Join me as we explore the realm of map designing nonsense, in it's purest form. Second Channel: / @stip02 - / stip0_ - Discord Server: / discord - My Discord: stip0 - DEAD RISING Development Archive: deadrising2mod...
As a resident of Colorado, i can confirm the malls here in real life are just as confusing, inconvenient, and non-handicap friendly as the ones in Willamette
Deadass bro I visit Colorado to see some family every few years and the malls there are so confusing also not related tbh in a weird way I always thought deadrising captured the look of Colorado pretty decent actually
@@tobinmonroe3046 yeah they tried their best to capture early 2000's Midwest Americana and I don't think any game has done it as uniquely as Deadrising. Such a fun setting in a mundane thing, along with the inspiration from Evil Dead
I mean, at least we got to explore Willamette in that weird non-canonical Dead Rising spin-off where you play as Frank's distant half cousin; Hank the wedding photographer
TBF though I kinda like DR4. Not in the "This is THE sequel DR1 NEEDED!" but more in the way of "This is fun but I'm glad I got it in the bargain bin."
i think one of the biggest issues with willamette is the mall itself. it seems illogical for a rural american town of that size to have a megaplex mall that massive, with such a large objective waste of space as leisure park. a town that size wouldn't have the budget for something that size, and a couple blocks in any direction puts you out in nature, so why have a park in the center of it? Also, maybe the layout of the mall makes sense according to how malls are over in japan. Their building codes and urban planning might be like that over there, but the dev team didnt realize that it makes no sense when applied to a free standing structure like malls here in the US
It's not necessarily nonsensical- I live in a fairly rural area, and forty five minutes or so's drive North takes me to a fairly large mall in an area that's maybe a bit more dense than Willamette seems to be. The four lane roads through the center of Willamette tell me it's probably a relatively high-traffic area, so it'd make sense that it might be a mall placed there to draw business in from larger population centers nearby. Also with regards to the entrances- that same mall I'm talking about is nearly as bad, TBH. You've got entrances on your anchor stores and a main entrance, and that's about it, which means there are long sections of the mall that you just have to walk forever to get to, even if it's your only stop. I think that sort of thing is deliberate, to get foot traffic around some of the smaller stores.
There are a number of big malls in small towns in America due to the explosion of malls in the 60's, and how you practically couldn't lose money opening one up, no matter how incompetent you were with it. Which also led to a whole lot of dead malls today. I can't remember the details, but that was the jist of it
Dude, just google Marineda City Mall at Coruña, Spain. A nonsense huge shopping mall in a quite small city. Looks like a global trend of this century ( @stipo, perfect location for a zombie outbreak, just saying)
Actually around Missouri and Arkansas there are big malls like that in small towns. I remember going to one around Missouri and going to a game shop in a mall and the people working let me play a viva pinata demo and dead rising which was ironic. But we only left there with an original Xbox and manhunt lol.
It could make sense if they made the mall like the only shopping location in the town like every single store is just in that building, but even than that's disproven by the number of stores in the ordinary town
I've a feeling the developers watched the movie "Eight Legged Freaks" and assumed that having weird underground mines attached to a mall is perfectly fine. That film shares a lot of strange similarities with Dead Rising. The other thing is why would you build a mall that big IN town? the local roads would be bottle-necked with traffic constantly, it's why they build them out of town. Also no multi storey parking lot either? there's not enough parking out front for a mall of that size. Finally, there's no back area of the mall for trucks to deliver goods. I worked in a mall as a kid, and those delivery areas are HUGE. bigger than the mall itself a lot of the time.
Not a single mention of the underground parking garage that connects to Leisure Park and has no exits to the town proper? So you have Leisure Park a parking lot and the underground area but no way for vehicles to get out into the town.
I remember that one of the Capcom staff from Japan was sent to America to figure out just what the hell a shopping mall was, and from this video, it seems that whole experience was some sort of horrific fever dream for him.
