Dead Rising 3's optional use of the Xbox One's mandatory Kinect gifts its zombies with a level of situational awareness you may not want them to have, truth be told. "They can hear," a Capcom representative told us during a demonstration at E3. "If you want to call a zombie or distract [a zombie], you just yell at your Kinect and they'll respond to you."
Sounds useful in a stealth situation, but what if you're not as good at staying quiet as you'd like, or your roommate comes home at a tense moment, taking the frustration of his lousy day out on your front door? Are the zombies listening that closely?
"That's part of the joke," executive producer Josh Bridge said. We asked whether the zombies would respond to specific words or just sounds in general, and while exact details regarding the mechanic won't be revealed until further into production, "for the most part, zombies don't understand English." Bridge added that the microphone sensitivity will be tuned to a "threshold that makes sense," so that attracting zombies will, by and large, feel like an intentional decision.
Of course, the functionality can be disabled entirely.
