That rumored Resident Evil 4 remake could be a longer way off than we thought. It turns out that the project has undergone major reworks as development is overhauled. Capcom has not announced more specific details, but things don’t look good. There are rumors that a delay until 2022 or later is certainly possible.
The report comes from VideoGamesChronicle, who claims that the project has been handed off to a new core team at Capcom. The game has been rumored for a while, but only recently got moved into full-time development.
The reasons have not been confirmed, but suggest that Capcom was not happy with the current design intent, as well as progress on the remake. The team was originally seemingly working on something much simpler apparently, and has been shuffled out of the lead role as a result. Work on Resident Evil 4 remake was headed by M-Two, a new team within the structure. The project has now been handed to Capcom Division 1, a more senior team.
M-Two, a studio founded by former PlatinumGames head Tatsuya Minami, isn’t lacking in talent. And Resident Evil 4 director Shinji Mikami is said to have given his “full approval” to the remake, so things must have been pretty bad for this shift to have happened.
The core ethos that Capcom wanted was for Resident Evil 4 remake to be “inspired by the original” but with “its own unique takes” on the idea. We already know that some core elements, like Leon’s attache case, are a strong candidate for a revamp, but still get included. There are some suspicions that the team previously working on the game wasn’t doing enough to differentiate the project from its original version. It seems like Capcom has decided that there needs to be a new spin on the old game, possibly a rework to how the interactions with Ashley are structured. We don’t really know for sure.
It very much feels like Capcom wanted to shake things up in line with how the previous two remakes handled things. So we could see a more active enemy, similar to how Nemesis and Mr. X behaved in the two previous games.
So we probably won’t see this game for a few good years. There’s a good chance this could push the game all the way back to 2023 or later. We will have to wait and see what Capcom does. So it’s not a good day for Resident Evil fans looking for good news, at least not on this front.
The good news this week is that we know for sure what’s coming with Resident Evil Village when that drops on May 7. The game is also getting pretty substantial pre-order bonuses, as well as two different special editions. That game is also getting a special multiplayer mode called Resident Evil RE:Verse.
