One day in the future, Capcom’s legendary Resident Evil series could see a reboot.
Resident Evil: Revelations producer Masachika Kawata commented on the possibility of changes following Resident Evil 6′s mixed reception, and specifically commented on the suggestion of a more open-world approach in a Eurogamer interview:
“If we did [go with an open-world], we would want to preserve what Resident Evil is and what makes it appealing to fans, while also making it accessible to new players. It would almost entail having a slight reboot to get the series into a place where it would work with open-world gameplay. That’s just a personal opinion. A lot of decisions would have to be taken before something like that is done to the series, but it is something that… There is a possibility.”
Capcom may look more towards Revelations as a point of inspiration for the next Resident Evil. Kawata “can see us focusing even more on the horror aspect and fear in the series, and see us making something scarier than we have already.”
“Once we see Revelations released on consoles, we’ll be looking very carefully at how the title is received and what feedback we get. I think we’ll get a lot of input from the fanbase and the media on what it means for Resident Evil, and what it could mean for the future of the series. We’ll definitely be looking at that as a signpost for where we need to be going next. Moving forward I can see us focusing even more on the horror aspect and fear in the series, and see us making something scarier than we have already.”
Any changes made to Resident Evil going forward won’t be a direct response to “6″, according to Kawata:
“We don’t want to respond directly to, for example, the reaction to Resident Evil 6, [rather than] taking a chance to re-examine the series as a whole within ourselves, within the company, and decide where we want to take it from there. If anyone is waiting for an open-world Resident Evil, I think it will certainly be quite a while. So in the meantime, I recommend giving Revelations a try.”
Resident Evil: Revelations was initially a 3DS exclusive. The game, which originally launched last year, was a moderate success, though Kawata said Capcom would have liked to sell “a little more”.
“Going by the 3DS market at the time we released the game, it was definitely a success and we’re certainly hoping we can repeat that success with the home console version. Given the large development costs we had on the 3DS version, we would have liked to have even a little more sales than we did in the end. But that doesn’t mean we saw it as a failure by any means.”
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