Capcom: Western-Developed Resident Evil Game "Absolutely" Possible

[Carnivol]

Not sure why I've even dignifying such a childish retort with a response ...

Woah-hoh! Who pissed in your bed last night?

I think you might've missed what I was trying to get at there

A lot of people complain about so called "horror" games not working as intended, when they (the players) set the difficulty to a lower level than what matches their own gaming skills. Playing them as some people play FPS games by loading the same quicksave over and over again to shoot the same guy in the face over and over again to see him ragdoll away.


Anyway; it easily takes a lot away from the gaming experience when there's no real reason to "worry" about anything. Some (if not possibly all) of your points against Dead Space are truly valid, but when if you play the game on easy vs hard on your first go, you quickly see a huge difference in the amount of ammo you have, the way the enemy behaves, how important it is to make "most" shots count, etc...

This stuff is very apparent if you start on Hard, without having the benefit of some past hands-on experience to get the basics down already.

(Also, A-J's right; A mighty sound solution, a nicely calibrated display and stuff like that too also greatly helps on enhancing the experience in a lot of stuff. It's kinda hard to make a gaming experience scary if the volume is turned down, brightness all the way up, the room nextdoor is playing loud music, and you and the guys are talking loud, cracking jokes and drinking beer.)


Also, Darkmoon's got some good points about being able to more or less empathize with the characters and somewhat put yourself into their shoes. (Also, reading the logs/diary in Dead Space was something I completely missed out on on my first go... I really wish I had paid more attention to them.)

[aris13]

I'll keep that in mind AJ.

[Mr_Zombie]

Hey, but Chris is right - western developers can develop a RE game... and they actually did - RE: Gaiden was made by M4 Limited, a British studio (I think they are biritish; their official site, which is now dead, was http://www.m4.co.uk/).

[A-J]

remember to play it with the lights off, and with some good headphones or a surround sound system.

[aris13]

Great timing I just bought Dead Space.

[Alexia_Ashford]

Dead Space honestly bored the hell out of me. Half way through I found myself wanting the game to end because it was so painstakingly repetitive, it became intolerable. It only felt vaguely fresh towards the end where you actually got OFF a ship which always seemed to look exactly the same and you were doing exactly the same thing throughout the entire damn game. Going to a part of a ship to repair it. Even though I was scraping for ammo, I didn't find it scary, just extremely boring; which was a shame because I was really expecting to like it and for it to be a great horror title for me. It was about as scary as RE5; not very. RE5 was just action-packed, great fun, intense with a great story and varying environments. Dead Space imo = survival horror, but the story is very dull and the environments are extremely dull and repetitive. The only part which I did find scary was with the big monster who didn't die no matter what you shot him with. It was reminiscent of Nemesis. Other than that, I found it an overall unenjoyable experience.

I actually gave my copy away because I knew for a fact I wouldn't want to replay it again, and I've not.

Perhaps a Western developed RE will be a bit better than that, but I still don't think it's very likely. RE is one of Capcom's biggest money makers, and it's Chris Kramer who said it's possible. He also said Sherry wasn't in RE2. Until someone from Japan says it's possible, I'll take it with a pinch of salt. Capcom Japan call the shots, not Capcom US.

[Corrin]

I'm both happy and sad to hear this.

Happy because there is now the slight chance that when i become a games designer i can make my own RE games! (OMG FUCK YEAH!!). And ill definitely bring it back to the classic style complete with the most awesome camera angles ever.

Sad because it'll probably go to someone like EA and have a game released every year and have like two different teams making separate games so they can do that.

RE is the next Call of Duty.

What makes you think EA has/ever will have anything to do with Resident Evil? Capcom develops and publishes Resident Evil. EA is a different company.

[Darkmoon]

Maybe I'm just emotionally dead inside or something, but I still have yet to play a single survival horror game that actually scared me or even made me feel uneasy. Of course, this may also have something to do with the fact that I have yet to see a single horror movie that has actually scared me or made me feel uneasy.

But this is ultimately why I find it amusing when people complain about the RE games not being scary anymore. Maybe for them they're not scary anymore, but for me, they were never scary to begin with. Of course, I never played the RE games to be scared, and it's probably a good thing I didn't, otherwise I would have been sorely disappointed.

Well, in my case the reason I tend to find certain things scary is because I have a very, very good imagination. Not just a powerful one but one that allows me to emphasis with characters (which is also part of why I dislike Leon so much in RE4...why should I be afraid if he isn't?) and the situation they're in. I can feel the terror of the situation from the characters situation in a good game, and that makes the game enjoyable.

