Dusk Golem
A 21st Century Rockefeller
So this is based off of the same 4-5 hour demo many press got to play there were several previews of a couple weeks ago, but this maybe the most detailed take on it yet. This info comes from Playstation Magazine UK, which have an RE7 article for their issue.
I will mark things that may be slight spoilers with spoiler tags, things that people may want to be a surprise or are story related, but as this is an official article there should be no major spoilers.
First bit is about the opening to this segment of the game, not the opening to the game itself (it's about 45-60 minutes in), but the opening to the demo, which is the Baker Family Dinner scene:
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Now to the more general stuff past the story bits there:
-Playstation Magazine UK says if the rest of RE7 can match-up with the five hours they played of the game, we're looking at the next 10/10 game they'll be rewarding.
-There are doors in the Greenhouse coated with insects that will damage you if you try to open them. The only way to take care of them is to burn them or to take them on with your knife. You can shoot them, but your supplies are limited and do you REALLY want to shoot individual bugs in a swarm?
-Say the setting is stunning with a lot of details and interesting rooms which help breathe life into the adventure. From moth-eaten furniture, yellowing newspapers, battered grand father clocks that tick, and they say may be one of the most graphically impressive games currently in HDR mode for 4K on PS4 Pro, which they played on. It looks near photo-realistic.
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-A number of things to interact with in the environment, can explore pantries, mess with the sink, investigate lamps, and more, which help detail the environments.
-The first heart sinking moment they get into is when they realize
-They think the sound design in RE7 is well done, gets to their nerves trying to dictate early in if a sound was the sounds of the house or something coming to them which makes them curious and anxious to go around the next corner, open up the next door, recreating the sort of morbid curiosity the original RE1 had done for them.
-Ethan adds map updates in real time when you investigate stuff in the environment, to notify which doors are locked, blocked, etc., ala the older Silent Hill games.
-Talk about their first encounter with Jack and his dynamic AI to try to corner or locate you, and how he's a brute that smashes through furniture and walls after you.
-There's a collectible in the game in these bobble heads, which you have to strike (melee, gun, etc.) to obtain, but they don't know what they do (maybe they're like the emblems in RE5 & RE6 and are tied to unlockables?).
-If there was any doubt, they confirm here that Save Rooms in RE7 do have save room music. The first save room also gives you your first healing items, a green herb and a chem pack.
-Chemicals are a crucial item in RE7, they come in regular (yellow) and strong (red) colors, and combining them with various elements create new items. With herbs they can create stronger healing items, with gunpowder they can craft different types of ammo. You can also combine them with psychostimulant pills which will give you a brief few second effect which will give you a brief moment to see a Google Map-like information spew of the area, including all hidden supplies nearby, any enemies that are nearby, and when using the stronger variant, will also show especially well hidden things like collectibles, well hidden grenade launcher ammo, and more. But you can choose what you want to combine your chemicals with for either health, for ammo, or these pills for this brief information feed showing everything nearby. There are limited chemicals and all that, so gives you some options of how to handle your supplies.
-They say to believe them the chemical pills are actually useful, there is a surprising amount of well hidden items and supplies in RE7, and you'll need all the supplies you can get.
-Grenades and Grenade Launcher ammo comes in different flavors, including a 'Poisonous' kind which creates a cloud of poisonous gas, and incendiary for fire.
-Recovery items are by default mapped to R1 for quick use, though it prioritizes which one is in an earlier slot first. Can put weapons & items to the D-Pad to switch between quickly without going to your inventory. There's an inventory grid system like RE4 and organizing your inventory is important for play. You can get pocket increases for your inventory as you play (you start off with only eight slots, but can get increases to add four additional slots). Unlike RE4, the game doesn't pause when you go to your inventory though.
-Ethan doesn't talk a lot, but is not a silent protagonist. He'll make interesting or amusing comments when you observe the environment. In older RE's, you'd get flavor text when observing things, in this one you actually get to observe and move them around and Ethan may make a vocal comment, like when observing a rack of drying socks, he exclaims, "Jesus, these stink!", and such things.
-As you make your way through the game, you get phone calls to talk to a mysterious stranger who seems to know a lot about the Baker's and your current position, but claims she wants to help you. You usually get a phone call from her once you've completed a major objective in the game, can answer and talk to her from one of the various phones in the environment, or neglect it.
-First Boss Fight Spoilers:
-Apparently the whole first part here and the first boss are still part of the 'prologue' of the game, it's from here you enter the main hall of the Baker Plantation and the game begins to really open up.
