Resident Evil Creator Explains Why the Series Stopped Being Scary

[Cognimancer]

Resident Evil Creator Explains Why the Series Stopped Being Scary

Resident Evil ceased to be a survival horror series at some point and became an action series with zombies - and according to its creator, that was a decision we made with our wallets.

The Resident Evil games of today are very different from what they were fifteen years ago. The series began as pure survival horror, with scarce resources and more panicked fleeing than direct combat. The man who started it all, Shinji Mikami, says that the series kept that mentality until it became clear that gamers wouldn't buy another game with clunky movement controls and restrictive camera angles. While Resident Evil 2 and 3 had slowly increased the level of action, it wasn't until Resident Evil 4 that Mikami decided to create an "action game."

The turning point, Mikami says, was the lackluster commercial performance of the GameCube's remake of the original Resident Evil. "It didn't sell very well," Mikami says. "Because of the reaction to the Resident Evil remake, I decided to work more action into Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 would have been a more scary, horror-focused game if the remake had sold well."

The change in development strategy was immediate. With earlier Resident Evil games the top priority had been scaring the player, but during development of Resident Evil 4 Mikami told the team that "fun gameplay" was the most important thing to have. "Then the second thing [would be] nothing," Mikami says. "And then the third thing is to be scary."

Apparently it worked - Resident Evil 4 was madly successful and managed to redefine both the horror and action genres. When Mikami stopped working on the series at that point, Capcom continued to move away from the series' horror roots with Resident Evil 5 and 6. These days, Mikami is hoping to get back into true survival horror with his upcoming game The Evil Within.

Source: IGN [http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/26/resident-evil-4-came-out-of-the-commercial-failure-of-re-remake]

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[Li Mu]

The sales to the Resident Evil remake were lackluster? Wow, I must be living in BizzaroWorld or something! I thought the remake was great! Obviously not many other people did. Perhaps it was it's GC exclusivity which were the cause of poor sales.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

This is true, of course. Everyone likes to whine about changes to their franchises or that certain genres and games are popular. In the end though, everyone buys them, so why would developers go back to making games that all sold poorly? Most of my favorite games were commercial failures sadly. I never expect them to be made again in this day and age.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

that's to be expected. Thing is, people were getting tired of RE's formula if the REmake and RE0 were any indication. Plus the series was one that ALWAYS tried to have its cake and eat it. Sure, they start out as survival horror AT FIRST (and even then most of their horror depends upon jump scares) but then quickly turn into action games with awkward movement. It just makes more sense to get rid of the monsters permanently with a shotgun blast to the face due to ammo and healing items becoming increasingly common. After 4 dropped the horror pretense and focused on being a fun shooter the series was all the better for it.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Mikami, Resident Evil was never "scary"; the ridiculous translations/voicework and plodding gameplay of the earlier iterations saw to that, and then from 5 on everything just got cartoony. Where the series excelled was when it made you feel trapped or overwhelmed, and in my mind RE4 probably had the best balance between that and the gameplay- it allowed you more freedom to move and see/respond to threats, but even with the fancy moves and accurate shooting, it was still possible for the enemies to overwhelm or outmaneuver you if you weren't careful.

As for the REmake... well, come on. The GameCube wasn't exactly the best or most popular platform of its generation, and recreating RE1's "tank" controls when other games were allowing ever-greater freedom of movement couldn't have helped anything.

 

[ShirowShirow]

The REmake sold only marginally worse than 4 did (I think it was 1.35 mil to 1.6) and that makes a lot of sense. A shiny new entry in a series that's very much critically acclaimed will probably do better than a remake, however decent, of a game a lot of people already own.

The Gamecube exclusivity must also have hurt it. Between the PS2 absolutely dominating that generation of consoles and most of the RE fanbase coming from the PS1 all this just... Really seems obvious.

I'm not a fan of horror myself but this seems like weird logic.

 

[Ariseishirou]

The REmake sold only marginally worse than 4 did (I think it was 1.35 mil to 1.6) and that makes a lot of sense. A shiny new entry in a series that's very much critically acclaimed will probably do better than a remake, however decent, of a game a lot of people already own.

The Gamecube exclusivity must also have hurt it. Between the PS2 absolutely dominating that generation of consoles and most of the RE fanbase coming from the PS1 all this just... Really seems obvious.

I'm not a fan of horror myself but this seems like weird logic.

You mean just on the Cube, right? Across all platforms, RE4 sold 7.5 million copies. It was much, much more popular on the PS2.

