Capcom is on a roll. It had a successful year, what with the release of Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, the latter of which sold 2.5 million copies in just three months. And part of this continued success is thanks to all the remakes Capcom has under its belt.
“One of the reasons for creating remakes is producing a new entry in the Resident Evil series every year would be quite an undertaking and a difficult task,” producer Masachika Kawata says in an interview with GameInformer. “So, being able to revisit older games and remake them helps Capcom meet that goal of releasing a Resident Evil title each year, but it also allows the team to continually challenge themselves and hone their craft.
“That’s not to say the remakes are any less important. In fact, they’re just as important as the mainline titles. Capcom is lucky enough to have found this cycle that can continue to provide us with the financial resources to create things like new entries in the Resident Evil series and completely new IP like Pragmata. So there is that relationship there.”
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There’s no kidding that Capcom is in a very fortunate situation, one that I’m sure plenty of other studios are jealous of. It has access to a great deal of much-loved older games, and has also managed to crack the code when it comes to remaking them. I was a little unsure of the Resident Evil 4 remake before it was released—RE4 is my favourite of the bunch, and I was uncertain how Capcom could improve on that kind of greatness. But RE4’s remake ended up being a thoughtful and massively worthwhile venture.
This isn’t to say, however, that I’d want to see back-to-back Resident Evil remakes. Capcom has already hit the big ones after cycling through RE4, RE2, and even RE3, with a dwindling supply of nostalgia left, and I would much rather see this universe be expanded on, not just reiterated into oblivion. In a perfect world, we’d be getting far more original stories than remakes, but the world is anything but perfect.
“Maybe there are a lot of people out there who would like to see more spinoff titles or such (yup, that’s me!), but honestly, the team is giving everything it has right now, working on things like our new entries like Requiem or remakes,” Kawata says, “So honestly, at the moment, that’s where our efforts [are] being focused. We are so focused on pouring our energy into that, I don’t think there’s a whole lot left right now for a spinoff.”
It seems like DLC’s of mainline games take priority, with a Resident Evil Requiem DLC being scheduled for next year and rumours of one for the Code: Veronica remake coming out the year after that. I would certainly like to see more new ideas coming from Capcom, but it’s hard to argue against the fact that it’s clearly found a rhythm with these remakes and new games.
But just because Capcom has found a comfortable cadence doesn’t mean the devs plan on getting complacent. Kawata himself says that new games like Pragmata “are absolutely necessary” when it comes to honing the development team’s skills with “new challenges or situations for a game in a triple-A series.”
“Creating new things is not just absolutely necessary for the games industry,” Kawata adds. “It’s absolutely necessary for the entire entertainment industry. If you’re not doing new things, you’re just going to be repeating old things. And while that’s not necessarily bad in itself, you’re never really going to move forward that way.”
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