Looking at Dead Space Isaac is alone, on a strange ship that has been infested with the reactivated corpses of the crew. As a technician he knows how many people Ishimura holds, and worse, knows all the things that can wrong with a ship that size left unchecked by humans. How long can the computers keep the ship alive while the remains of the crew destroy it from the inside out?

Then you have the knowledge that if you die you may well become one of these creatures, and the idea must run through your mind...how much of the person that was is still inside the body, mutating under an alien influence and screaming to be set free in a body driven by another force entirely? And the situation is quite possible, given that Isaac is no soldier, and the enemies often have plenty of advantages over him, such as access to areas he can't and the ability to function despite heavy damage.

Then, you have friends and a loved one aboard the ship. How are you going to help them? Can you help them? What happens if you screw up and someone else suffers for it?

Combine that with the Ishimura herself and the superb sets, and I think the game excells, even beyond the cheaper 'Is this corpse dead will that vast hole start spewing enemies moments. And yes, I know, a lot of people ripped the levels apart for being too samey, but I found them exceptionally realistic. This is a decades old mining ship, built to tear apart planets and process the minerals. It's going to be as basic as humanly possible in the working areas. The crew quarters we get to see are a bit better, although not much, and the bridge and officers areas are, not shockingly, the nicest part of the whole boat.

The reason RE4 and RE5 weren't scary was because, partially at least, you never felt out of control. You rarely ran seriously low on ammo and if you did in RE5 you can pop back and farm some at an earlier stage. In Leon, Chris and Sheva were all clearly superior to the enemies they were facing...smarter, better armed, better trained. Chris and Sheva get a slight edge in that they seemed genuinely concerned by the enemies they faced, if not afraid. Leon seemed like he might be more worried about forgetting to have his deliveries postponed.

But that's me. And I don't meant to infer that your imagination is sub-par or anything like that, simply very different to my own.

[Archelon]

It was certainly scarier than the last Resident Evil or Silent Hill games for me, but since everyone is different...

Maybe I'm just emotionally dead inside or something, but I still have yet to play a single survival horror game that actually scared me or even made me feel uneasy. Of course, this may also have something to do with the fact that I have yet to see a single horror movie that has actually scared me or made me feel uneasy.

But this is ultimately why I find it amusing when people complain about the RE games not being scary anymore. Maybe for them they're not scary anymore, but for me, they were never scary to begin with. Of course, I never played the RE games to be scared, and it's probably a good thing I didn't, otherwise I would have been sorely disappointed.

Or maybe I just haven't been playing them correctly, as Carn seems to imply in the following post, despite the fact that I've played through all of them on the hardest difficulty using just a knife. Hmm. Maybe I'm just that awesome?

(That was sarcasm, by the way, before anyone gets offended.)

and anyone who didn't find that tense and somewhat unsettling need to get off their easy difficulty setting and start to play survival horror games with a bit of risk involved again... you know... so there's actually survival going on and a reason to be afraid and on edge and not just you running around shooting everything that moves 'cause it's fun to shoot stuff

Not sure why I've even dignifying such a childish retort with a response, but regardless of what difficulty I played it on, I did not find Dead Space the least bit scary or even tense. I was never once "on edge." The bullet time effect, whatever it was called, pretty much removes any and all challenge from even the tougher enemies in the game. I suppose the game might be more challenging if you went through it without actually using this ability, but I shouldn't have to make the game more challenging myself by assigning handicaps to my playstyle. That's the developers' responsibility, to balance all of the elements out.

My biggest issue with Dead Space is that it's just plain boring. It was basically Doom 3 all over again, even down to the monster closets. It's kind of hard to be frightened in a game when you can see where the monsters are going to be coming from a mile away. Whenever you see a vent or a dead body, you already know a monster is going to be coming at you, and it pretty much never fails. It would have worked better if you encountered some dead bodies of monsters that did not jump up at you as you passed by. And yet every single one of them did, and pretty much every single closed off vent you come across is housing a monster in it. It becomes yawn-inducing after awhile.

Another issue is that Dead Space can't even decide what kind of horror game it wants to be. It's almost as if the developers weren't sure what kind of horror game they wanted to make, so they basically threw everything at the wall to see which stuck. You have elements of shock horror, "gore" horror, and even some cheap "psychological" horror, but it never meshes together. It's like there's an invisible line marking off each segment of the horror spectrum. It's kind of hard to be frightened when you can tell just what kind of emotional response the developer is trying to elicit from you at that particular moment in time. They're just there for the sake of being there, because the developers wanted to toss everything they could into it without actually creating any real cohesion between the disparate parts.

Heck, the game even gives up on being any kind of horror game by the end when it devolves into your average third person shooter. The highly touted strategic dismemberment falls by the wayside when it proves to be far more effective to just mow down the enemies with the plasma rifle. Oh, I'm sorry, I guess I'm not playing the game correctly.