-Direct Quote: "It's here, approximately 20 minutes into our adventure, that we really begin to get a sense of how special Resident Evil VII is set to become. If the breathless opening duel with Jack reminded us of Resident Evil 4's frantic beginnings, we're now dropped right into Resident Evil 1 territory. The Baker family's creaky house is more like a mansion, and it's a place we'll have to slowly pick apart over the course of many hours."
-They're tasked to find three emblems to leave the house, and to find animal-themed keys with doors marked which key to use by the pinned-up corpses of said animals, ranging from scorpions to crows and more.
-Has a number of direct series calls, from draining bathtubs to depositing gear in magically linked boxes to keep inventory slots open, an enemy smashes through a window, and other such things.
-Moulded, the 'zombie type enemy' of the game (apparently victims of the Baker's strange rituals), come out of areas with black moldy slime from the walls and floors, their limbs can be hacked off, if you get headshots their heads begin to leak and eventually explode in an exaggerated but awesome way.
-Moulded can be frightening in how they chase you in packs, but like the older RE games zombies, they can't open doors like the Baker's can. One technique they got was to lure Moulded through open doors and lock them in a room they didn't plan to return to anytime soon by slamming the door on them. Can quarantine them until you can come back later with better weaponry, in their time with the game they had picked up a flamethrower, a grenade launcher, and a .44 magnum, for example.
-After you escape the house, you find out RE7 is a lot bigger than you may expect, and are met with a rusty trailer, a pair of locked gates, and a partially submerged swamp house. The trailer is the shop in the game. Bird Cages hang from the trailer with a coin slot and a number. Having been using pills, they had found a few hidden coins. The cages have a slot for you to insert coins in, insert enough coins and it swings open for you to take what's inside. The first shop in the game has a steroids syringe which increases your health permanently, for five coins there's a stabilizer syringe which permanently increases your reload speed with guns, and for nine coins there's a weapon, a .44 magnum you can obtain.
-Mention it's interesting how they blend both classic horror game design, more modern Resident Evil game design, and more modern horror game design. It never feels odd or at ends, and RE7 is surprising how incredibly natural it all feels despite it mixing new, old, and its own unique take on things.
-They can't talk as much about the second location, but they mention how it has swarms of insects you have to fight and crowd control which gives a feeling more similar to the newer Resident Evil games, but it feels in place with the classic RE feeling as you explore as well and have to also deal with the bigger enemy in Marguerite, who is their pick for being a more terrifying foe than Jack (they claimed she managed to scare them shitless twice during their time with the game).
-Get to a point where they're super low on supplies and have to barely scrape by, a very Resident Evil feeling moment for them as they have to clutch to near nothing but their knife and terrified of death around the next corner while they try to make their way to a safe room.
-Talk about the horror aspect of RE7, which they find interesting. they describe it as kind of a blend of Western and J-Horror, the setting, the Baker's, and slasher elements of the Baker's are unmistakably Americanized, but then there's a psychological angle they can't go into full detail about, a weird humming and suddenly vanishing grandmother who watches you, a figure of a little girl you can see in the corner of your eye but when you go to look she's suddenly gone. RE7 manages a weird blend of both intensity and subtleness which is interesting to see play out.
-VHS sequences are optional, but they strongly suggest hunting down the tapes and playing through them, some of them are really special.
-While holding out your gun, you can press Triangle on the PS4 controller to switch ammo types. There's special types of ammo you can craft.
-Claim some of the most tense moments of RE7 manage to put them on edge in a way no other game has since the iconic village tussle of Resident Evil 4. To quote: "We're well aware of the dangers involved in name-dropping what's widely seen to be the series' finest entry. Know that we don't do so lightly, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard presents a very different shift in style and tone to Shinji Mikami's masterpiece, true, but our time in the game surpasses every single expectation we had while heading over to Capcom- Our caution is a natural symptom of being burned many times by Resident Evil. Is it perfect? Possibly not. In one boss fight, the hit detection felt a little off. In our one encounter we died twice, and a loading screen text pointed out a game feature we didn't know about (and can't talk about yet). And the old-school horror fans inside us are a little sad that there are automatic checkpoint reloads (on Normal difficulty) on top of a manual save system (although we'll concede that the game is surprisingly brutal on normal even, and that some players may die an awful lot). But three small blips in a four-hour run-through that contains more high points and higher highs than Resident Evil 5 and 6 put together? We reckon that's an unprecedented reversal of fortunes for the ailing horror."
