Capcom announced today that Capcom Vancouver (previously known as Blue Castle Games) will be remaking Dead Rising 2 less than a year after it originally released (Sep. 2010 in North America), but now with a new main character and twist to the story to see how things would have played out.
Titled Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, this will feature the return to the story the star of Dead Rising 1 Frank West and his trusty camera who will be going through the outbreak in Fortune City instead of the Chuck Greene and his daughter. This time around, Frank West has become a "has-been" star after making a fortune from the book he published after the Willamette outbreak, but then lost it all on a failed hair restoration product he tried to launch. Now infected and looking to make a quick buck, he does what most fallen stars do...they show up on reality TV. As a contestant in "Terror is Reality" Frank literally wrestles with the undead in order to make some money to buy Zombrex as he has the 24 hour requirement placed upon himself instead of trying to go back and forth to keep another character alive (like Chuck Greene's daughter in the orignal). This change in having to keep up with other characters will hopefully give us more time to explore the area as long as you keep some Zombrex on hand and ready to administer. Capcom will let me down if they find a way to lock us back to that main room again. But here is to hoping.
Now going along with a new main character and story, Frank's fun obsession with photography will be brought back sans film since he has upgraded to a new digital camera. So while you are trying to survive the countless zombies around newly expanded Fortune City, you can go camera happy with some sometimes hillarious results. But for a more serious use, you will also be trying to uncover the conspiracy behind the event by getting photographic proof as you explore.
And to go along with the new areas, Capcom revealed that new Psychos will show up to fight Frank and possibly expand the story even more now. And to fight those new badies, Capcom mentioned that Frank will have new weapon combinations available, but was not willing to state what they were at this time.
So there you have it, a (kinda) new story, a (returning) new hero, and some new play mechanics. But when will this be available to download? Well...never. Yep, Capcom went on to state that this will be a disc based release instead of DLC for the existing Dead Rising 2. No price was given though being so soon after the first game I am hoping for no more than $30. Will Capcom drive it up to a "brand-new-game" $60, or will they show mercy and let the fans have a great expanded story to add to the game they already may own? We will find out later this year probably around E3 in June.