The more time that has passed since the launch of a video game set to be remade, the more things that have to be changed for its remake. True, sometimes you only have to do minor things, like adjust the graphics a little, or adjust the programming to fit the new system it’s on. But in contrast, some games have to really go that extra mile in order to get things done. Such as with the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake.
For the dev team, they noted that the graphics were actually one of the biggest challenges in the project. Some of the team talked with the Daily Star and noted:
“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!”
The other challenge was implementing the higher-res graphics with having to change certain events in the game out of fear of it looking weird or silly:
“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.”
It’s going to be interesting to see how Resident Evil 2’s remake works out their issues before it’s release on January 25th.