-By the time their play session was up, they still had many questions they wanted to know, still doors they hadn't opened yet, and things to hint towards a grander scale of the whole game. They still hadn't met Lucas, found many VHS tapes yet, and they had found plot points that had begun to hint at something beneath the surface threat that there's something else bubbling away that's being built up to, but something they can't quite put their finger on, but itching to find out.
-The biggest question they have is if the rest of RE7 can live up to the 4-5 hours they've played? When they came to play RE7 they wouldn't have dared thinking this game might be a GOTY contender for them or something they're seriously considering has the potential for a perfect score from them, but now that they've spent time with the game, it feels like without any major slip-ups later in the game, that RE7 may be something truly special.
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Then they have a developer interview with some more details.
-A Capcom employees take on the enemies in RE7: When you have a game with a cast of characters who includes the enemies, you want them to be interesting. They can't be shallow or dull, as it will ruin the experience. The characters and enemies you encounter in RE7 aren't coming out of a generator, they all have histories, personalities, some malicious, some tragic, some terrifying, and you learn more about the characters, the enemies, and the setting as the game goes on.
-Capcom employee talks about how they debated if they needed enemies even outside of the Baker's, the sub-enemies for the player, but they decided to include them to help embellish and give greater power to the Baker's, and more varied gameplay experience for the players. and to help give it the classic Resident Evil flavor. Also add there's more sub-enemies we haven't seen yet outside of the Moulded and insects.
And then a interview with Jun Takeuchi, the executive producer on the RE series.
-On the reception of RE6: "You know, I think Resident Evil 6 was a great game and it certainly has its fans. Of course, we also heard feedback from a lot of fans who thought it had gone too far in the direction of the action-blockbuster, and they wanted us to go back to the roots of survival-horror. The timing was right because in the run-up to the series 20th anniversary the team at Capcom was revisiting what made Resident Evil so unique and special. We thought: "How can we make people in 2017 feel the same sensation that they would have felt in 1996 playing the first game?"" That's how RE7 was born.
-Mention while the series has had first-person viewpoints in spin-offs before, this is their first serious attempt at making a first-person survival-horror game. There were concerns at first, not least because each member of the team had their own opinions and perspective on what Resident Evil is. One thing that came up a lot was that Resident Evil is a game that's often been based on hero characters, like Leon and Claire and so on. If you're going to be in first-person you can't see the character on the screen, is it really the same kind of game? Is that still Resident Evil? But eventually managed to convince the team, and they hope players, that first person can work with Resident Evil while still being Resident Evil, and that being in first-person allows for a much more playable and interactive game that gives new possibilities, to build off of Resident Evil and not abandon it. As more of the team has played the game, and now journalist, they're happy everyone who's played has had it click and realize that this IS a Resident Evil game, and it clicks even with those who had their doubts.
-He talks about his own perspective of RE. He worked on the original Resident Evil with Shinji Mikami, and remembers how they created survival-horror in the first place. He drew a lot from them trying to define a new genre back then for when he was working on RE7 to bring Resident Evil to a new perspective and live up to the series 20-year legacy and return to horror like fans had demanded. He thinks to make good horror, you need to be brave enough yourself to venture into territory you're not familiar with and explore. He thinks a key element of Resident Evil is that you never know what's going to be around the next corner, the game doesn't fall into a predictable rhythm but builds itself up and goes in surprising directions. He thinks you need an easy to understand ground but with an uncertainty of what's behind the next door.
-Talks about the balance of referencing older games and also allowing newcomers to play and not be alienated. It's a difficulty balance to get right, and they mention one of the biggest focuses of RE7 during its development was 'balance'. They knew if they didn't strike a balance the game would suffer for it, for puzzles, encounters, story, pacing, everything. To make it so you enjoy when things come, they don't overstay their welcome, and when to mix things up. With series fans and veterans, they tried to put in references that could be enjoyed by both people who had played the series, and also had never played it. Because we see the game through a new characters eyes, things are new to him, even if the world around him might have elements familiar to long series fans. That was their kind of approach to references in particular, but mentions Balance was one of the biggest design focuses for RE7.
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-On the game being difficult, they wanted to make sure deaths didn't seem unfair or that they were killed by something out of their control. RE7 is a horror game, it's not a shooter game where dying is a case of losing a life or losing progress. They think dying is part of the horror experience, and wanted to try to smooth out the patch to allow dying to be productive and not tedious. They went for this because they knew making the game too easy would detract severely from the horror, and they think survival-horror needs to have the right volume of player death potential for it to be effective. Ink ribbons don't exist outside of Madhouse to help player ease, but wanted to add it in for veterans and people who wanted the challenge.
