Resident Evil 7

[StrangerDanger]

So, Resident Evil 7 is going to be a thing eventually. as such, i figured make a thread about RE in general. what all about the series do you guys like? thoughts on the upcoming RE 7? looking forward to the RE 2 remake?

Link to jontron playing a demo for RE 7 for anyone interested

 

[Xiokir]

Spoiler: this is a lot of text

The series has taken some massive turns, not all of them good. Let's start with the older games.

RE:Code Veronica is just kind of a personal childhood favorite, I love RE2 and RE:Remake a lot too. What can be said about almost all of the Resident Evil games before 4 is: great horror atmosphere with a fuckton of memorable moments, tension that came with the survival aspect of item management, fantastic soundtrack, and ridiculous voice acting, which was just a staple of older games. The only thing that might have been a tiny smudge was the controls, I'm fine with tank controls but the original RE was kind of ... pain.

Then we have RE4. The perfect balance, not straying far from its survival-horror roots, yet being one of the best 3rd person shooters (IMO). I've only played the Wii/PC HD version so, I can only speak for those control and I have to say, they feel great. I think most people don't like the

Spoiler: HISS

escort mission

but I feel as though they handled this pretty well, literally solving it with dumpsters and keeping them glued to yo ass.

I feel like 5 and 6 lost the series' charm and became like.. a really dumb summer action movie type of game. The kind you find entertainment but will forget after you're done with it. I won't say the series got fucked as hard as Silent Hill after SH4(which is, in my opinion, a great game despite its...many flaws), but something definitely went wrong with RE5 and 6. They decided to just make.. a standard action game, because that's what was popular. And call it Resident Evil because money. Though RE6 I just can't forgive because they used my bae Leon and turned him into dogshit.

Resident Evil 7... hm... what is there to say? There's been a reform, horror games are alive again thanks to well received titles likes FNaF and the Silent Hills PT demo, and with that another camera POV change in the series. I really do hope the tides turn and Capcom makes a good game. From what I gather from the demo, they're putting more emphasis on the horror, which is fine. I can't say it's good,the horror style atm is more like a haunted house you walk through, literally like what Jon was in lmao. The story seems like its there, and we don't know what combat is like, or what the threat is (human murderer? zombies? bug zombies? leech zombies??)

TL;DR: I like Resident Evil, I didn't like RE5/6, and I pray RE7 turns out well.

 

[StrangerDanger]

Walls of text are always a welcome thing, it means you give a shit about whatever your talking about. or, that your incredibly butthurt. either way its interesting to read.
Personally, i agree with your assessment of 5 and 6, but i feel that 5 can be given a bit more leeway, as they were (in my opinion) experimenting with the direction they wanted for the games. Given the reception of 5, i don't quite understand why they did what they did with RE 6, but all the same i must admit i kind of enjoyed it. Leon being butchered aside, i feel like the best storyline was sherry and captain edge, since it made sense for them to be less, scared, i suppose is the word, and more action oriented. that said, RE 7 feels like it'll be a much welcome return to roots, or at least back to being primary horror, secondary action.

But really, i wanna talk about the deranged swamp bakers and whether we'll see them outside the demo.

P.S. Yes, RE:remake controls were painful. cannot tell you how many times i've yelled at the tv for it. can only imagine what the original was like.

 

[Savin]

P.S. Yes, RE:remake controls were painful. cannot tell you how many times i've yelled at the tv for it. can only imagine what the original was like.

Exactly the same. Unless you played it on PC, in which case it was exponentially worse because you lacked face buttons -- arrow keys to move, and then the bottom key row (z through v, I think?) as face buttons.

I streamed RE:Make RE:Master for Halloween this year. Maybe I should dig out my RE1 CD and see if it'll work on modern computers. It probably won't.

 

[StrangerDanger]

Most likely not going to work, yes. I had it for the PS4. was a free download a few months ago. the keyboard controls sound disgusting though.

 

[Kei]

The only RE I actually played was 4 for the GC. It was pretty darn good but I understand it's the black sheep of the family.

 

[Skeleton Man]

What attracted me to Resi was never the whorreur spooby scurry stuff. It was the cheesy B-movie humour and aesthetic to the series. Something 5 and 6 completely forgot. RE7 looks like it'll be something very different to what I loved, but I'm cautiously optimistic. The silly cannibal hicktown USA vibe to the antagonists has piqued my interest. So long as the VR isn't just a shitty gimmick and there's an actual GAME to it, I think it could be ok.

