When a video game is a classic, it’s hard to picture it as anything other than what it originally was, even if it was an 8-bit game. So when remasters or remakes happen, they have a lot of things to deal one, one of the big ones being to make sure they don’t screw up what made the original so great. For the team at Capcom, they’re attempting to do this with the Resident Evil 2 Remake, and it’s not an easy task.
For example, is it even a remake? The team talked with IGN about this:
“We’ve been calling it a remake as well internally. It’s kind of a nickname – ‘Resi 2 Remake’,” producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi told them. “But I think that’s a word that has a different amount of depth depending on the person. You can define a remake as quite a basic polish of a game graphically or resolution-wise. Or you can define a remake that’s a complete rethinking of the entire game.”
Apparently, they wanted to keep it balanced between classic and new things, but that didn’t last long:
“We initially started with the concept of a 50-50 split between essentially untouched content from the original game and then new stuff was added,” reveals Hirabayashi. “But when we put together that concept we realised it was a bit neither here-nor-there… We had to go further. That’s when we started thinking of it as a reimagining of the entire game.”
But make no mistake, the Resident Evil 2 Remake will have plenty of horror, and they actually changed some things to ensure that this happened:
“We wanted to achieve with the horror expression – the intensity of an up-close, claustrophobic zombie encounter. When they grab you and bite you, it just feels really in your face and intense. The more zoomed-out perspective of a fixed-camera wasn’t really going to work for what we wanted to achieve with the horror effect.”
The game releases January 25th, 2019.
