Before we saw the official reveal of Resident Evil Requiem during this year's Summer Game Fest event, there were rumors that the next entry into the historically linear franchise would be an open-world game.
Now that we know Resident Evil 9, officially called Resident Evil Requiem, is in fact not an open-world game, and closer to what players expect from the series, it's easy to dismiss those rumors as just that - rumors. Well, according to Capcom, those were not rumors and were indicative of how Requiem began its development journey.
In an extended version of the Resident Evil Requiem Creator's Message video that's only available through the Resident Evil Portal on Capcom's website (spotted by VGC), director Koshi Nakanishi confirmed the rumors were true, though Capcom pivoted from its open-world approach after concluding that this wasn't the direction players wanted the series to go in.
"You might have heard some of the rumors," Nakanishi began. "Things like an online Resident Evil or an open-world Resident Evil, which we spent some time experimenting with. But in the end, although we had some interesting concepts, we realized that it wasn't what fans wanted to see or play. So we went back to the drawing board and created what led to Resident Evil Requiem."
Having the context that those rumors were true, and that Resident Evil 9 was almost an open-world, potentially online-focused game, makes the opening statement from producer Masachika Kawata make a lot of sense, as he begins his section of the Creator's Message video by clarifying that Resident Evil Requiem "is an offline single-player game."
In a time when it feels like many of the bigger publishers and developers are trying to push an online focus onto historically offline single-player games, it's nice to hear a story where the team realized early enough that things needed to go in a different direction.
It makes you wonder how different things could have been for other games that we know went through a similar process, like how EA's leadership kept pushing for Dragon Age to be a live service title and realized far too late in the development of what became Dragon Age: The Veilguard that they had been barking up the wrong tree. And we all know how that went.
At least in the case of Resident Evil Requiem, we can look forward to its release next year with plenty of excitement, as Capcom is on a hot-streak of excellent releases. Perhaps that has something to do with their leaders having more than just hollow space and dollar signs in the six inches between their ears.
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