The incredible Resident Evil 2 remake reveal during this year’s E3 had many long-time fans of the horror franchise screaming in their seats with excitement. Yours truly included, it was absolutely stunning to see some of our favourite characters – hello, Leon – back in action and in today’s graphics! But don’t call this game a remake in its official capacity! Capcom took the organic formular and created a new experience, which meant the title won’t be as you remembered it from way back in. Luckily, one of the familiar faces from the title has remained – despite almost getting cut.
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So what is the one thing that we all went up against the game? The character that so many loved to hate? That damn giant alligator! Apparently, he was a pain in the ass for the developers too and because of that difficulty level, he was almost cut entirely. Producers Tsuyoshi Kanda and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi revealed to the Daily Star that making everything more modern was touch, and that transition into this generation was very apparent when rending the alligator we all know and loathe.
Kanda explained, “20 years ago, the graphics that we had weren’t photoreal and that meant you could get away with… a lot of things. Things that maybe you couldn’t today. You could be fantastical with the creatures and it wouldn’t stand out too much. So making a giant alligator – that’s a real challenge [laughter]. Trying to update that into a game where you’ve got scanned faces, motion-captured actors, photorealistic environments… it’s really, really hard. Where do you even start!”
Hirabayashi then went into even greater detail. “It was tricky to do without changing the game’s tone a lot. We’re competing with people’s memories with this game, too, and that’s really hard. Trying to make a convincing scene where a human-sized character – a guy with a knife – is taking on an alligator… that’s really silly. People don’t remember it as silly because the whole game was groundbreaking at the time, but that moment was ridiculous. It was a difficult process for us, making that work today.”
He then added, “Perhaps they have the perfect version of the game in their heads and what we do undermines that? We’re just trying to make a game that feels right and feels like what you might remember from a gameplay perspective the first time.”
It seems like the painstaking detail was a lot to handle, but from what we’ve seen with our own hands-on time with it, that effort will definitely see a positive reaction at launch.
Resident Evil 2 will release for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on January 25th of next year.
