sisslethecat
So we for sure live in the good timeline I see. Capcom recently released a special video for Resident Evil Portal users that features an amazing candid conversation between series creator Shinji Mikami and series producer Jun Takeuchi, looking back on the franchise’s 25(6?) years. The whole video is a good watch, with some great insight into how the series has evolved over time, but there’s one part that stuck out in particular. Takeuchi reflects on the early development of Resident Evil 7 (probably around 2013-2014), talking about how the Resident Evil team was struggling to figure out the direction the series should take following the sixth’s entry’s relatively sluggish performance. In the midst of all that, Capcom higher-ups were apparently extremely pushy with the direction they thought the series should take, and it wasn’t good.
“Right around that time, there was a big push at Capcom, a big ‘marketing’ push, saying ‘we have to make the games players are asking for’. So we were being told ‘make this, make that’, it was really hard on the directors at the time. ‘Online multiplayer’ this, ‘downloadable content’ that. ‘Ongoing service games! Microtransactions! Make a Resident Evil game that ticks all those boxes!’. Seriously, there were so many demands… those poor directors.”
Eventually, Takeuchi was asked by Capcom’s President, Kenzo Tsujimoto, to step in and oversee the game, where Takeuchi went on to vouch for a return to horror and chopped out all of the live service, multiplayer, microtransaction stuff that had been bolted onto the project. Thank God for that, I’m sure both us as fans and Capcom are able to say now in the wake of Resident Evil 7‘s massive success. Capcom’s been celebrating multiple years of record growth since the release of Resident Evil 7 all the way back in 2017, with it leading the charge for multiple successive hits for the series, and now currently holds the record for the highest-selling single release (as in no ports) of a Resident Evil game to date. It’s a bit miserable to imagine where the series might be right now had Capcom stayed the course with their original concept, no matter your feelings on the final game it’s safe to say that a microtransaction-heavy, live service version would have been a massive failure and we probably wouldn’t have gotten any of the games that followed it. It’s especially interesting to learn that it was a deliberate shift away from this sort of content in the face of the still upcoming multiplayer shooter RE:Verse, which Capcom’s been quietly pretending doesn’t exist, with neither the official Twitter account nor Steam page having been updated in over a year (even to acknowledge its new release date of 10/28 just two months away).
So, huzzah! Thank you so much, Takeuchi-kun. Without you, Resident Evil might really, really suck right now.
[Source]
