Resident Evil 7 Was Originally Going to be a Live Service Game With Microtransactions - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 23 August 2022 / 1,780 Views
Capcom was originally planning for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to be a live service game with microtransaction and online multiplayers, according to executive producer Jun Takeuchi in a new video posted on the official Biohazard YouTube channel who spoke with Shinji Mikami.
Once Takeuchi was brought onto the project any plans for a live service game were scrapped.
"When we started working on Resident Evil 7 we went back to that 'what is horror anyway?' discussion," said Takeuchi (and transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle).
"I talked about it a lot with [Resident Evil 7 director Koshi] Nakanishi – 'so what are we going to do?' We’d talked about that stuff even before starting work on Resident Evil 7, actually. And right around that time there was a big push at Capcom, a big 'marketing' push, saying 'we have to make the games players are asking for.'
"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.
"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."
When Takeuchi took over the project he pushed to remove the live service aspect of the game and to focus on making it a horror game.
"First, we decided that Resident Evil's roots are in horror," Takeuchi said. "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.
"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."
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil 2, and Resident Evil 3 in June of this year all received a next-generation update for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Thank you, Tsujimoto and Takeuchi! Boy, am I glad the they scrapped all that shit. Funnily enough I had just been playing RE7 a couple of weeks ago and it is a fantastic game. I'd hate it if it had any of that mtx multiplayer nonsense.
"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." - Isn't there a famous quote about when 'marketing' runs a company? Can't quite think of it off the top of my head. Basically, it's bad. :P
thankfully they forfeit killing the franchise.
And let marketing guys suffer the nightmare instead of the game and gamers (we don't want this type of nightmare).
Thanks, Takeuchi.
Man, we dodged a bullet here. Hopefully that awful idea will never come up again.
It wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to as successful as it is now if it had this stuff.
There’s horror… ?
And… horror. ?
Essay Pro