Capcom has published a new video about the development of Resident Evil Village that he went through certain negative moments because the combat was not what the testing and quality control department expected. In fact, Shutaro Kobayashi, head of the latter department, gave some curious statements.
“The content of the game was completely divorced from what the developers believed they had done.” Capcom does not beat around the bush in this video as several developers admit that there were very negative feelings in the early stages of combat development, something that happened during the forced hiatus from the pandemic.
Too many enemies
Basically, the combat was a mess according to the testers themselves. There were a lot of enemies and they were too aggressive so facing them with low ammo and taking hits was very annoying, not fun and the general feeling was that facing enemies broke the rhythm of the game to the point of making it a job.
Despite the fact that QA were afraid of being ignored, all their feedback reached the developers and producers who had to get down to work, although they admit that there was nervousness at first. In the video they mention that the first thing was to find the most efficient way to change the title without delaying it and determine what was wrong.
In the end, one of the principles of the redesign was to “give space” to the player instead of overwhelming him with too many enemies, director Morimasa Sato commented as follows:
“Instead of making players panic by simply throwing aggressive monsters at them, we make them paranoid about whether they are going to be attacked and how they will be attacked, and we worry about where the next enemy will be. So when an enemy appears, it is relentless. We consciously focus on improving the pace. I think that’s when it started clicking. “
For all the designers, these changes were key to reaching an agreement with the testers and quality control. Resident Evil Village was released three weeks ago and has rave reviews, and now it’s interesting to know that we could have gotten a very different game.