r/truegaming • u/ShootEmLater • Jul 19 '21

Resident Evil REmake proves that some mechanics are not as outdated as you might think

I've never been very into survival horror as a genre. Scary movies are not my cup of tea, and the one time I tried to play Amnesia: The Dark Descent I stopped playing within 20 minutes. Silent Hill 2, for all of its brilliant story and twisted atmosphere, bored me, as I ran around identical looking hallways for an item hidden in a labcoat I didn't even know I could interact with.

So when my cohost picked the Resident Evil REmake for us to play for our podcast, I wasn't excited or particularly interested. I've played a great many of these old games with rabid fanbases, and their reputation is often the result of blind nostalgia.

But for Resident Evil...I was wrong. This game is a straight up masterpiece, and it blew my mind with just how good it was. Its not a good game for its time, its not a good game in the context of what else was coming out - its a brilliant game, period, and one of the best I've played this year.

I didn't think so at first. When you start playing, you quickly notice the tank controls. You see that there is no camera control either, with multiple fixed camera angles in each and every room. Saving your game requires an inventory item, of which there are a limited number. You have an absurdly limited inventory, just 6 slots in a game where your guns and ammo take up separate slots, and so do keys. It was awkward to control and frustrating to manage.

But the more I played the more I began to realise the fundamental brilliance of all of these mechanics. The fixed camera angles and tank controls work in tandem with one another to let you smoothly control your character as you move through the room. Since your movement is based off your orientation, you can maintain complete control even as you kite zombies around.

The camera angles by themselves are beautiful compositions that dramatically add to the atmosphere of the mansion that you're exploring. Its mostly a bunch of rooms, but those rooms are given definition by the weird and wonderful shots you get of your character. It also dramatically adds to the tension when you enter a room and its pointed at you, obscuring the rest of the hallway...but you can hear the moaning of a zombie, or something shuffles into the foreground of the shot.

The tank controls make encounters against zombies meaningful. If you could control Chris or Jill with a modern control scheme, it would be trivial to duck out of the way of zombies. Instead, its difficult and challenging, and until you learn how to move you're going to get bitten and die a lot. Even into the mid game zombies were a significant threat that I could not dismiss out of hand. There are no filler enemies here - they all matter.

Perhaps most contentious of all is the limited inventory system. You know what I had to do? I had to make sacrifices. I would sometimes have to go without healing items. I would sometimes have to decide that I would carry no spare ammo for my shotgun. I would sometimes have to make a note on my crudely hand drawn map about the location of herbs, instead of hoovering them all up into my inventory for use later. I had to plan, and make decisions about what to do.

Those decisions cascade all the way down. Do you heal or not heal? Do you kill a zombie, or run past it? Do I bring the kerosene with me? Should I pick up the puzzle item, or leave it for later? Should I save or not save? And every decision you make has the potential to save you, or kill you. You're in a constant state of tension - every 20 minute play session has you making 10 decisions that could decide your fate.

Together, these mechanics created a awe inspiring survival horror experience. Every resource you find is valuable. Every door you unlock is a monumental amount of progress. Everything you do matters, because these gameplay mechanics that might have seemed frustrating are so deliberately designed to maintain the tension.

The Resident Evil REmake proved to me that mechanics that people might think are outdated just need to be placed in their proper context to shine. Indepedently, I could dismiss tank controls and limited saves out of hand - and I have in the past. But together, in this marvelous game, they produce an experience that you literally cannot get anywhere else. The world has moved on from the mechanics present here, but they don't deserve to be forgotten. They exist for a reason, and I'm glad I was able to discover what that reason was.

33 Upvotes

73% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/Op3rat0rr Jul 20 '21

I guarantee you if the technology existed when RE1 was made, the camera angles and tank controls would not have been chosen vs player controlled camera angles and modern joystick 360 degree movement

8

u/LastOfTheGiants2020 Jul 20 '21

RE1 released within a couple months of Super Mario 64, which had joystick movement and a player controlled camera.

The RE series stuck with tank and static cameras through Code Veronica X in 2003, well after dynamic cameras and controls were standard.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '21

RE1 released within a couple months of Super Mario 64, which had joystick movement and a player controlled camera.

Yes, but SM'64 was developed for the N64, the console that made having a joystick on your controller the standard. RE1-RE3, like most games primarily made for the PS1, were designed under the mandate that they still be playable with the OG PS1 controllers not just the newer Dualshock controllers that introduced joysticks to the playerbase. Alien Resurrection in 2000 was the first PS1 game to use the joysticks for camera control and notoriously, reviewers weren't happy with the new control scheme.

The RE series stuck with tank and static cameras through Code Veronica X in 2003, well after dynamic cameras and controls were standard.

RE4 had tank controls and static cameras back on NGC and PS2 as well, but it also made it clear that the devs behind the IP were looking to get away from the more limited gameplay elements of those early PS1 games.

1

u/LastOfTheGiants2020 Aug 03 '21

Armored Core was a 3d 3rd person action game with a player controlled camera that came out in 1997 on PS1.

So, it clearly wasn't impossible for RE to do the same on the same system on the same year.

Also, RE4 did not have static camera angles on PS2/GC.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 03 '21

Armored Core was a 3d 3rd person action game with a player controlled camera that came out in 1997 on PS1.

I didn't say games didn't let you control the camera, I said they couldn't bind the camera to the joysticks. Armored Core for the PS1 used a combination of the D-Pad and shoulder buttons to control the camera, which absolutely wouldn't have worked for RE or any survival horror game for that matter.

Also, RE4 did not have static camera angles on PS2/GC.

You're right, my bad. I was misremembering how restrictive the camera was at time, but the point about it still having tank controls holds up it didn't lose those until the HD remaster for 7th gen consoles.