'Resident Evil 4' was very difficult to remake. The group was prepared | Worth reading.

 

'Resident Evil 4' was very difficult to remake. The group was prepared.

Over 20-year-old video game brands can struggle to remain relevant. With its impending remake of "Resident Evil 4," one of the most significant video games ever developed, publisher and developer Capcom is set to continue its track record of artistic and financial success.

The Resident Evil team has become very proficient at creating Resident Evil games, it's a truth. Their trust is based on Capcom's choice to develop the Reach for the Moon (or RE) engine, the studio's own software architecture for game development. 2017 saw the release of "Resident Evil VII," the first Capcom game to use RE Engine. Since then, it has run every significant Capcom game, including the much awaited "Street Fighter 6" this summer.

Yasuhiro Ampo, a seasoned Resident Evil director who is also in charge of the new remake, stated, "Once the designers develop anything, we can instantly evaluate everything in engine, see whether everything looks great. "The accessibility certainly helps with game creation,"

The first "Resident Evil 4" isn't simply another Resident Evil game, however. It is often referred to as the originator of the contemporary third-person action adventure. It would later serve as the model for "The Last of Us," the Gears of War series, and pretty much every other video game where the camera is positioned behind, directly above, and to the right of the player character.

The most challenging Resident Evil game for the RE Engine is the remake. Previous games have included brainless zombies and other creatures lumbering toward the player, notably the popular remakes of the second and third sequels. Nonetheless, the zombies in "Resident Evil 4" were essentially still human, still possessing their mental capabilities, and still capable of acting quickly during combat situations. For the team, this presented a fresh challenge.

"We have developed a lot more Resident Evil games since," said Yoshiaki Hiabayashi, the game's producer and another series veteran. The Ganado [zombified people] artificial intelligence in the game presented one hurdle for us. To the RE Engine, it is novel.

Ampo said, "We do have to make opponents have some form of intelligence when you engage with them so they don't walk directly at you or behind you. "You'll notice that they're not behaving like a machine, but rather like a thinking creature with thought-out moves," the author said.

This is not a brand-new problem for game designers. Even the ghosts in the 1980 video game "Pac-Man" have artificial intelligence that was built to respond and plan attacks on the player. Just swap out the ghosts for zombies and the labyrinth for a mansion or, perhaps, a city in the Resident Evil series. The stakes are raised even higher in "Resident Evil 4," where the labyrinth is a Spanish countryside and the ghosts are hundreds of zombie residents who are all out to get the player.

Throughout the years, the creators gained a great deal of knowledge about their own series and were acutely aware of player criticism. Despite the team's initial reluctance to reproduce such a revered, important game, the tremendous favorable response to the "Resident Evil 2" remake sparked optimism for the fourth game's remake.

Hirabayashi said that they were very committed to figuring out what made the fourth game so fantastic and improving on it. Hirbayashi said they kept the focus on improving the fourth game, while not thinking about other games in the series or within the survival horror game genre. The player protagonist Leon may seem like a faint echo of the confident, skilled-at-martial-arts Leon of the infamous "Resident Evil 6," but Hirbayashi said they kept the focus on improving the fourth game.

He said that the team didn't explicitly research other games in an effort to mimic them. The starting point was "Resident Evil 4."

The public reportedly adores the characters and wants more tales about them, according to player comments. Because of this, Leon seems to be directly confronting his trauma from surviving the devastation of Raccoon City in the original trilogy, while Luis, a minor character from the original game, has an extended presence in the remake.

Ampo stated, "We found that gamers really want to know more about everything. "Therefore we gave the characters greater dimension. As a result of their increased interactivity, the gamer feels closer to them.

Shinji Mikami, who oversaw the creation of the series' two most important games, "Resident Evil" and "Resident Evil 4," recently made the decision to leave Tango Gameworks, the company he established after leaving Capcom. While Mikami hasn't had any participation creating the latest remake, his influence is felt strongly in it, according to Hirabayashi. The GameCube remake of the original game, which Mikami directed, established the standard for groundbreaking video game remakes in 2002. But this time, Mikami just joins the group for drinks in a polite manner.

The developers still value Mikami's advice from the early 2000s; several of them had previously worked for him.

Hirabayashi quoted Mikami as saying, "If you create a game that's constantly tight, you lose the players inside that tension. "High tension and low tension are built up in a curve. These moments of consolation follow the great strain.

According to Ampo, the essence of creating a successful Resident Evil game is instilling players with terror before providing them with the tools to get over that fear. As ammunition and other helpful supplies are required, the series establishes a push-and-pull dynamic by providing them, but then quickly depleting them via enemy confrontations. Because of this, each episode of the series concludes with the protagonist brandishing a rocket launcher as a metaphor for the player's last, victorious assault on the terror.

One of the key ideas is getting over the trauma, Ampo stated. "With "Resident Evil 2" and now "Resident Evil 4," the development teams have learnt to consider how players approach and handle different circumstances. To handle any issue, we have included extra tools.

They include Leon's knife, which is now a scarce resource but has been reinforced to the point that it can match a chainsaw blow for blow. Along with Ashley, the president's daughter, and Luis getting increasingly involved in the fighting, this also applies to the new partner AI.

Also, "quick-time events"—button prompts that flash on the screen like Simon Says for your controller—had to be eliminated. As a substitute, a well-known knife-to-knife battle scene from the first game will now be completely playable.

According to Hirabayashi, "We wanted the player to be able to manage the sequence themselves.

Both guys avoided saying which aspect of the game they wanted to maintain the most when asked.

Hirabayashi chuckled, "This is a hard topic for us because if we tell too much we can ruin the game.

The Resident Evil team wants to make sure that gamers remain alert even if they are confident in how it remakes our collective survival horror history.