I always knew that there was a lot of ilogic places and locations in DR1 Willamette, Colorado in general. For example: -What was exactly the place that you fought with Brock Mason? A military base? A prison camp? A training camp for tanks? Or anything like that? -Why there's a wall blocking the parking lot in Leisure Park? -What was exactly the main use for the maintenance tunnel in Leisure Park? -Why there's a butcher shop in the maintenance tunnel? -And the rest that you said in your video.
Come to think of it, why the hell did so many zombies end up in the maintenance tunnel? It's pretty hard to access intentionally as a healthy human being who can still think
@@drmegaman That's another good question. And also why the did so many zombies end up in the tunnels between Willamette Parkview Mall and that military base. Considering that there wasn't an entrance in the clock, before the helicopter crashed.
This is a pretty funny and interesting video. I never really noticed most of these errors in mall design, but now I'm always going to think about them. Your editing has certainly improved since the good ol' days of JTAG modding, that's for sure. Great video, man.
@Mikahel Nunez RPDs structure legit didn't made sense. from the whole building and sewers stiched together. at least in the Remake they made a sense and grounded bit more albeit still fuckin weird.
Dead Rising 2 is a little bit better given its half Casino and there is that big ass gate, but if some shit happens and you need an Ambulance at the Arena they would need to either drive up the stairs or go threw the Hotel, then South Plaza on Foot, also let's say you have to go to the bathroom after eating too many Jellybeans at Lombardi's you would need to run threw the food court into Slot Ranch and go to the bathrooms on the other side
Sorry if its brought up later but I remember the tunnel having a load screen which I thought was meant to reresent a passage of time we dont play but where Frank and Isabel are traveling.
probably true that they had time restraints but instead of focusing on a realistic map, they made a map that was focused on gameplay which is why for me, the mall is really fun
Interesting stuff and great job noticing these inconsistencies. I'd still prefer that devs design the game around providing good gameplay first rather than making everything internally consistent (considering limited development time)
I think the intro helicopter ride through the town and being able to see the town when inside the mall is so much more important that people realize. It really gives you a sense of an outside world and that you are truly isolated in the mall. Where as with DR2 you just spawn inside fortune city and cant see what outside and does not give you that same feeling.
@The Cat-Ear Femboy Café That would have been really cool if you play case zero as the intro then make your way to Fortune City and then the main game begins.
I always imagined that they made the tunnel shorter so YOu don't have to run inside it for 20 mintues and it really reaches out further into the mountains
Could we also take a moment to appreciate the fact that a town with only 53,594 people (and one that doesn't seem to be connected to a larger urban or metropolitan area) has a gigantic, multi-level mall, with a roller coaster no less, that would put most real malls in major cities to shame?
Amazing video! Architecture is so easy to forget when developing a game, but it's important for immersion. I think someone managed to stick all the Half life 1 maps into a single one. And it actually makes sense, just impressive. Maybe an analysis to the one on DR2 next?
Another excellent video. Of course, the real answer here is that its just a fictional video game and the game-play/"sense of place" is more important than actual geographic accuracy. Its pretty easy to suspend your disbelief and "feel" like the construction mountain area is somewhere outside the mall in the town, as long as you can see mountain tops and sky. I think it works, especially for a 'casual' 1st-time player. I love your map modding btw. seeing the Willamette map imported into Unity and 'flown-through' is fascinating! Please keep adding to this "dead rising 1 museum", as you call your channel. Cheers! :D
I get so giddy when you upload!! Videos on my favorite game ever, such an awesome channel!! Thx for exploiting all the flaws with willamette mall lmao 😂😂😂😂🤗
@@eksdee2170 I thought about that 11 years ago when I was playing the game yet. When the convicts appeared at leisure park my brothers and I were wondering how they got there considering there isn’t a drive-through gate from the parking lot.
The boss arena gave me “water dam” vibes. Like at one point it was a man-made water reservoir, or a type of bulkhead/levy system to prevent flash floods coming down from the mountains as the winter snow melts in the springtime.
Great video! I never noticed the whole shopping trolley fiasco, it is kinda funny. As for the mysterious boss arena area, I always liked to imagine that Willamette once depended on a gold rush of some sort at the start of the 20th century (this is referenced in one of the newspapers mentioning "Since the mines closed back in the 60s, [Willamette] has been nothing but a haven for pickle-eating yahoos!" So this may mean that the entire town was once interconnected with mines, hence them running beneath the mall as well.
