Resident Evil 7: Should be live service game with online multiplayer and microtransactions
Capcom’s plans and wishes for Resident Evil 7 originally looked very different than what came out in the end.
Resident Evil 7 was actually supposed to be a live service game with online multiplayer and microtransactions, as the Executive Producer revealed.
Insights into the past
In a new video with Shinji Mikami on the series’ official YouTube channel, Jun Takeuchi talks about these plans. Ultimately, Takeuchi was asked to join the project, after which said plans were abandoned.
“When we started working on Resident Evil 7, we went back to this ‘what is horror anyway?’ discussion,” says Takeuchi. “I have a lot with me [Resident-Evil-7-Director Koshi] Nakanishi talked about, ‘what do we do now?’ We talked about it even before we started work on Resident Evil 7, in fact.”
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“And right around that time, there was a big push at Capcom, a big ‘marketing’ push that said, ‘We need to make the games players are asking for’. So we were told, ‘Do this, do that ‘, that was really tough back then. Online multiplayer’ here, ‘downloadable content’ there. LiveService games! Microtransactions! Make a Resident Evil game that ticks all of these boxes!”
“Seriously, there were so many demands… those poor directors. Eventually our President, [Kenzo] Tsujimoto, a. He had heard about all the unsuccessful attempts at that point. So this is one of those unforgettable moments for me. It was January 4th, the first working day of the new year. The President called me into his office. ‘Resident Evil 7 is in pretty bad shape. Takeuchi-kun, jump in and help make it!’ So that’s how I ended up working on Resident Evil 7.”
When he joined the project, he lobbied for Nakanishi to become the game’s director. He then went on to fight those live service elements and microtransactions that Capcom wanted.
“First we decided that Resident Evil had its roots in horror,” says Takeuchi. “We talked a lot about it. The idea of multiplayer was scrapped pretty quickly. If we could get it right, we could make an exciting horror multiplayer game, but we didn’t have any really good ideas, so we put it aside.”
“We went through the list and scraped everything until we had marketing’s worst nightmare – a regular, old single-player horror game. That’s what we ended up with.”
The fans should probably thank Takeuchi.
Reference-www.eurogamer.de