Garrett AnthonyThe fourth Resident Evil can be called a legend already because of the history of its creation. Six years of production hell is usually an unequivocal verdict for a game. But Capcom team still managed to figure out their ideals and concepts and released the finished product in 2005. Not just ready, but good enough. And not just good, but revolutionary for the series, for the horror genre and the entire industry in general. Just for a second: what kind of horror games are we waiting for in the near future? Dead Space remake, Silent Hill 2 remake, The Calisto Protocol, Alan Wake 2 – all of these games came courtesy of Resident Evil 4.
I’m going to reveal the reasons for the greatness, and like in the last time, one game innovation will naturally lead to another one, and we’ll make the whole picture, and then, in the epilogue, we’ll reflect a little bit. So, the starting point of all the game’s gameplay design decisions has been mentioned many times, but it’s a little harder to trace its impact than it seems. That’s where we’ll start, and then you’ll see how one decision twisted all the pillars of Resident Evil.
You probably heard that the main feature of Resident Evil 4 is the shoulder view. It replaces the fixed camera that worked like a surveillance system. The reduced visibility and a certain sense of voyeurism worked well for the atmosphere, but the reasons for this decision were purely technical – in the mid-nineties Capcom were not able to work with 3D-graphics, and a moving camera would have burned that all your surroundings – are the flat prendered textures. For the record, Shinji Mikami generally wanted to make the original Resident a first-person game.
In the mid noughties this approach looked more than archaic, but on the PS2 generation the industry and especially the Japanese were just learning how to work with two joysticks. Therefore, on the background of the same MGS 2 looked more progressive in appearance Splinter Cell, made by all the canons of modern third-person games. By the way, in the main mode the camera was quietly swiveling at a distance from Sam Fisher, but when aiming just translated over the shoulder of the hero. Mikami and his team fixed this view for the entire game. Why? Well, first of all, because now they could do so, and secondly for immersion – from an outside observer you turn into a witness and participant in the events taking place on the screen. You don’t even have to resort to cutscenes to create spectacular moments – you can see everything with your own eyes. In fact, this view was a compromise between first person and third person: the player looks in the same direction as the hero, fully controlling the process of aiming, and at the same time sees his character and visually reads his movements, as well as the surrounding environment.
The innovation turned out to be so breakthrough that it essentially created the genre of third-person action games – Gears of War, the founding father of shooters with cover and roll-ups, was already released in 2006 and its developers openly say where they spotted such a convenient camera position. And that’s it. Kane & Lynch, GTA, Batman, Mass Effect, Fallout, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, Watch Dogs, and so on down the list. Even the rival Silent Hill switched to the new camera. By the way the shelters also appeared in the fourth Resident, albeit in an embryonic form, but that’s another conversation.
For now, let’s concentrate on the game itself in a vacuum. So, thanks to the new camera, Resident Evil players for the first time could decide for themselves where to direct their gaze. That means, goodbye prender – now every location has to be rendered in honest 3D. The developers could have easily stopped on the 3D corridors, but they went further. The next revolution made by the fourth Resident Evil is the interaction with the environment.
Let’s remember how classic Resident Evil worked: you have a hero, you have a location and… that’s it. From there there are only two options – you can either pick up an item lying around the location or fight the enemy in it. The doors are animated portals between the parts of the map, and the different levers and buttons become interactive only after the activation of the script in the pop-up window. The revolutionary interactivity of Half-Life is still out of the question, although that’s a conversation for the next libretto. That is, look: even in the graphically breakthrough remake of the first part, if we remove the beautiful backdrops, then left a bare corridor, where the only interactive object will be a zombie – well, at most a statue that the hero can move the fixed jerks.
Now take a look at the fourth part. Each of its locations is more like a playground: smash windows, jump into windows, put ladders to houses, pick boxes with a knife, shoot at crows, bypass traps and stretch marks – all these elements of the gameplay outside of combat. The first big battle with los zombis will have you barricading doors, throwing enemies down ladders, blowing up red barrels (okay, that’s for later) – at some point the game will even have shelter segments. It works like shit, of course, but it’s a fact.