I always just assumed the tunnel beneath the clock tower was meant to divert floodwater from heavy storms (perhaps several maintenance entrances are scattered along the tunnel and the clock tower just happens to be near/is one of them), considering that the area you eventually end up in seems to have what looks like flood gates. The town is also next to a river as well, and seems to mostly be established in a low-lying area compared to the surrounding hills and mountains. How a town as small as Willamette was able to afford to construct such a thing is beyond me, however. Maybe the mall was able to bring in some extra funding and act as a tourist destination of sorts?
I’ve noticed in the game bully that bullworth academy doesn’t seem to have any ramps for students in wheelchairs or any sort of disabled facility’s just like the willamette mall 🤔 also speaking of the whole toilet thing there’s actually this one super market close to me here in the uk where the bathroom is far away from the cafe next to the checkouts which is really awkward but thankfully the other supermarkets have theme next to the cafe 😊
I have a theory of why having only one entrance to the mall. They probably wanted to pad out the journey for the consumer as much as possible and take advantage of that by overwhelming them with product placements. The longer you're expose to ads, the higher chance the customer folds and buys the product. As for the rather inaccurate proportions, I feel it was intended to be abstract. In-game, you wouldn't be too sure exactly where you are in the sense of world space. You're fighting to survive in a linear interior filled to the brim with zombies, you'd be too busy wanting to advance instead getting a real feel of the place. HOWEVER, when you're supposed to transition from the tunnels to the mines, you had to do it by taking the humvey mounted with the heavy mg. Using a vehicle would imply some long distance fast travel. Why is the two world space so close, the tunnel and mines, that's developer's convenience. With the mines mountains and its skybox being just an empty sky, its enough to allow the player to interpret they are indeed far away from the mall.
It's funny how you almost never notice the weird layout of this place aside from the final area of the game connected to the clock tower. At least that's the only oddity I ever noticed until I saw this video.
I've been in many multi level malls... I've never seen one with shopping carts unless there is a store such as Target or something attached to it. so who cares about that part of your argument. no one wanders through malls with shopping carts.
When I was kid I noticed the weird design of the mall and after replaying a few times even noticed how odd “the center of town” wasn’t easily viewable. As a kid I honestly thought the mall was a subtle hint at planned supernatural story. I honestly believed the sequel would mention survivors who insist that they took refuge in a mall that never existed in there town. I was a dumb kid.
The Brock boss arena looks like a dry water reservoir or dam. Probably connected to the mall because it's the largest structure in town. For drinking water, the ponds in the center park and numerous fountains and water features in Paradise Plaza.
Listen, if we are going to bring in the geological mess willamette was in, then we will also need to go back to re2 and figure out how umbrella managed to stow away a train car to their top secret super sercretive lab in a sewer without anybody working in the tunnel noticing.
Idk what kind of malls you have around you, but I have never been to a mall here in the USA that had shopping carts you can roll around the whole place. You just hold bags of what you get, and if you get a ton of stuff you just make a quick trip to your car to drop it off. The whole thing about there being only 1 entrance and the entrance plaza is true though..... every mall I have been too has at least 3 entrances from outside.
when i was younger found a picture on the internet of frank outside a house and because of that i used to think you could get out of the mall and explore the city when you after you beat dr1 (sorry for bad english tho)
I always thought it was a water reservoir that connected to the sewers and that it was just kinda implied that it was longer than it was so you didnt have to go through miles of tunnels. Everything else I never noticed but now I’ll never unsee them XD
Jesus I never questioned anything until now. Literally only 1 entrance to the mall, no other Plaza has any entrances at all. Why the hell is there a parking lot in Leisure Park but there's a huge ass wall? Where the fuck did the cars that are parked come from? Why is there this military like base here near a mall? Like literally I'm pretty sure a helicopter above, Hell even Frank would've already seen it when arriving. Why is the mall so fucking huge even for 2006? What kind of budget did Willamette Colorado have? Why is there no pathway for handicapped people? The only logical explanation I can get from this is that the Willamette Parkview Mall was probably gonna be one of those places "Made by the shady government" used for "Testing" purposes, basically how Fortune City had underground tunnels that housed a secret laboratory used for harvesting Queens. Maybe Willamette had a different story than the Santa Cabeza story back then.
