Dead or Alive 6 Producer Talks Development, Engine, and New Character

Dead or Alive 6 Is Coming Along Well

Team Ninja’s Yohei Shimbori, who is the producer and director of Dead or Alive 6, recently spoke on the game’s development, including its new engine and the inspiration behind the new character, Diego.

As of now, there are still more character reveals to come, the order of which will be dictated by the development process.

“The order in which we’ll reveal the characters may simply depend on when the assets are ready,” Shimbori said. “For some, we’d like to reveal them at the appropriate time depending on the game’s story.”

“I’m sure that some people will be a bit worried about whether their favorite characters will appear, but please look forward to future reveals,” he added.

Shimbori also spoke on one of the new characters, Diego, and the inspiration behind him.

“So far the design of the characters was mostly decided by the Japanese team,” he said. “This time we took some inspiration from our American staff. We did some brainstorming, received ideas, and had a lot of discussions, and we came up with Diego who comes with a rough street fighting style and is a very realistic character.”

Dead or Alive 6 also uses a brand new engine that was built from the bottom up, which offers benefits to third-party options like Unreal Engine.

“It’s more a decision taken by the company’s higher-ups like President Koinuma-san,” Shimbori said. “A third-party engine may not really match our needs, requiring us to work on some of those elements ourselves, creating additional costs. It may not be as cost-effective as some think.

“There are also specific aspects that are unique to the game that we’re making, and a third-party engine may not be able to handle those as we need. In a game like DOA, stages have very specific aspects, characters have very specific movements. Developing the engine ourselves we can incorporate all of these specific elements from the start, making for a better game.”

Dead or Alive 6 is set for release on February 15th, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

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