Though I agree with you - I didn't buy the REmake for two reasons: one, I already owned the original (and I think Capcom did a poor job of advertising how much new content there'd be - I did play it later and it was definitely worth it), and the other was that it was a Cube-exclusive. The PS2 was by far the winner of the last generation's console war, making that a poorly-considered move.

 

[Frezzato]

Yeah, I'm not buying into that logic. As someone who has never enjoyed Resident Evil from day one, even just watching people play the first RE was painful for me. The controls were one thing, but the truly awful aspects of that game were the story and dialogue. "...You, the master of unlocking." Remember that? I could never get over the terrible writing and voice acting. On top of that glaring flaw, you control characters that are supposed to be some sort of top notch reaction force--which is incapable of shooting while moving. Pardon me?

What ultimately ruins games like RE for me is that these supposedly special units are special in name only. Their look, their gear, and their standard operating procedures were planned with all the knowledge and tact of a 10-year old child. There are other ways of making a game difficult without removing the distinguishing characteristics that make your "special" character special.

 

[Berny Marcus]

Revelations was a good return to the horror elements of the past games, and combining the elements of RE4/RE5, and the game was successful. Capcom can make a good scary RE game again, if they knew what to do.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

The sales to the Resident Evil remake were lackluster? Wow, I must be living in BizzaroWorld or something! I thought the remake was great! Obviously not many other people did. Perhaps it was it's GC exclusivity which were the cause of poor sales.

The thing there its that you thought the remake was great. and so did most of its other buyers, myself included. But history has show that good does not equal successful. Like you and others said, Gamecube wasn't that popular, so low numbers of that means low sales of the game, and I thing the GC has the same problem like the Wii that it was seen as the kids console, so RE a mature game did not get its audience, and then RE4 with similar sales on GC got more sales when ported to others. I own RE4 on PS2 because that is how it was available the GC version went out of print, but the PS2 version was sold in a pack with Outbreak and Code Veronica X.

 

[Kallindril]

I thought RE4 mostly hit the right note for balancing action and survival horror. It had better gameplay and was faster and really more fun to play, but you were dropped on your own in an eerie village, and being alone had to be careful to make your bullets count. Inventory management was key. And the events were just right... defending a log cabin from a horde of "zombies", harpooning a giant monster dragging your motorboat around a lake, using a sniper rifle to cover Ashley from monks as she turned the cranks for you, riding a mine cart with "zombies" jumping aboard... there were a lot of different scenarios that worked.

It was perfect up until you got to the Chapter 5 island... then it just turned into a straight-up gun battle and took a step back. Except for the Regenerators.

Where I think the RE series made a wrong turn in 5 and 6 was largely that resource management, a source of tension, went out the window. A game like RE doesn't necessarily need to be dark and eerie all the time if you're concerned about having only X bullets to kill Y monsters coming at you to add some tension. In 5, you could just give yourself a full inventory of bullets anytime you died or started a new section, including a rocket launcher from your stash if you died at a boss. And although 6 did the right thing by removing the massive headache of either managing your AI partner's inventory or trading equipment with your partner, the inventory in 6 was too tiny to use it smoothly. If you saw a red herb and a green herb sitting there, you'd often have to destroy entire stockpiles of ammo to pick them up and combine them... then you turned them into pills, and had 2 empty inventory spaces where your bullets used to be.

I enjoyed the co-op in RE6 for what it was, and they did a nice job of splitting the 2 of you up every so often and giving you separate tasks where one of you would need to help the other, and they provided some *really* fun co-op times to do with a friend, like the Jake/Sherry motorcycle ride, or fighting the enormous ogres, but the inventory system needs to be smoother. I didn't terribly mind the QTE sequences except for the ones where you had to hammer a button as fast as possible, but there were too many unnecessary ones, like rotating the controller stick to open a door.

The number of times you have to kill Leon's final boss was a little over the top, though. By the end of the game, you've gunned him down, hit him with a high-speed train, shot him through the eye, gunned him down again with the aid of a helicopter in the form of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, beat him to death, shot him again, stabbed him through the chest, thrown him off a roof, burned him, shot him again and let zombies eat him, gunned him down in the form of a giant fly, stabbed him in the eye with a giant metal spike, electrocuted him, shot him again with a rocket launcher, and finally, impaled him after a 40-floor drop on a spike.

 

[MrGalactus]

When a musician broadens their music specifically to be more radio friendly or mass appeal, we call them sellouts. Because they are.

