With Capcom’s surprise reveal — and announcement of a PlayStation-exclusive demo — at E3, fans have a lot of unanswered questions so far, and understandably so.
While Capcom has gone on record to say that Resident Evil 7 biohazard isn’t a reboot, and that the demo isn’t really part of the final game, there’s still a lot of questions left unanswered. Chief among these is who’s the Resident Evil 7 protagonist? Will we be playing as Chris, Leon or Jill? It seems the answer to that is a big, fat “no.”
Over on Capcom’s blog, RE7 Producer Masachika Kawata and Director Kōshi Nakanishi talk a fair about the horror game and one of the things they talk about is exactly who’ll be the hero in RE7.
What character(s) do players control in this game?
Kawata-san: Just to confirm – it isn’t an existing character whose eyes you’re seeing through. I think one of the places we got in the series up until now is you’re kind of playing these superhero characters. They’re fully equipped, powerful people who go into these survival horror situations but they’re ready for them. They can take it on. To bring the horror experience right to the player, we thought now that you’re in first person you’ll feel like you’re there. You can’t be looking through the perspective of a macho, hero character because that’s not you at home. Or maybe you are macho, I don’t know [laughs]. It’s sort of a powerless, ordinary person you’re playing as. We’re not really talking in too much detail about who they are right now, but they’re an ordinary person stuck in an extraordinary situation. I think that really brings the horror right to the fore. You wonder if this person you’re playing as – or you – will be able to cope with this situation. That’s a real feeling of helplessness that helps the horror stand out. If you try the demo that’s out on [PlayStation 4] for [PlayStation Plus subscribers], you’ll see.
Additionally, Kawata and Nakanishi both explain why RE7 is in first-person.
Why did the team decide to shift RE7 into a first-person perspective?
Kawata-san: Both myself and the director, Mr. Nakanishi, felt if we want people to experience horror and experience it in the most direct, visceral way possible, then literally putting yourself in the position of seeing what the character sees is the best way to do that and so it was our motivation for the first-person camera change.
Nakanishi-san: Of course it’s a big change, so first we got a prototype working and we put first-person in place and we wanted to see if we could make Resident Evil work in first person. As soon as we had it up and running we were really confident that this was the way to move forward. We were really happy with the way that Resident Evil feels in first person.
Check out the rest of the interview right here, which dives into a lot for a company-published feature.
Don’t forget you can download the Resident Evil 7 demo right now. If you want to know how it plays on VR, check out our hands-on preview which almost made our own Paulmichael pee his pants.
[Source: Capcom-Unity]
