Resident Evil 2 – Claire is back and she’s not wearing short shorts anymore

GameCentral plays a new section of Capcom’s stunning remake and talks to the developers about the wetness of gore and the floppiness of Leon’s hair.

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When we first saw the remake of Resident Evil 2 at E3 earlier in the year we wondered whether we weren’t letting nostalgia get the better of us, when we proclaimed it the best playable game at the show. So we were somewhat relieved when we saw everyone else showering the game with similar praise and acknowledging it as not just a loving remake but one of the most technically advanced survival horror games ever made.



The E3 demo was set near the beginning of the game, as rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy first enters the police station of the zombie-infested Racoon City. Those that remember the 1998 original will know that the game actually has two playable characters, with Claire Redfield – sister of Chris from the first game – playing out her own parallel story that featured a number of new situations and locations.

The original used a ‘Zapping System’ that created four separate campaigns, two for each character, but that’s not how it’ll work in the remake. Capcom has said there was too much backtracking and repeated content in the original version and so the remake will just have two more distinct campaigns. And so the section we played with Claire was a boss battle with scientist William Birkin, who’d begun mutating into a terrible monster amongst the pipes and tunnels under the city. And it looked fantastic…


Resident Evil 2 – William Birkin is not feeling himself

Since it uses the same graphics engine as Resident Evil 7 the remake was always going to look good, but as we discussed with producer Tsuyoshi Kanda and director Kazunori Kadoi afterwards the visuals for the human (and human-ish) characters are astonishingly good. Claire’s facial animation is particularly good and the gloopy disgustingness of William Birkin is just as impressive.

It’s also interesting how with the new state-of-the-art visuals the game’s original influences are much more obvious than before. George Romero’s zombie movies are still the starting point but ‘80s sci-fi horror films The Thing and Aliens are clearly just as important, especially as Claire comes across Newt stand-in Sherry.

The actual playable section was fairly short and involved trying to pick up as much ammo as possible and nervously scanning the steam-spewing pipes for signs of where Birkin will attack from next. Even in the confines of a noisy Gamescom demo room it’s still an impressively tense and exciting battle, as you struggle with your quickly dwindling ammo supply and worry that you’re not doing any damage or have miscalculated somehow, until finally the monster goes down…

The demo ended with a tense stand-off with another human character (the original might be 20 years old but we’re still trying to avoid spoilers) that not only showcases the visuals but also the new, slightly more realistic dialogue. It still has just enough whiff of cheese to feel like Resident Evil and like everything else it’s remarkable how well Capcom has managed to balance the new and the old. Remake or not, Resident Evil 2 seems destined to be one of the best games of 2019…

Formats: PlayStation 4 (previewed), Xbox One, and PC

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom R&D Division 1

Release Date: 25th January 2019

GC: I’ve been a bit worried about this interview, as I like to think I ask reasonably hard questions, but I can’t think of a single negative thing to say about your game.



Both: [laughs]

TK: [in English] Thank you!

GC: The only thing I can think of is you better have the voiceover saying, ‘Resident Evil!’ when you press the Start button at the beginning. Because it didn’t have it in Resident Evil 7 and that almost ruined the game for me. [laughs]

(The translator finishes translating the question but doesn’t do the impression like we had.)

GC: I didn’t hear you do the voice?

Translator: Biohazard!

All: [laughs]

KK: We’ve kind of taken that out recently, because it’s a bit old-fashioned and behind the times to have your name shouted out on the title screen. But while it isn’t in the main game in Resident Evil 2 if you get the Deluxe Edition there’s DLC for switching to the classic background music of the game, from the original PlayStation version, so you can switch the soundtrack up. If you use that soundtrack switcher then the original title call comes back.

GC: [laughs] I never expected there’d be a sensible answer to that question! But… have you been surprised by how well the game has been received? It obviously looks great, but even as a fan of the original I’ve definitely been surprised at just how enthusiastic people have been about the remake.

TK: Even we were pleasantly surprised by how big the reaction was. We were obviously hoping for a positive reaction when we reintroduced the game at E3 2018, after the previous soft announcement a few years ago. We were hoping for a great reaction, but it was even better than we expected.


We had the announcement trailer, that went down really well, but also the game was playable. And to see fans reactions of this much-demanded remake and have lots of people saying that they really, really liked it… to be able to meet the expectations of the fans that way has been really special for us.

