Capcom Wants to Keep the 'Resident Evil 4' Remake Weird

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The term “remake” is getting increasingly tricky to pin down in video games. What’s the difference between a “remake” and a “remaster”? How much do you have to change (or not change) from the original to become more than a “remaster”? And when does it just become an entirely new game? The developers at Capcom have the unenviable task of revisiting Resident Evil 4, considered not just one of the best survival horror games ever but one of the best games of all-time. The task is a mountain to climb, but they do have a guiding light.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5yxxb/capcom-wants-to-keep-the-resident-evil-4-remake-weird
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We should just call them Special Editions or All-Stars instead. Dead Space All-Stars. Resident Evil 4 VGA Edition.

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Not sure why this is a constant source of debate amongst The Gamers. Both terms remake and remasters come from other mediums.

This is why the phrase “shot-for-shot remake” exists because as early as the 70s we were making new versions of movies from the 40s and 50s, with different casting, blocking, and compositional choices. The mere fact that a new movie would recycle elements whole cloth from its predecessor warranted the label.

We need so many more remasters than we currently have. Make Bluepoint do HD transfers again.

EDIT: I’m playing RE6 as we speak and I think it’s awesome that Hirabayashi is still at Capcom and working on these games. I haven’t made up my mind on RE6 but it’s absolutely not a work of stunning incompetence that it’s made out to be. This team has always had the revival-era games in them.

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I don’t think anyone is saying RE6 is incompetent, just that it’s kinda boring after awhile. The RE formula generally only works in the 10-15 hour long range IMO, and 25 hours of a lot of repetition and a story that goes nowhere is pretty rough.

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I have vivid memories of the Giant Bombcast from the game’s release week where Patrick and Brad were stunned at the choices in this game. They weren’t wrong, but details of its failures appear to have been exaggerated.

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RE6 was just developed in a terrible time for AAA video games and it was p much on record as wanting to be the most AAA action horror game.

That team def still had a lot of the spirit and drive of RE in them; there are recent products with the RE brand label that are far less Resident Evil than RE6 is, but the exact spot it released in really touched a nerve with a lot of people.

I think there was a just sense of universal (mostly) unconscious dread in the exact window it released in, sort of a fear that AAA games really were never going to escape the worst of their trends. QTEs had been mostly terrible for a whole generation, now here’s tons of them with a goofy UI. Barely-interactive blockbuster action’s been looking laughable from having a tiny fraction of the rendering budget of CG action movie setpieces games keep trying to imitate, now here’s many hours of that action as basically connective plot tissue. To say nothing of how the character writing and plot are treated, especially at the absolute worst/most embarrassing parts you can dig out of that game.

Plus yknow, RE itself was in a bad spot. Outbreak was long dead, RE0 was a decade prior and the last numbered game that didn’t live in the shadow of RE4 one-upsmanship, the… creative Paul Anderson films almost felt like they had more public mindshare than the games by that point, and the last spinoff was fucking ORC that same year. I’d be pretty disillusioned and dismissive of RE6’s deal too if ORC was my most recent memory of where the franchise is at.

That all, I think, is why people reacted so exaggeratedly poorly to 6. 6 is undoubtedly messy but I think in a world where we’ve got the secure and sober reflective armor of RE7/8 and the new REmakes existing, 6’s flaws feel far less cataclysmic, and its points of interest feel much more appreciable to more people.

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In my opinion, the backlash and hate behind RE6 is caused in part by the two different branches of RE fandom finally uniting together.

There are, generally speaking, two main factions of RE fans; those who preferred the straight and generally serious B movie horror, and those who preferred the more action focused tongue in cheek B movie horror. Not to say you couldn’t enjoy both; but most people had a preference and a lot of people really didn’t like the other option.

If you were camp serious horror, then everything from 4 on was RE getting away from its roots and becoming something it never should have been. RE6 was just more of the same AND they even taunted you up front with the idea that this was at least partially going to be a return to form of pure horror in sections. For people who liked the action side of things, which I personally tend to favor, RE6 took everything that made 4 and 5 so playable, and absolutely flubbed it.

I can fully understand not liking 4 and 5, I can completely get why people would not want to play what to them felt like a completely unresponsive third person shooter. What I can’t understand is people who say the game plays poorly.. Whether you love them or hate them, 4 and 5 are balanced perfectly for their controls. Someone who knows what they are doing can flow shooting, melee attacks, crowd control, reloads, everything, into long unbroken streaks. Everything is intentional and considered, and you always know how your character and the enemy is going to react. I know what enemies I can suplex, which will fall to their knees, which will trip over entirely, etc. It is a known quantity with many options, all of which are simple to execute but give you countless opportunities with your verbs.

RE6 takes this design of simple execution and predictable results, and dumps a metric ton of random bullshit onto it. Look up a guide to melee combat in RE6 and you’re going to find a small novel that feels like it was barfed up by an early alpha of an AI text bot. Attacks are now based on character, weapon you’re holding, how close you are to a wall, how close you are to a ledge, whether the enemy is aware of you, enemy position, CAMERA POSITION, the list goes on. I played through all of RE6 and I never once felt confident in what my character was going to do. Was I standing in the right spot to get a critical hit on this ground stomp or am I going to whiff? Am I facing the camera enough for this to count as a back attack or will I swing forward at nothing? Can this enemy be countered at all, is it doing a counterable attack, am I in the butte zone to actually allow me to do that? It took the fine tuned gameplay of 4 and 5 and made it a clunky, unpredictable mess.

So RE6 became the game for no one. It satisfied neither camp with the only true horror the game provided being the unbearable tension of seeing what your button inputs would actually do. It was scary, it wasn’t tense, and it wasn’t fun to play.

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I dunno, I played for an hour and learned how to make Leon grab a broken bottle off a zombie andthen stab it in their back so that blood starts pouring out the bottleneck like an open keg.

I absolutely acknowledge how needlessly convoluted all of these mechanics are, but crucially, they are all very fun and hilarious to me.

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