Outgrowing Resident Evil

[khasho]

Resident Evil can not be as good as it was with two characters on screen all the time....What it needs is a single character game...The thing i hate the most is two characters on screen all the time... Old resis had feeling of isolation which made games excellent....but modern games contains multiple characters on screen which is big turn off for me...and what is worse is that they never shut up and they act as a walking tutorial....when we replay games the unskippable dialogues become a real nuisance...force walking also adds to frustration...these things are ok first time but i like replaying games than it gets really frustrating...All i want is a single player RE with minimal dialogues and cutscenes...Let the environment tell the stories

[Mikhail]

It's time for a reboot with the original characters just providing tech / radio support, there's no reason for them to be active in the field anyone, at this point they should all be coffin dodgers.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

I'm not even sure we need old characters providing support.

Re-occurring characters & organizations have robbed many of the series' storylines from interesting mystery. Even if we all suspected Albert Wesker of wrong doing in RE1, there hasn't been a reveal as surprising as seeing him in a slide of Umbrella staff since, and most reveals have come much earlier in the titles following. Long before the final act of RE2 you know off to Umbrella, you've got a horny Birkin on your tail and Mr X has a thing for child jewellery.

What we're usually left with is guessing which Wesker or corporation is responsible for the latest outbreak and digging through our minds to remember obscure plot details from 4 or 5 that are important to the current plot.

I haven't outgrown survival horror. But Resident Evil has failed to evolve that at a pace and quality on par with other genres, and instead, has gone off on an awkward action title tangent.

[EDIT] Actually, part of me thinks that if returning to the Sweet Home concept gave birth to RE1, then rather than RE7, I'd like to see Capcom once again return to the Sweet Home concept and see what they can create that's fitting for modern technology.

You only have to look at Dark Souls & ZombiU to see the potential for permideath, asymmetrical co-op and leaving other players information in a horror title.

[News Bot]

It's time for a reboot with the original characters just providing tech / radio support, there's no reason for them to be active in the field anyone, at this point they should all be coffin dodgers.

They are really not old. Aside from Barry who is not an active field agent, Chris is the oldest protagonist and he's only 40.

[Deathlygasm]

I'm personally fine with Re7 incorporating [spoiler removed] into the story.

[Canas Renvall]

^ Had to remove that name, it was a big spoiler for REV2 for those who haven't played it. But yeah, I think that's what should happen. A new generation of heroes (Jake, Sherry, Moira, etc.) vs a new generation of Spoiler:

show spoiler

Wesker.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

They are really not old. Aside from Barry who is not an active field agent, Chris is the oldest protagonist and he's only 40.

It's easy to forget how young the characters are in RE1 to be when you consider how much older Chris & Barry look in the intro (30 Barry? Please!) and how much time has passed since that game.

Spoiler:

show spoiler

I wouldn't mind 2 different generations of characters working together. I think there was a missed opportunity by not uniting Barry & Monica earlier in REV2 and seeing their relationship evolve over the course of an episode, instead of the rather immediately "we love each other, all is forgiven fuckity fuck" dialogue at the end of Ep 4.

[Sly]

Barry was 38 in RE1 and he looked old only because he had a full beard. In fact he's as old as Albert, who never seemed to age except in RE5 where he had some wrinkles.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

Oops, read that as 30. Blame dodgy compression on the YouTube vid I checked out. Chis was 25 though, so still quite young.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

A new generation of heroes (Jake, Sherry, Moira, etc.) vs a new generation of Spoiler:

show spoiler

Wesker.

It really wasn't until CV that the series started to become about repeated heroes and villains (not just heroes) going up against each other again and again. I'm not sure what those dynamics have to offer us that are fresh anymore.

RE1&2 were both great titles that paid tribute to decades of great monsters and moments in horror movies, wrapped in a more unique (if not original) story. 3 really was the start of the end of that, and the series becoming much more reliant on self-reference & tentacles. Whilst the future of the series couldn't survive on tribute alone*, it's not really ran with the series' strengths. I think 4 actually feels more like a title in keeping with RE1-2's sty;e & tone during its first couple of hours gameplay whilst introducing lots of brand new elements, but the gamepaly takes a much more linear, action orientated slate, the human antagonists are comical and the return of Ada and Wesker are the final nails in the coffin of reinvention for a series in need of it.

*Ape Escape 2 is a great example of a series that exhausted all pop-culture references too early in the series to sustain future episodes

[Wrathborne]

Hey Jimmy, who is "Monica"?

[Guest]

I don't know. I'm sure I've heard that name before somewhere, maybe in the Outbreak games.

[Jimmy_Jazz]

Nah, it's just my brain failing to work on a Monday, I meant Moira.

[Guest]

OK.

[MeganGrass]

I have quite literally spent half of my entire life playing these games, and I honestly get even more angry with myself when I feel burnt by Bio/RE. I used to direct these feeling towards CAPCOM and those "God awful" developers who "ruined" my beloved franchise, until I finally realized that I was the one who didn't bother to properly grow with the series.

As it were and as it has been stated many times, the series would not have survived by continued use of the original formula (Bio1,2,3) and I would have been pretty bummed out if the franchise were to be shelved - my nerdy dedication to the series actually saved me from some real-life ugliness.

Absolute opinion on the current status of the series (Bio4,5,6) is that it just works [...] Otherwise, we'd be stuck with a tired cliche/niche series that only gathers interest from a generation of gamers who now live busy adult lives. Having just recently played Bio6 for more than a few minutes (read: last night for one hour), I'm both impressed and saddened that I had never before even given it a chance.

Survival Horror cannot survive without Action. They go hand-in-hand because the real world is just too complex and fast-paced to imagine any other possible scenario for this ever-expansive canon... though, it's become quite obvious that the balance needs to be offset. Take the absolute best from both worlds (Bio1,2,3 -vs- Bio4,5,6), slap a Bio7 logo on it and let's keep this thing going for both current and future generations alike.