GC: I think meeting expectations is right. Because Resi is such a strange beast, such a difficult balancing act. It’s cheesy in a way where, at least for a Westerner, you’re never sure how much is intentional or not and yet even now you’ve modernised the dialogue it still feels tonally appropriate.

KK: We don’t want to have unintentional cheesiness that is actually not good. Like, I think it’s become a beloved aspect of the older games, because at the time having a story at all was great and having recorded dialogue was amazing. So you forgave it some sins because it was just unlike anything else out there. And over the years that cheesy reputation is actually something, in the West, that people like about the games.

We certainly want to have humour but we only want it if it’s intentional. We don’t want people to be laughing at dialogue that’s supposed to be really serious, you know? So we’re sort of balancing that out a little bit. We are keeping certain key classic lines intact, so some of the quotes people know and love from the game – whether or not they’re cheesy – we’re keeping them as little tentpoles of the script to keep the references of the original game alive.


But as for the procedure of developing the script, we work on an outline in Japanese first and then we give that to a Western writer. And then they create the fully-fledged screenplay, so to speak, in English. So the lines themselves are actually written in English natively this time, based on an outline by our staff.

GC: I think my favourite line is the one they reused in Spaced, ‘Let’s split up, look for any survivors, and get out of here’. Did you ever see that show?

Translator: I don’t think that would be known in Japan.

(On checking later we can’t actually find the clip on YouTube, but the one below is from the same episode.)

KK: We don’t necessarily take those lines the same way when they’re written back in Japan. There’s a kind of a gap between the intentions and the, albeit positive, reaction from Western players. There’s always been a gap.

Whenever people say to us, ‘We love the cheesy lines!’ we’re always like, ‘What cheesy lines?’ In Japan it’s taken as a Hollywood style game. Because in Japan it was all in English, there was no Japanese voice acting in the original games. It was all subtitled. But the writer we’ve hired, they will have included some references that will keep the fans happy, but we haven’t given specific instructions.

GC: The flipside to all the cheesy dialogue is that the games are genuinely scary. And I notice this is a lot gorier than even the original. Are you not worried that survival horror games in general are not as successful as they used to be, and that you could potentially be putting a lot of people off?

TK: For us it’s just we have an experience we want people to get from the game. We’re challenging ourselves to push the expression of that as far as we can. We saw a really great reception for Resident Evil 7 biohazard, it went down really well.

It was also a game with quite a lot of fairly gory, graphic scenes. But that didn’t seem to be much of a put-off to the audience, in fact we received a lot of positive feedback on it. So that was one of the inspirations for pushing the gore level so much in this game. Because we’ve seen that there is an audience for it, and an appetite for it from Resident Evil 7.

Survival horror as a genre name was actually something that was invented by Resident Evil. It’s the original descriptor on the front of the package for that game. And that’s a label that was then borrowed by a variety of titles to create this genre. But Resident Evil is definitely the father of them all! And I think that the fact that something we made was then able to take off within the industry as a whole shows me that I can be confident that there’s definitely still a market for survival horror.

GC: I doubt you ever thought seriously about keeping tank controls, but I imagine there was a question of whether you’d reuse the original fixed camera angles – as the Resident Evil 1 remake did?

KK: We did, at the start of development, consider and do a bit of trial with fixed camera angles versus over-the-shoulder. We developed a little test comparison between the two and looked at how they worked. But the major advantage of the fixed camera angles was in creating a horror atmosphere via the use of specific angle cuts as you moved along. And it was a kind of movie director style approach to creating an atmosphere for each individual scene.

But the disadvantage is the controls have to be somewhat different when the camera angle changes. And to deal with that you have to have the tank controls. We looked at both though and realised that actually, the over-the-shoulder camera has the advantage of modernised controls, consistent movement controls, and free-aiming.

But it also helps us push the zombies a lot more because we can be right close up and personal with these sort of claustrophobic zombie encounters. Rather than having a camera that’s at a distance in a room they’re actually right up in your face. As scary zombies is one of the key aspects we’re pushing with this game that’s a big advantage.

But we also realised that by combining the over-the-shoulder camera with a variety of other game design elements – such as level design, use of shadows, field of vision – we can actually still do lots of great horror tricks and atmospheric things even though we’re not using fixed camera angles.

