The series that defined survival horror is at a crossroads; now split into continuing titles, Resident Evil is doing everything in its power to stay relevant. But is it working, and can making a splinter franchise really save Capcom’s most iconic game?
It’s been almost 20 years since we first saw the words ‘Resident Evil’ fade into life on our old CRT TV screens. 20 years since we first set foot in an imposing, pre-rendered house, 20 years since we first heard the words ‘T-virus’ and ‘Umbrella Corporation’. It's safe to assume that most discerning gamers played through the labyrinthine mansion that Resident Evil called home, and it’s just as safe to assume that - at the time - the game was something of a revelation in its own way: a benchmark for what 3D games could achieve, and a watershed moment for horror gaming as a whole.
But it wasn’t until almost ten years later that the series reached its apex. The GameCube’s Resident Evil 4 recently passed its tenth birthday having been released 11 January 2005, and even with ten years’ distance between the seminal game’s first showing and now, it's dear how much Capcom's best-rated game changed the industry. Resident Evil 4 got the traditional third-person shooter by the neck, forced it to the floor and put a bullet firmly in its temple, execution-style.
It discarded the fixed camera angles of its predecessors and opted instead for an over-the-shoulder perspective, giving the player full control of what they were looking at without compromising character control. It’s not an over-exaggeration to say that this redefined the way we game, or even the way that developers make games. But it didn't just affect the industry, no; Resident Evil 4 was the point of no return for its parent franchise - the release of RE4 had made a point, it had fundamentally altered what gamers could expect from a Resident Evil game. And the fixed view wasn’t the only casualty of the game's innovation: when RE4 released; the 'survival' aspect of Resident Evil's survival action died. Before RE4's exemplary gunplay, the series relied on ammo management, prioritising threats, delicately managing your saves. Resident Evil 4 did away with all of that, and it worked - at least for one game. Resident Evil 4 is easily one of the best games on the GameCube, and is a series highlight without a question, but its success took a toll on the rest of the Resident Evil family of games.
Since then, the series has been lost - attempting to relive its golden years, clinging desperately to its muddled identity, trying to fuse its influential roots with its innovative adolescence, to no great effect. It's lost its identity, bogged itself down in myopia - not sure whether it's trying to be ten or twenty years old.
That’s where splinter series Revelations comes in; freed of the constraints of its parent IP, Revelations has the freedom to do what it likes, to riff off Resident Evil without owing it anything. The first Revelations was something of a shock to gaming media and consumers alike - the 3DS’ first true dark horse. It was a relief to see a Resident Evil spin-off on a handheld device save a console-specific series from obscurity. After the lacklustre release of Resident Evil 6, and the doomed spin-offs that’ve peppered the series’ name since the early 2000s, it could be Revelations 2 that revalidities the franchise fora modem audience.
“I think you could say the series is at something of a crossroads at the moment, especially as we're moving into a new hardware generation," Michiteru Okabe - producer on Revelations 2 - tells us when we ask him how he thinks Revelations 2 will impact the Resident Evil franchise, “it's a big next step. Were always trying to be aware of user needs and feedback, taking note of how people react to previous releases in the series and looking at the reception of each game individually. We always want to bear those [reactions] in mind when were working on future developments-and that’s no different for Revelations 2."
But what do Resident Evil fans want? It seems to be a tough crowd to appeal to as a whole after providing such a broad range of games - attempts at innovation are met with scepticism - Resident Evil Raccoon City was largely ignored on release, and RE6's multiple narratives conceit didn’t have the impact Capcom hoped for. Yet the original’s second remaster has reviewed (and sold!) wonderfully well. But you can’t just give your consumers more of the same every year, surely, so how do you appeal to the core audience whilst still trying to do something new?
“I think you could say [Revelations 2] has a very solid core of survival horror, typical Resident Evil elements," explains Okabe. ‘The first Resident Evil title I worked on was Racoon City, and the intensity and passion of the Resident Evil fans is something you realise when you become the focus of it It's a long-running franchise, people have their own feelings that they put onto it they love certain parts of it, and they want to see those parts taken care of as you make new entries in the series. It’s a good pressure, though: it keeps you on the right road, I think. And when you’re making a series that you love and you’re making the next game in it it’s hard to complain about any kind of pressure. I always want the passions of the fans - I'll always listen to their thoughts and opinions during the course of development."
In our conversation with Okabe, it became clear that he understands Resident Evil - that he respected Capcom's legacy with the series and was keen to prove the franchise still has a place. He told us that if a product he was working on carried the Resident Evil name attached to it, there were certain fan expectations - and they went deeper than just zombies, intrigue and satisfying gunplay. There was an atmosphere, a solid core of ‘survival horror’.