I always wondered how you're supposed to take the shopping carts near colombian roastmasters (where the photographer is) to the ground floor of paradise plaza, without crashing it down a few stairs. After that I stopped trying to make any sense of willamette lol (and i still love it for that)
That intro hurts. Why couldn't they just let us explore willamette as it was in DR1. Spawn us in the plaza, play a 5 hour long chapter 1 where we can't leave the mall, then it opens and then the real game begins where you can explore the whole town. Also, about the location of the mining facility or whatever, if i recall correctly, you get in a vehicle and drive to the final arena, and we don't exactly know how far you drive.
A dead rising add-on where frank and Isabella escape after the tank battle and run through the town and explore the map outside of the Willamette Mall would have been sick
The problem with this video is that the maps were obviously not meant to be overlayed. Overlaying different maps shouldn't give the actual scale of things - maps in games usually aren't 1:1 for gameplay reasons. Imagine if the tunnel was actually like 10 miles long and reached that mountain - how fun do you think that would be? Same with the inconsistencies in the mall's design. These were all conscious decisions made for gameplay reasons/possibly optimization (?)
I don't think there's a single bad video that you've done on this game. I really hope this channel never dies. I don't know if Dead Rising 2 would be as interesting for you, but I'd love to see that game explored more too in the future.
Well the point about the shopping carts doesn't really work. Most shopping malls don't have shopping carts. The stores inside have carts but you can't bring them outside. But other than that great video.
The thing about Fortune City is that both versions of Dead Rising 2 made it seem like what you saw in the game was the whole city. I personally thought that was just a portion of the city itself, considering how you only get the entire Plaza with the hotel, the arena, the casinos, Etc. Plus, in the original Dead Rising 2, you see that gate area in Fortune Park. I like to think that there was more in the city than what was shown.
@@calbin6309 OTR is superior in every single way, from having more combo items, a whole new area, a better ending at least in my opinion, and an actual Sandbox Mode.
I guess malls with anchor stores technically have carts, but Willamette Mall's shops that should be anchors (like the grocery store) somehow don't have their own entrances
Not to mention there's no projector rooms in the cinema. Capcom should have consulted a mall planner or architect to construct a mall plan, or base it from an existing mall structure.
I never understood anything with the maintenance tunnels. There is a single storage room in the middle nowhere near any maintenance entrance. There are only those meat trucks down there, no carts or anything. How the hell did those trucks and the car and motorcycle get into this place considering there’s no way to drive in on the surface or an outside entrance in the tunnels. Why’d they put the butcher shop underground instead of just attaching it to the back of the grocery store? And bonus, how’d the Convicts get that military jeep inside the park? Maybe one of those semi trucks that hauls cars broke down on the other side of the wall and they used that as a ramp? Idk. A lot of this was fixed in DR2! The tunnels had train cars and carts throughout the entire thing There was storage right under just about every plaza and casino You can easily drive a car into Fortune City and even up like say the Silver Strip stairs if need be. There are like mini supermarkets in FC but stuff like that makes sense for guests staying in one of the many hotels. And even though there’s one entrance to FC, if you think of it as like a Disneyland or Six Flags for adults, it’s acceptable. EDIT: As a big fan of this series, I would love to see like a New Game + mode in Deluxe Remaster where they actually finished designing the mall properly! Like if they weren’t so pressed for time. Seeing the two iterations of Parkview Mall would be really cool
Other illogical stuff: Why does a shopping mall have a gun store in it? Those are usually put out by themselves, not smacked in the middle of a shopping mall
the boss fight area if i was the guess is a water waste or reservoir that is drained up or dried up and the tunnel opening the way it did was more of an accident like it broke into a old sewer or water system, and its close for gameplay reasons but its supposed to be much farther away also north plaza still under construction maybe before there where entrances but because of the new plaza new ones will be build also there is a path from north plaza to wonder plaza that does not have stairs i think i will have to check it out no i was wrong there is a connection from north to the top of wonder but then you need to go downstairs from there
Interesting. It just seems like they weren't thinking about how logical an actual mall has to be or the town. Lets me honest any game under scrutiny falls apart in some way. Thankfully they are game developers and not designing blueprints for malls or any sort of building lol. If we ever come back to Willamette in a Dead Rising 5; it would be interesting to see how the Japanese teams would put it together.