You can’t see what’s around the next corner, and that’s the same whenever you’re in over-the-shoulder anyway. Even when you enter a room, even though in theory you can see everything, the darkness means you might not see what’s in the dark corners and what’s hiding there. So there’s plenty of tricks up our sleeves for horror, even without the classic angles.

Resident Evil 2 – stick close to me Newt, err… Sherry

GC: Another thing that I think surprised everyone is just how good the graphics are. Resident Evil 7 was good but this seems a clear improvement even on that. The facial animation in particular is some of the best I’ve seen in the industry, and suddenly it seems to give Claire – who to be honest was a fairly bland character originally – real personality.

KK: The RE Engine is, as you said, the same one from Resident Evil 7 biohazard. Over the process of developing several games with it now we’ve been able to get better at using it and we’ve been able to fine tune the engine as we go along and improve it. So I’m glad to hear you thought it looked good and were able to see an improvement over Resident Evil 7.

Our key words for the graphic concepts this time are ‘wetness’ and ‘darkness’. And we’re trying to make it so we have this almost tangible, wet gore that you see on-screen. It isn’t just red-coloured gore, it actually feels really realistic and jumps off the screen at you.

That realism also comes across in the characters as well. We’ve used photogrammetry to scan models and add that into the game, and then animated them. So I think every aspect of them really leaps off the screen as feeling almost like a movie-like quality.

Also, a less visually obvious aspect of the engine is that the way it’s designed is that it really helps us iterate very quickly, when we’re developing. So we can put things together very quickly and get them up and running, and see how they look. And we can do a lot of process of trial and error, because it isn’t taking a lot of time to commit to things. And that really helps us to work towards getting the kind of visuals you want to express.

TK: The performances are using full body performance capture, so we’ve got the scanned models who provide the appearance and we’ve got the full performance captures that can be implemented directly in the game.

But we actually don’t just put them in and call it a day, we take a look at how the performance feels in a game and then we go in by hand and fine tune aspects – whether that be facial expressions, lighting, detail character animation moments… All those things are actually a level above just a performance capture; it’s also got a certain kind of craftmanship, an artisanal quality.

Resident Evil 2 – did that get him?

GC: That approach definitely works, but the only thing I’m concerned about is Leon’s hair. I think it needs to be about 20% floppier.

All: [laughs]

TK: [laughs] Some of the Western staff we’ve had on the game have also said that Leon’s hair is a little bit on the anime side… it came up. It’s not just pure photorealism, we’re balancing realism with the fact that these characters already exist. We’ve got the original Leon, we’ve got how Leon looks in later Resident Evil games, and we’re trying to make it so that it isn’t just ‘a person’. It’s actually the Leon we know already, so he has to look like Leon even if that means sacrificing a little bit of realism.

GC: [laughs] I love the fact that you’ve obviously had lengthy design meetings about the floppiness of Leon’s hair.

TK: [laughs]

GC: The remake of Resident Evil 1 is still one of the best remakes ever, and there were a number of sections in that which were brand new or heavily modified from the original. Can we expect to see a similar percentage of new content in Resident Evil 2?

KK: I don’t exactly have a number in my mind for what the percentage of new content was in Resident Evil 1 remake but I think that you can probably generally expect a similar level of what’s sticking to the original and what’s refreshing it… what’s making it changed up and new.

Don’t expect, like, a never-before-seen enemy. We’re still respecting the original game, the storyline and flow and key beats. So while we’re going to make it so that, say, an enemy you’ve seen before has new attack patterns, maybe they appear in a different place so you can get some new excitement out of it, it isn’t just going to be like: here’s an enemy that’s never appeared in Resident Evil 2 before.

GC: And just finally, the obvious question now that this is all going so well is how far will you go? If you’ve remade Resident Evil 2 do you remake Resident Evil 3 and so on afterwards? And *coughs* Dino Crisis?

Both: [laughs]

GC: Where does it all end?

TK: At the moment we’re focused on finishing up Resident Evil 2, getting it out the door. But as a company we’ve always had a direction of using our legacy, and our existing masterpieces, and trying to find ways to utilise those assets that we have to bring in new players, who never discovered our games before. And that aspect of Capcom as a company is always going to be one of our strong directions.

GC: That’s very encouraging… but please do Dino Crisis next.

All: [laughs]

GC: Thank you very much, you’re doing god’s work.

TK: [in English] Thank you!

KK: Thank you!

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