Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was a pretty fantastic game - Ethan Winters’ search for his wife in a dilapidated plantation helped bring the franchise back to its survival-horror beginnings, and all in all was a great (and terrifying) time. However, things could have gone very differently.
As reported by VGC, an interview with Resident Evil 7’s executive producer, Jun Takeuchi, has revealed that there had been a huge push from Capcom to make the title a live service game, including microtransactions, but the devs fought against it.
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“Right around that time [when work started on Resident Evil 7] there was a big push at Capcom, a big ‘marketing’ push, saying ‘we have to make the games players are asking for’,” Takeuchi explained. “So we were being told ‘make this, make that’, it was really hard on the directors at the time. ‘Online multiplayer’ this, ‘downloadable content’ that. ‘Ongoing service games! Microtransactions! Make a Resident Evil game that ticks all those boxes!’
“Seriously, there were so many demands… those poor directors. Finally, our president, [Kenzo] Tsujimoto stepped in. He’d heard about all the unsuccessful attempts at that point. So this is one of those unforgettable moments for me,” he continued. “It was January 4, the first working day of the new year. The president called me to his office. ‘Resident Evil 7 is in pretty bad shape. Takeuchi-kun, step in and help make it!’ So that’s how I ended up working on Resident Evil 7.
“First, we decided that Resident Evil’s roots are in horror. We talked about it a lot. The idea of multiplayer got killed off pretty quickly. If we could properly put it together we could make an exciting horror multiplayer game, but we didn’t really have any good ideas so we set it aside,” he said. “We went down the list, chopping them out, until we had marketing’s worst nightmare – a regular old single-player horror game. That’s what we ended up with.”
And, clearly, that decision was definitely for the best.
Topics: Resident Evil, Capcom