trivard676When Resident Evil 4 first hit the scene it was hailed with equal parts praise and criticism. On one hand, it was revolutionary to not only survival horror but to video games as a whole. On the other, it just didn’t feel like Resident Evil anymore.
RE fans and many survival horror fans for that matter can generally be divided into two groups – the people that feel the genre needs to change and adapt, and the people that feel survival horror’s best days are behind it. However if you happen to find yourself caught in the middle, sitting on the fence, rest assured that you’re not alone.
Capcom has recently issued an open question to all Resident Evil fans (paraphrased as) -“What do you want? What do you want out of the series? Where have we gone wrong and how do we fix it? If you’ve since abandoned the series, how can we make you a fan again?” Or something to that effect. The responses have been pretty straightforward and to someone who’s actively thought about the question, pretty expected.
“Make it scary.”
Make it scary? What is that supposed to mean? Furthermore; how? One can only imagine how taxing it must be to the creative team behind a survival horror in development on how to make their game scary. Considering how subjective fear is, that can’t possibly be an easy task.
Yes, Resident Evil 4 was changing the rules, people thought it was scary and rightfully so (hell, it kind of was). Armed with that knowledge the devs behind Resident Evil 5 not only hoped to bank off the success of its predecessor, but to take what they thought was the proper next step in the advancement of the series. What did they get? A game that was almost universally hailed as one of the worst Resident Evil games in the series history. Not that it’s not a good game, it’s just not a good Resident Evil game.
Sorry guys
RE 5 focused heavily on co-operative elements. If you didn’t have a friend to play with, you could always play with the AI. Your experience with the AI really depended on what you wanted out of the AI. In my personal experience, the AI on the PS3 version of the game was a little less dependable than the AI on the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, in all difficulties. Almost as if the game was purposely giving me a rough time on the PS3 version.
Does this mean that co-op is bad for survival horror? Not necessarily – the co-op system worked pretty damned well in RE5. You needed to cooperate or you couldn’t progress. Just like in Left 4 Dead – if you don’t work together, you’ll die. Horribly and painfully…sometimes comically. So is co-op out of the question for future iterations of Resident Evil? Hardly. The gaming industry is quickly discovering that unless you release a quirky indie game, if co-op isn’t included, you’re doomed to fail at retail (see Alan Wake, Shadows of the Damned). Additionally, fans of Outbreak seem to think that co-op is just alright.
Above: TEAMWORK!
Let’s take a look at (as in paraphrase) another fan request. “Include ZOMBIES! Not Plagas or Cephalos or Majini bullshit, ZOMBIES! Take it back to the MANSION in RACCOON CITY, ETC, ETC, ETC. Basically make it the same way it was 15 years ago and we’ll totally eat it up.”
When you think of zombies, what do you think of? Do you think of the running, angry-looking charged zombies from Left 4 Dead and 28 Days Later? Or basically the kind you could weave around and leave in your dust – the slow shuffling kind a la Night of the Living Dead – the guys that (in the gaming world), aside from their semi reinvention in Resident Evil: Remake are 15 years old. How exactly do other game mechanics from 15 years ago work ya? How would that work in a modern gaming market? Don’t enough people complain of how dated the controls are in RE?
The cutting edge of zombie tech…
The DLC for RE5, Lost in Shadows, harkened the old breed of zombies and created the level accordingly…with NONE. It really did have everything about old Resi down pat except for the freaking zombies! There was a boss-type enemy and the final boss battle, but that was it. Perhaps I’ve got a bit too much adrenaline running through my blood, but I kept anticipating something, ‘anything’ would happen. A window breaking, a zombie shuffling, a hiss…but nothing more than the clap of thunder. Is this what people remember and long for?
Perhaps a cast change is in order? New characters have been done before, but they’re used for a single title and then tossed. Or an entire reboot of the cast all together? People who really aren’t ready to fight off zombies with a flick of the wrist and a snap of the neck. People who couldn’t shoot the broad side of a barn if they were standing ten feet away from it (okay…maybe not that bad of a shot). People who when seeing a zombie for the first time can properly emote how afraid they are, not say something in the vein of “Not you guys again.”
One of the reasons that the Silent Hill franchise has remained so poignant is that the protagonist changes with each new entry in the series (with small exception). Each time out, you see the game through new eyes, not of those of a battle-ready soldier, ready for anything they might encounter. Even though the gamer, if a longtime fan has seen these enemies before, the effect seems to have so much more power when the lead character is out of their element. Even though it was implied that they were, Chris and Sheva just didn’t appear to be afraid in RE5. It was pretty evident that Isaac Clarke was terrified in Dead Space, and Daniel? Well…you know the story of Daniel in Amnesia. But for the RE crew? Almost as if it were just a regular day at the office.
Back to the original question posed; how do you keep the series fresh while appealing to longtime fans? How can the series progress when fans clamour for the past? We all want to relive those rosy days of our youth when survival horror was fresh and new and what Silent Hill and Resident Evil were doing was groundbreaking. Maybe we’re just looking at things through the rosy eyes of nostalgia? It’s actually a common occurrence, that people feel things were better ten or twenty years before present day. There was less crime, television was better, games were better, and the kids were alright.
The very nature of the gaming industry is not only to entertain, but to change. To progress forever forward with the advancement of the tech that powers it and adapt to current industry trends. If Resident Evil can’t evolve, then quite simply, the series will fade, to be viewed only through those rosy eyes of nostalgia.