I think the place where you fight Brock is some kinda of water reservoir with the green mold on the walls and the red doors to let the water out. Interesting i've never thought about how the hell would you be able to shop here lol
I think it's important to consider that the scale of an in game world doesn't necessarily correlate 1:1 with the actual world it's trying to display. The Elder Scrolls games are a great example of this. Solitude is supposed to be the capital city of Skyrim. It should be massive with hundreds, maybe thousands of people, yet there's only 24 buildings with only about 85 or so NPCs. Perhaps the tunnel in the clock tower is far longer than they actually rendered in game, but was shortened to reduce the amount of time it would take the player to traverse, and to keep from rendering too much at once. Same with the city of Willamette itself. I will admit though, I never realized how bizarre the concept of shopping carts in a mall is until you pointed it out.
I think it's a water treatment plant. It makes a bit of sense because of the sewer connection but at the same time, why is it dried up? Edit: I think the worst offender is Fortune City in DR2, but only for the fact that there's a hardware store in the middle of a gambling center. "Hey man, wanna go play some blackjack?" "Nah bro, I gotta go pick up a power drill and some 2x4s for this deck I'm building."
Willamette, Colorado. The small town(s?) with great big secrets. Perhaps the outbreak was to cover up everything else the residents started questioning about their own city haha. I mean every town has a history,imagine a part of the history being the great mall ramp shortage of 2006, tragic! X)
The bad desing is in Dead Rising 2 too, look the example of Fortune Park and Silver Strip... all the restaurants, all mini casinos, bars, shops, nightclubs, etc shares one single unisex bathroom for *E V E R Y T H I N G*
Someone once made a fake screenshot of a rumored "Return to Willamette" DLC or (New Dead Rising game) bullshit. It literally just took debug screenshots of the opening town sequence but photoshopped Frank walking on the sidewalks. As a kid I thought they were real, and deep down I still wish they were.
I like to think that the tunnel was... longer for the characters, but shorter for the players. One of those. Like how Elder Scrolls games depict cities. They are actually massive with lots of citizens, but they are tuned down to a few streets and buildings for the player. That's game design.
I always took it as you were travelling for a while once you get a vehicle in the tunnels, not shown in-game of course. And there is a closer toilet to the food court, but it's in the Gym.
Ay, really liked the editing of this video, thanks for making it comrade, and for teaching me more about one of my favorite games for as long as ya have. I appreciate it my dude.
I feel like the maintenance tunnels were originally designed to be used by the customers to navigate the mall as they would alleviate alot of the navigation problems you layed out in your video as most entrances to the tunnels have elevators and parking spots underneath and where the tunnels exit to the world could be considered another entrance to the mall that is walled off by concrete barriers that seems done after the outbreak. Also i love the video and keep up the amazing work!
My favorite fan theory is that Willamette started off as a park, but some rich guy built a mall around it to capitalize on the tourism. Seems completely plausible given Dead Rising's anti-capitalist themes.
Man sucks that the franchise has gone to shit. I am the biggest DR fan but had zero interest in playing #4 since its a empty shell of what the game used to be.
Watching this really makes me wish they made the version of Willamette in Dead Rising 4 look like the version from this game. Like seriously, this town looks waaayyyyy more believable than the one from Dead Rising 4. DR4 Willamette is garbage, DR1 Willamette is much better, even with all the backface culling.
i feel like capcom does a lot of shady shit in their games because they come from the era where it was all smoke and mirrors. everything had to be done off screen and out of sight, they probably havent moved into the 21st century when it comes to designing
