzombified women.
It’s also worth noting that you don’t get points for taking pictures of men’s bulges – the points are very explicitly gendered to incentivise pictures of women. I’d argue a good alternative would have been to keep the mechanic and make it gender agnostic.
You could also make the argument that this is a loss for game preservation, but you can still buy the 2016 remaster with the mechanic intact, so that’s an irrelevant line of logic. The category is certainly less cut and dry than ‘objectification bad’, is my point.
Why Won’t Capcom Be Straight About Its Reasons?
However, Capcom doesn’t say any of this in its statement about the category’s removal. Instead, it tries to make a case about shots of zombie tatas not being essential to Frank’s goal. Well, it’s not, but neither are funny masks on zombies, right?
The company seems to be trying to straddle two sides – the kind of people who think incentivised sexual objectification in games is in poor taste and shouldn’t be implemented in modern games, even remakes, and the kind of people who quite enjoy it. It removed the category, made Cheryl less overtly sexy, and swapped out a racist caricature, but then denied that it was because of a “changing cultural climate” where that stuff doesn’t fly so easily anymore.
I’m not saying that these changes are bad, nor am I saying that I want Capcom to release a statement saying it’s trying to be more woke or whatever. But it’s pretty cowardly to make changes very obviously geared towards making a game more politically correct by contemporary standards, and then appeal to an anti-woke crowd by talking around the reasons why.
Capcom isn’t unique in its reluctance to address the growing anti-PC movement in gaming – just last month, Ubisoft releasedan equally confounding statementabout racists blasting Assassin’s Creed Shadows online thatdidn’t say the crucial thing: racism is bad. In trying to align themselves with modern moral standards while simultaneously trying not to alienate gamers who get up in arms every time they see a game with any sort of diversity, these studios release statements that say nothing of substance, obfuscate the truth, and annoy people on both sides. These changes aren’t that big a deal, but corporate cowardice is.
Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster
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Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster builds on the 2016 remaster of the 2006 original, following photojournalist Frank West as he looks to uncover the shocking source of a zombie outbreak - and make it out alive.