“In terms of the things that got a positive reaction in Revelations, we tried to keep that sense of claustrophobic tension you got from being kept on-board a cruise ship," explains Okabe. “Something we learned and tried to improve on was the pacing: alternating chapters would switch away from the cruise ship and take on a more action-oriented approach with a different set of characters. These were intended to be moments of relief from the tension - much faster! - to give the player a break, and make the tense sections more claustrophobic once you got back into them, but the way they were received... well, it seemed the action didn’t really fit into the game as well as we planned, especially when the team did such a good job making the cruise ship sections so tense. This time, there’s been more of a creative focus on maintaining the claustrophobia and trying not to move away from that too much.
“With that firm base established [in Revelations], we felt we could experiment more with the release format of the game, rather than the gameplay itself," he explains. "That’s because we wanted to make sure the game felt solid and right before we gave it [to Capcom] to release episodically". The biggest departure for Capcom with Revelations 2, then, is its release structure; like many in the industry, Capcom has seen the success of rival publishers and their episodic games and has decided it wants to move in on that market, too. Thing is, unlike a lot of the other developers that are mobilising in the episodic games market, Resident Evil has a pseudo-history with the format: the original Revelations was structured episodically, even if it wasn’t released that way.
“The first Revelations game was somewhat episodic in its structure, if not its format, anyway - you had these ‘re-caps' and next times and so on. It was like watching a TV show, even back then," explains Okabe, highlighting the method that the game used, if not the form. “We kind of wanted to take that idea, but do it properly... Releasing it on a weekly basis (doing it right this time) and going back to the roots of survival horror were the two biggest focuses of both Revelations and Revelations 2.1 hope users will find this quite a unique way to enjoy the game, and enjoy on the episode-by-episode basis it’s made for."
Cast your mind back to 2005 - just after you've taken down that lumbering zombie with a chainsaw in Resident Evil 4 - and imagine that person trying to comprehend an episodic Resident Evil game... it doesn’t seem right, it wouldn’t have fit in with the gameplay. the action, the tension. But since then, we’ve had two passable main entries in the game and a slew of misfired spin-offs... Revelations redefined how players could digest a Resident Evil game, and if the sales figures are to be believed (the HD versions alone had sold 1.1 million as of February last year), it was a stylistic shift for the best.
“One of the main things we’re aiming for with this style of release is to give people the chance to experience the pleasure of waiting between episodes so they can talk to each other about the game -speculate and theorise and get online and communicate about what [the game] is doing," Okabe explains. “It’s kind of like what you get with Breaking Bad or Game Of Thrones on TV: if you watch it on the schedule, you'll get story revelations and a cliff-hanger and so forth, and then you have to wait until the next one... that gives you these so-called ‘water-cooler moments’ where you talk to your friends about what happened, about what you want to happen. You can go online and talk about what's going to happen next - and that was one of our main aims."
Okabe makes a salient point - a lot of buzz and word-of-mouth is generated through commentary these days: YouTube videos, Twitter chatter, Reddit threads. Get people talking - get your audience genuinely invested in the product you’re selling them - and you've basically got a free PR machine. But episodic gaming is still a fairly untested market: aside from Telltale, only Square Enix (Life Is Strange) and Sega (Sonic The Hedgehog 4) have attempted to open up the market to varying degrees of success...
“Obviously, The Walking Dead is one example of a game we’ve been looking at," reveals Okabe when we ask him what inspired his team to attempt the ambitious release schedule. “But I mean, [The Walking Dead] wasn’t weekly by any means, in fact there’s quite a large gap between episodes. And it’s nothing like our game in terms of how it plays - (Telltale) focuses a lot more on adventure elements, but I guess you could say we’re similar with our third-person perspectives? Anyway, it was interesting to see how well they pulled off what we’re trying to do between Episode One and Episode Two: online, people were just talking endlessly about the story and what they’d like to see in the next episode, and there was such a big gap between them! That helped me, it made me realise the outcome for Revelations 2 could definitely be the same with our actual weekly schedule."
It's a brave move for a series that - so far - has retied on releasing complete games, games that act as cinematic experiences that you need to chip away at, learn and understand, before you have a chance at succeeding. Games with structured set pieces and causality. But considering Revelations 2 has been specifically constructed from the ground up for gamers to buy week-on-week, we have faith that Capcom’s newest experiment will pay off - we’ll be playing it as it releases, regardless, paying close attention to how it handles the episodic pacing and if - finally - we might have a contender to Telltales thus far unchallenged place atop the throne of episodic gaming.