Resident Evil

A full on open-world Resident Evil would be very interesting. It has the chance of failing miserably, but, if done well, could be a fascinating new way to take the series. An open world horror would be very good if done well. I understand open world fatigue and hope that series staples wouldn't be lost, but a Resident Evil game translated well to open world would be quite unique as far as open worlds go (I'm not saying it's the first horror open world, just that a specifically Resident Evil one has a lot of potential to be unique).

People complaining that recent games aren’t so serious should go watch Chris punch a boulder.

"You were almost a Jill sandwich!"

Yeah, original Resi 4 is clearly intentionally meant to be corny (just mixed with genuinely good horror)

Edited by king15 on Mar 27th 2024 at 2:06:04 PM

And really, the old games (the PS1-era, Code: Veronica, and original-RE4) were pretty corny too, at least as far as the voice work goes.

See, this person gets it!

Edited by TrashJack on Mar 27th 2024 at 10:07:56 AM

The whole series is ultimately campy, in the same way as the B-Movie horror that inspired it.

It plays itself seriously, knowing full well the audience won't treat it as such.

Claire: This is Sherry.
Leon: Okay. 🙂

It's hilarious how Claire can trust Sherry enough to explore on her own.

Put me down as a "No thank you" on open-world.

At its heart, Resident Evil is an inventory management game. The core of its gameplay loop is bullet/herb decision-making. There is a monster in this room. If you kill the monster in this room, you can be sure that this room will become safe to traverse in the future. Maybe at a certain plot point the game will spawn new enemies but for right now, for what you're doing, you can spend the bullets to clear this room.

But if you spend those bullets here, you might not have them for the next room. So you have to make a choice. Is it worth spending those bullets? Is this a room you expect to have to traverse again after you've passed it? Do you feel confident that you can evade the monster and make it to the next room without a fight, or is that decision going to cost you an herb?

Then you make your choice. And then you have to live with it.

In terms of gameplay, that decision is what Resident Evil's identity is. That is Resident Evil.

As the game opened up to be more action-oriented, it still maintained this central piece of the loop. Cool, Leon can buy guns and upgrade his gear now. But there's still a finite amount of cash to do that with.

An open-world game can't do that, because it needs to respawn trash mobs in all the spaces between Important Plot Missions so that there's gameplay to do. And that means it needs to respawn item pickups too. There is never any real cost to fighting the 8,000th respawn of the same encounter copy/pasted onto the map. And the oversaturation of said encounters makes them all wear thin and eliminates the tension.

A Resident Evil game where you're schlepping 80,000 Magnum Rounds across the map while wondering if it's going to be the Three Zombies And A Hunter random encounter or the Two Lickers random encounter when you hit the next spawn point doesn't sound, to my ears, like a Resident Evil game. There simply isn't a way to provide scarcity of resources and meaningful inventory management choices in a game where both resources and encounters infinitely respawn.

(This, incidentally, is also part of my problem with invincible pursuers. They break the game's formula by taking away choice. The pursuer will regenerate. My inventory will not. So it is never the correct choice to fight. Ever. A foregone calculation is not a meaningful choice, and an enemy that you're never supposed to make the choice to fight is not an enemy; It is a recurring nuisance. An irritant affixed to the gameplay.)

Edited by TobiasDrake on Mar 27th 2024 at 12:26:19 PM

Nah, the franchise should seriously bring back the Crimson Heads again.

When THEY were active, it wasn't just a matter of "Do I shoot this zombie or not?" but "Do I risk shooting this zombie and end up missing the head anyway, creating a Crimson Head, or just find a way around it to save ammo and my life?"

That to me, was one of the scariest things Resident Evil have ever thrown at me.

The prospect of "chance" and the odds of making a bad situation even worse with no way enough ammo to deal with it.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Mar 27th 2024 at 7:26:48 PM

Today I learned there was a golden Tyrant in one of the original games and now I want it brought back.

I suppose I COULD get the remake of 4 for PS4 (heh, see what I did there?), assuming that game still has "assist mode". Chances are I'm probably gonna die against the first enemy though.

Do we have a list of all the different powers and abilities that people who've been infected by the various viruses and parasites, but not turned into monsters have gained?

Like, Sherry's got super healing, Wesker (before he went full monster) got super strength and speed.

