Resident Evil 7 was almost a live service disaster

After Resident Evil 6, there was a lot of concern around the next game in the series. The franchise was at a low point and Capcom needed to shake things up. Eventually, Resident Evil 7 turned out to be an excellent game and a fresh starting point for newcomers to the series. However, it almost went in the complete opposite direction, one producer has revealed. 

This week in an interview on the official Biohazard YouTube channel (via VGC), Capcom Executive Producer, Jun Takeuchi, touched on the rough early days of development on Resident Evil 7. During the interview, he explains that Capcom marketing folks wanted to push multiplayer, DLC, microtransactions and live service elements.

“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!”, he says in the interview. “Seriously, there were so many demands… those poor directors”.

Eventually, Capcom President, Kenzo Tsujimoto, stepped in and gave the development team the greenlight to make the game they actually wanted to make. The end result was Resident Evil 7 as we know it today, which kickstarted a new trilogy of games and put the franchise back on the map. Now, Resident Evil is in a better position than ever, and Capcom has seen high sales.

There is still at least a small part of Capcom still pushing for multiplayer, as Resident Evil 3 Remake had a tie-in 4v1 mode, and Resident Evil Village is getting its own multiplayer deathmatch mode, ReVerse, in October.

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KitGuru Says: Thankfully, Capcom made the right call and we eventually got a fantastic game out of it. A multiplayer-focused, live-service style Resident Evil might be possible in a spin-off, but that stuff shouldn't be what a mainline Resident Evil game is built around. 

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