Resident Evil 2’s forthcoming arrival on new generation hardware isn’t merely a port. Capcom is rebuilding its classic horror title from the ground up. Furthermore, this fresh experience will bear some difference to the original. For example, difficulty settings will reflect player performance. Additionally, parts of Resident Evil 2’s narrative are to receive further exploration. During development, the team behind the remake, that isn’t technically a remake, nearly made another massive alteration.
One of Resident Evil 2’s memorable scenes involves Leon facing off against a giant alligator in a sewer tunnel. According to producers Tsuyoshi Kanda and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, the match almost didn’t make the cut this time around. Some design choices from 20 years ago are tough to translate to modern audiences. Kanda tells the Daily Star, 20 years ago, the graphics that we had weren’t photoreal and that meant you could get away with… a lot of things. Things that maybe you couldn’t today. You could be fantastical with the creatures and it wouldn’t stand out too much.
So making a giant alligator–that’s a real challenge. Trying to update that into a game where you’ve got scanned faces, motion-captured actors, photorealistic environments… it’s really, really hard. Where do you even start"
Hirabayashi adds,
To make that convincing in any way was really tough. For a while, we were just t...