I think a few people got psychic powers? Jill might have slowed down aging if her looking more like her RE three self in Dead Island is an in-universe thing. And then there's Rose from Resident Evil 9.

I don't even know what she does, and the Mold is a little different from most viruses (but I think a lot of them are derived from it, aren't they) but she's essentially a walking BOW, so she's gotta have some crazy powers.

I think we've talked about if all the main characters might have some low key powers after years of fighting Zombies and mutants. Most of them have been infected and cured in some way (whether they got bitten in gameplay but were immune, or exposed in other ways like Jill in 3 and 5, Claire in Revelations 2 and Dead Island, Leon in 4 and also Dead Island, and Chris for the fist time...in Dead Island)

Oh, Ada also gets infected with a Plaga in the remake of 4. Almost forgot her. But she also got stabbed in 2, didn't she? How come that didn't infect her with anything?

Back on topic. So yeah. Lots of powers. What are they all? Who do you think is already superhuman besides maybe our favourite Boulder Puncher?

In theory Rose should have Mold powers like Evelyn and Miranda does. But more so.

But she's not generating Mold like Eve does or has enough around to manipulate like Miranda does so who knows.

Rose generates Mold, albeit not nearly as much. She sweats it when stressed out.

And in the backstory, the Ndipaya tribe's members (those who survived exposure anyway) gained enhanced strength and intelligence from the flowers that carried the Progenitor Virus. They were also the earliest known creators of B.O.W's, using said flowers to mutate animals to make them into living weapons. This of course backfired.

The original baseline Progenitor Virus didn't turn people or animals into monsters. It just either killed them or made them stronger and smarter.

Edited by M84 on Apr 2nd 2024 at 11:21:20 PM

So who here believes Eveline is actually Miranda's daughter but Miranda completely misses it because she thinks of her as a monster not created by "her" magic?

Mother Miranda: I'm going to mutilate your infant daughter in order to resurrect my own progeny.

Ethan Winters: Miranda your daughter isn't real. You created her using science experiments and mass genocide.

Mother Miranda: shrug That's what every mother does.

Annette Birkin: I mean-

Lady Dimitrescu: She has a point.

Mia: Look, Ethan, I already told you I was a child trafficker...

Edited by FOFD on Apr 2nd 2024 at 12:17:05 PM

No, she had a real daughter. The real problem is that given her daughter died of the Spanish Flu before she even discovered the Mold, it's entirely possible the Mold never had a chance to absorb her daughter's memories.

So the attempt to bring back even a copy of her daughter via Mold was doomed from the start.

Eveline is also Miranda's real daughter — Miranda helped create her by providing the Mold and a sample of Eva's genetic material. But because Eveline wasn't Eva, Miranda rejected her even though Eveline was just as much her daughter too.

Eveline's a monster, but you can't help but feel a little sorry for her.

Edited by M84 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 12:16:29 AM

I mean, Jack pitied her, and he was her Zombie Mold Pawn.

So yeah, Eveline was meant to be pitied. Her desperation for a family certainly takes on an entirely different connotation when you learn about Miranda and how she abandoned her.

It's even worse since the dlc confirmed that Rosemary and Eveline are separate beings. Eveline only exists as a memory in the Fungal Root. She can't even truly find peace in death.

Edited by M84 on Apr 3rd 2024 at 12:26:45 AM

x8 Jill Valentine in Dead Island has the power of using the latest RE model.

Mind you, it would have been righteously messed up if Rose was Eveline reincarnated.

For all we know she is. Rose was too young to develop her own personality yet, and Eva may or may not had gotten absorbed by the Mold. All we know for sure is she's not Eveline, and even then she could've picked up some traits anyway.

For all we know Rose is some gestalt of any combination of Rose, Eve and Eva.

Why is Mia such a non-presence in Shadows of Rose? It feels like they are hinting at a strained relationship but it's more likely devs didn't care about Mia at all during the story.

Mia isn't even a plot device in Resident Evil 8.

The story wouldn't change at all if Miranda had actually killed her off before the start of the game.

I think it's fair to assume that at the "Shadows of Rose" that Mia is still trying to deal with the loss of her beloved husband and attempt figuring out a way to be a support for her daughter's rather unique "situation" that goes way beyond the common puberty-problems and figuring out how to thread the path of adulthood.

Edited by Trainbarrel on Apr 3rd 2024 at 5:23:10 PM