Don't even get me started on the story, which is laughable, and not in the cheesy, Capcom "so bad it's good way," either. They tried to do far too much in far too little time, and forget about forming any kind of emotional connection with Isaac, despite the developers wanting you to so badly.

[Carnivol]

Personally, after seeing what's being done with MT-Framework 2.0 in Lost Planet 2, I really hope some insane Outbreak-like shit could be pulled off internally with it (where not necessarily the success of everyone is important, so players may drop out/die with slowdown of the progress of others as a result)

But if they ever were to outsource it... I dunno...
Silicon Knights should have another jab at the horror genre, that's for sure. And their Too Human engine has already shown that it's capable of handling many individual objects.

I think the most important thing that has to happen if they do a new game is to up the count. Especially if they're gonna go "back to the roots".
No invisible walls or police tape blocking the road. Let massive amounts of trouble do that in stead.


Personally, seeing as how much time I've found myself spending with one of their new games, I'd love to see Volition, Inc. have go at it. Especially after seeing what their engine is capable of now. If you have a town that is starting out clean, but slowly gets more and more "infected" as the timer/story unfolds, to then drop in some nice B.O.W.'s into the mix to "clean things up" (go for the dead rising approach, just put survival into it. Make it DisasterReport/RawDanger with Zombies instead of earthquakes and water, basically.



Cavia's a Japanese studio.


Also, about the polish thing, it's true that Japanese often tend to polish their games more, but they also tend to fail at doing their research properly.

Like how Resident Evil 4 Spain is pretty much more Mexican than it is Spanish and how Africa in Resident Evil 5 is almost more South American than it is African at times.




Also, Dead Space was a fantastic game. And I think it's definitively a much better step in the "right direction" as far as Survival Horror goes than Resident Evil 4-5 are.

Dead Space was more "hardcore" (I hate using terms like casual and hardcore), Dead Space also bowed down to no censorship and integrated limb decapitation into the actual gameplay. Something modern Resident Evil games has totally failed to do (shoot someone in the knee and their leg wont blow off, they'll just get stunned for a second and then they'll continue walking towards you. w00t!)

This at the cost of not being able to release it properly in certain places, but hey... how's that for a "games=art" showcase from one of the industrial behemoths out there?


Dead Space also contained some really great elements, such as the Zero gravity zones (and the "no atmosphere" areas) combined with the licker-like creatures jumping around (and anyone who didn't find that tense and somewhat unsettling need to get off their easy difficulty setting and start to play survival horror games with a bit of risk involved again... you know... so there's actually survival going on and a reason to be afraid and on edge and not just you running around shooting everything that moves 'cause it's fun to shoot stuff)

[LVL100 Merchant]

My biggest concern is that Western games tend to lack in polish compared to Japanese games. For example, the first four Silent Hill games are infinitely more polished products than Origins or Homecoming. I also don't think Western games tend to be as scary. Games like Dead Space and Doom 3 are almost laughable in their scare tactics. I'm not saying Resident Evil 4 or 5 are inherently scary, but they're definitely more atmospheric and frightening than something like Dead Space. Not to say Western games don't have great potential to be scary, as the Penumbra games are really scary, but when it comes to my game atmosphere, I'd put greater trust in a Japanese team than a Western team.

Besides, isn't Cavia a Western studio? And they've already done Umbrella Chronicles, and are working on DSC.

[Darkmoon]

But Dead Space wasn't scary.

It was certainly scarier than the last Resident Evil or Silent Hill games for me, but since everyone is different...

I don't see why folks are so worried about an American studio doing this. The worst they can do is make the series more action and screw up previous canon...and let's face it, that happens with every new RE game anyway.

[missvalentine]

Dead Space was developed in America (EA if I'm correct), right? RE still has a chance on being scary. I just hope they don't butcher the story or turn it TOO action oriented (too late?).

Well, your right about that, i guess you would just have to get the right Development team to make it.

But Dead Space wasn't scary.

Opinion. Dead Space had a lot of great atmosphere, i really liked it.

[Archelon]

Dead Space was developed in America (EA if I'm correct), right? RE still has a chance on being scary.

But Dead Space wasn't scary.

[Mr_Zombie]

I think a western-develped RE game might be a good thing since the game is more centered around America and parts of Europe.

Silent Hill was also about a small american town and has Americans as games' protagonists. And was it eventually a good thing when the series was handed to western developers?

Resident Evil, even in its current form (RE4 and RE5) still has this something special thanks to it being a game developed by a Japanese team. I dunno if I would want western developers to make another RE game (especially a main game).