 

[StrangerDanger]

The only RE I actually played was 4 for the GC. It was pretty darn good but I understand it's the black sheep of the family.

Thats true. RE 4 was just as silly as the other games in the series, but it went with a bit of a different vibe for why it was silly. For instance, it was cheap B-movie action stuff, but when it was trying to be scary it was actually pretty well done. (looking at you U-3.)

 

[lightningshifter]

Having played most of the games in the series I can say that original cut of RE1 was a lot cheesier than the remastered version they made for the gamecube later on. They actually put some effort into making some of the dialogues sound like they weren't just being read half-heartedly from a sheet of paper for the first time. That said, the old cheesy lines were funny at times. Especially Barry's dialogues in a couple of the semi-rare scenes. You see in the old RE there were scenes that were pre-determined at the start of the game. You either got one or the other. There were certain trigger actions you could take to steer the game to giving you the desired cut-scenes. But that still left a couple that were completely random.

Unfortunately they kinda forced their own hands by moving further and further into the storyline's timeline. It does actually make sense that they'd all regroup and wage war on the bio-terror. I think that's part of what people don't get about the later games. They're not going to be scary because you're no longer playing the trapped special squad trying to survive. You're now playing agents that are going in and trying to eliminate any and all bio-terror threats. That and they decided to try eliminating the static camera angles which were actually perfect for setting up jump scares. It's virtually impossible to setup a jump scare in over the shoulder camera games. It's even harder to pull it off in FPS titles. From RE4 on up to 6 it's been the over the shoulder camera. That's almost as free ranging as FPS camera. The drawback is you lose the jump scares with that. You couple that with the shift in focus from being the hunted to being the actual hunter and you've now turned it into an action driven sci-fi that's set in a horror backdrop. It's no longer scary. At best it's going to be disturbing or grotesque at times. They're trying to go back to the roots in 7 but I still feel that they're going to have a hard time making people jump in a FPS title. I mean, the problem in most FPS titles is that you could be looking the wrong way and you'll miss the 'scare'. Or the scare will be blown right before it happens if they try to lock your focus on a specific location. I mean it's a dead tell if you suddenly have your ability to look around the room taken from you right before something jumps out to try to scare you. Another difference in the modern games is that they try to portray more variety to the combat. Ironically if you give the players more means and especially more realistic means of defending themselves then the impact of those surprises diminishes since you can go from guns to melee for instance. Now, to jump back to where the story shifted focus from being the hunted to being the hunters. Well, let's look at when the first time clustered group of games took place. RE0, RE1, RE2, and RE3 all took place within hours or days of one another as far as the timeline went. Code Veronica took place months after the events in Raccoon City. By that point they were already shifting things over from the whole trapped and trying to survive to ... attempting to investigate and eliminate the bio-weapons. It still used the old static cameras though. But honestly it didn't have many jump scares from my recollection. I think they realized that if you over did those they became too predictable by that point.

I wouldn't call RE4 silly. I mean it had more of a feel like a James Bond flick set in a horror backdrop really. I guess you could call some of the silly their dramatic flair in that one. By the time they hit 5 they knew they had to really start wrapping up some old story loose ends. It was definitely all out war on the bio weapons in that one. It was kinda cool that they gave one final showdown with Wesker but at the same time... he was really the best of the series villains and the only one to survive several games. Realistically I'm not surprised that it shifted out of the survival horror niche by this point. Then they had RE6 which was all out war basically. I mean it's a direct fallout from the stuff that came out of RE4 and RE5. There might have been something there from Revelations but I didn't recall anything in particular. Revelations was basically in the same boat as any of the other post RE4 titles. Really I think the main trap has been the recurrance of the main cast of characters. They're all battle hardened by this point so it should be no surprise that they're pretty much lock and load with everything. The impression I get from RE7 is that it's going to be a new cast of characters. That's probably for the best. Although, if it takes place after RE6 I would question whether there would be any person (character) that wouldn't at least have an idea of what those bio weapons are and what they can do when they get into a populated area. We'll just have to see how this FPS version of RE plays out. I don't expect too many scares. But if they play their cards right they can create a very creepy atmosphere. That would be the happy medium for a survival horror. If they're playing it to the survival genre at this point.

Oh and any of you playing any of the RE games for pc. Get an XBox 360 or XBox One controller for the pc. These games are all made to respond beautifully on those. They do not take kindly to off brand (Non-Microsoft xbox) controllers. I would not recommend keyboard and mouse for any RE port whatsoever. It's too clunky to do that.