Mikami, you are a sellout. Capcom is your EMI.

 

[Casual Shinji]

that's to be expected. Thing is, people were getting tired of RE's formula if the REmake and RE0 were any indication. Plus the series was one that ALWAYS tried to have its cake and eat it. Sure, they start out as survival horror AT FIRST (and even then most of their horror depends upon jump scares) but then quickly turn into action games with awkward movement. It just makes more sense to get rid of the monsters permanently with a shotgun blast to the face due to ammo and healing items becoming increasingly common. After 4 dropped the horror pretense and focused on being a fun shooter the series was all the better for it.

Pretty much.

REmake and RE0 restricted your movement even worse than before by making your character's turing speed that of a damn tortoise. By this point Capcom had exhausted every possible measure with this series, and it was RE4 that dragged the series' ass out of the mud. I mean, it was the game that made me buy a Gamecube, and I still remember it as one of the best game purchases I've ever made.

Leave it to Shinji Mikami to say "No fuck this, let's make something that's actually good" well into developement.

 

[K12]

This is true, of course. Everyone likes to whine about changes to their franchises or that certain genres and games are popular. In the end though, everyone buys them, so why would developers go back to making games that all sold poorly? Most of my favorite games were commercial failures sadly. I never expect them to be made again in this day and age.

The problem is that the biggest selling genres are already well represented and you'd need to spend a shitload of cash to compete with COD or Halo or WoW and making a better game won't guarantee being a real competition.

I don't know why game developers seem to think that COD clones will sell better than games in an underrepresented niche genre. A bigger slice of a small pie vs. a smaller slice of a big pie. Developers seem to believe that they'll be able to get the big slice of big pie by just emulating games that have managed that. Not true!

The other issue is that making games isn't just a business, it's supposed to be art as well. We're right to criticise when a band creates a more generic sound just to sell better and we're right to hold game developers to the same level of integrity.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

This is true, of course. Everyone likes to whine about changes to their franchises or that certain genres and games are popular. In the end though, everyone buys them, so why would developers go back to making games that all sold poorly? Most of my favorite games were commercial failures sadly. I never expect them to be made again in this day and age.

The problem is that the biggest selling genres are already well represented and you'd need to spend a shitload of cash to compete with COD or Halo or WoW and making a better game won't guarantee being a real competition.

I don't know why game developers seem to think that COD clones will sell better than games in an underrepresented niche genre. A bigger slice of a small pie vs. a smaller slice of a big pie. Developers seem to believe that they'll be able to get the big slice of big pie by just emulating games that have managed that. Not true!

The other issue is that making games isn't just a business, it's supposed to be art as well. We're right to criticise when a band creates a more generic sound just to sell better and we're right to hold game developers to the same level of integrity.

I also agree that the idea that a game has to sell on the same level of CoD to be considered a 'success' is rather silly. That is why I look less and less to AAA games nowadays.

 

[Metalrocks]

understandable but still doesnt mean it has be action pure. i have to admit that i did enjoy RE6 for some odd reason. sure, it was action with some horror elements but when i think of the first title, it wasnt scary either. for me at least. plus i dint like the clunky controls and the fixed cameras that that caused me to die because i coulndt see anything.
and RE4 was for me the worst, not only because it was a poor pc port, but the controls really ruined it for me by not being able to strafe and having mouse support. plus, it only displayed the GC controls during QTEs. all this made RE4 the worst title ever.

revelations was really good and at some point creepy. but cant say scary. but i sure enjoyed this game more then any of the other titles.
if they would have made the remake for other platforms, it would have been more successful. i was actually pretty tempted to buy it once i have heard of it, but when i saw it was only for the GC, disappointment.
well, lets see what RE7 will deliver. if its planed.

 

[GAunderrated]

Maybe it's just me but I read this as "Resident Evil stopped being scary because of you people! It's not our fault, despite our sloppy writing and continued focus on things that players have already expressed distaste in!"

Always great when a dev blames their screwups on their players.

Pretty much what they are doing. Trying to blame it on the fans because we enjoyed how refreshing RE4 was. So they then take the worst parts of 4, add horrible co-op and interface, and then wonder why people don't like their game anymore.

I bought RE5 and its the last one I will get ripped off by. I didn't touch 6 with a 10ft pole. Hell I didn't even watch others play it because the gameplay is so dull. :/

 

[Vivi22]

So he killed Resident Evil because he decided to make the remake exclusive to the worst console for third party sales at the time? Well done.