 

[StrangerDanger]

You bring up a lot of valid points, and for the most part i'm in agreement with you. one point of contention is that i wouldn't call the combat realistic. you are certainly more capable of defending yourself, but some of the things you can do from RE4 on are pretty out there, even with the off screen secret agent training they all got. Leon's incessant window jumping, and the lack of any sort of pain or drawback despite some of the heights he falls from come to mind. or that time Chris straight up punched a boulder until it moved. admittedly, that last one annoys me because of the situation it happens in, but it's still not really something you can do, even with training and exercise. given the size of the boulder, you'd probably need superhuman strength to move it, something chris doesn't have. the games are all fun, and i enjoy them, but I just can't bring myself to take them seriously.

 

[lightningshifter]

You bring up a lot of valid points, and for the most part i'm in agreement with you. one point of contention is that i wouldn't call the combat realistic. you are certainly more capable of defending yourself, but some of the things you can do from RE4 on are pretty out there, even with the off screen secret agent training they all got. Leon's incessant window jumping, and the lack of any sort of pain or drawback despite some of the heights he falls from come to mind. or that time Chris straight up punched a boulder until it moved. admittedly, that last one annoys me because of the situation it happens in, but it's still not really something you can do, even with training and exercise. given the size of the boulder, you'd probably need superhuman strength to move it, something chris doesn't have. the games are all fun, and i enjoy them, but I just can't bring myself to take them seriously.

I could point out that you'd be surprised what you can make a near spherical object do as long as you apply the force in the same direction that gravity is going to want to pull it anyways but that's beside the point. I would have been more inclined to agree with you about the boulders had it not been for the fact that he never once knocked them loose in a direction that traveled uphill. Something that large and that spherical wouldn't need a huge amount of force to get it moving downhill once it was going. If you don't think it's possible for a person to get a round object rolling downhill then you might want to go out some place rural and watch farmhands pushing giant bales by hand. It's heavy work but you can move things that weigh well over a ton as long as you can apply the right leverage to them.

What I was referring to in terms of realism is the fact that you're not defenseless if you run out of bullets anymore. In the old RE games. If you ran out of ammo that was basically it as far as combat options. Oh yeah you had the combat knife, but that functioned more like a stand still melee weapon. Fighting with melee weapons rarely dictates that the person stands in one spot. The newer RE games started giving you the option to also use little bit of hand to hand combat when things got really close quarters. Admittedly a lot of that is just quick kicks or knife slashes on the side to throw your assailants back off you but still. That's a big step towards more realistic combat. The other thing they did was get rid of that hard stop before you aim and shoot. Yeah that's the ideal way to take aim on something but let's face it. Sometimes you need to aim and move at the same time. You may not be running but still you have to keep moving in a fight. I honestly got the impression that they always did that in the old RE titles to add to the suspense. Mainly because you had to stop to fight rather than having the option to keep moving as you would take pot shots at enemies.

As for tumbling through windows and whatnot, you can do that and I will point out he was not wearing outfits that left a lot uncovered. That means that his thicker clothes were shielding him from the worst of the broken glass. Also, it's kinda down to the basics in most martial arts to learn how to fall and how to tumble. If you do it right you won't get hurt much at all unless you jump out of a window that is really high up. By the way, it is possible to tumble out of a two story window even and survive with minimal injuries if you're really good at tumbling. The problem is that most people would instinctively (and rightfully so) brace themselves which causes you to tense up and blow the tumble when you hit. Another words the fear of that impact causes people to screw up in that critical moment when you're supposed to tumble into the fall to disperse the momentum. I will also point out another thing about these games that most people probably don't take into consideration. The only character injuries that are canon in those games are the ones directly tied to cutscenes. The games all pretty much go on that logic which would assume that they never got hurt until those cutscene. If you were a really skilled player that played those games to the extent that you knew where everything was at. Yeah you could possibly make a no damage run if you were insanely bored and had nothing better to do than master these games to the point that you could pull it off.

 

[StrangerDanger]

Fair enough. thanks for explaining the falling mechanics and what you meant by realism, i appreciate it. in regards to the boulder however, while pushing down a slope would most likely make it much easier yes, i'd like to point out that it does not get pushed, it is literally punched off the ledge, which i'm assuming isn't a thing people can normally do. maybe i'm being true to the old saying and making an ass of myself, but all the same i can't see it as being something possible within the time frame that Chris accomplishes it outside the realm of fiction. Here's a video of the scene in question, in case its been awhile since you played.