-Resident Evil 7's setting was selected when they were scouting and had an amazing experience at an isolated farmhouse on a plantation, on a completely different scale than a regular farm, and the sense of isolation despite neighboring a so-called nearby place could be miles away. It was a huge place, and it really helped inspire the setting for RE7. They thought it was a perfect match for Resident Evil and their mission statement to going back to the series roots.
-They hope people will be able to look back at Resident Evil 7 as a classic like the original or some of the other entries. When asked about what he thinks the series may be like in another 20 years, on the 40th anniversary, if it gets there he hopes that people will look to RE7 for inspiration on the series going forward, much like how RE1 was an inspiration for them.
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Lot to unload, I know, but I thought this gave a MUCH better idea of what RE7 is more than anything else so far.
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UPDATE:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-dept...world-of-survival-horror-with-resident-evil-7
New preview by Rely On Horror. They confirm a few extra tidbits being Resident Evil die-hards:
01.) They tested and managed to surprise Capcom in how they beat the first boss fight with Jack Baker, confirming that an all knife run, while challenging, is possible.
02.) This felt a lot more like the original Resident Evil than they were expecting.
03.) The Bakers have more personality in them than most antagonist of the series. You learn a lot about them from a mixture of the environment (as its their house), what they say, notes you read, and how they go about things. The series has many monsters, but you often don't know the backstory of very few of them, with exceptions such as Birkin or Salazar. But the story-telling here is much more intelligent and brings out much more interesting and memorable antagonist.
04.) Boss battles they describe as a good deconstruction of them which works in RE's favor. "Capcom has taken the traditional boss fight and deconstructed it so that instead of looking for specific patterns, you just have to find a way to keep your ass alive while fending off an unpredictable madman that can use the environment against you just like you would yourself." But had it confirmed to him also each boss fight has several solutions to beat him, and he managed to beat the first Jack boss fight going knife-only.
05.) This actually confirms something I don't think was previously confirmed. I always thought the Dinner Scene was part of the same house the main hall was, IE the main house, but turns out the first house with the dinner scene is a separate house and you go through the garage to a separate building. He went back to the first house once Jack was defeated to scourge for supplies he missed while being chased knowing he was safe for a bit after beating the boss fight.
06.) "I was completely satisfied with how gunplay was handled in the game, and combat in general. I managed to find 40 bullets for my handgun, but despite that number, I still didn’t feel entirely safe. Aiming is realistic in terms of playing as someone who’s had no prior experience with guns (I compared it to the first time I fired a gun). There’s only a very small white dot to pinpoint where you’ll shoot, but the act of shooting isn’t as simple as just aiming that cursor where you want to shoot. Aiming is a bit floaty, with headshots being a little tricky to pull off for those used to traditional gunplay in first-person games.
I put the knife to good use as well, using it to slash through breakable boxes hiding items, and also using it for a small environmental puzzle that reminded me a lot of the spider-web-covered doors from the original Resident Evil. And, of course, I may have even used it during a certain boss fight *winks*. The one thing I didn’t use much of was the guarding mechanic, where you can make Ethan raise an arm to block incoming attacks, lessening the damage you’d normally receive from them. I did duck a lot, though, especially when Jack was wildly swinging his shovel at me."
07.) Apparently one of the goriest scenes of the whole series happens in the first hour of the game involving the Moulded, but not talking (or can't talk) about the specifics of that.
08.) Claim this isn't just Capcom suddenly portraying its love of Texas Chainsaw Massacre & indie horror games, but really feels like they went back to the drawing board to what made Resident Evil what it was in the first place while being innovative with it.
I will mark things that may be slight spoilers with spoiler tags, things that people may want to be a surprise or are story related, but as this is an official article there should be no major spoilers.
First bit is about the opening to this segment of the game, not the opening to the game itself (it's about 45-60 minutes in), but the opening to the demo, which is the Baker Family Dinner scene:
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About 45 minutes to an hour into RE7, Ethan Winters get knocked out in an attic and wakes up in the infamous Bakers' Dinner scene, tied-up to a chair. The transition to the scene is apparently getting knocked out in an attic, which is new information that might minorly hint what comes before.
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Apparently during the dinner scene, Ethan gets one of his teeth gutted and pulled out.
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They bugger off and leave you alone once a phone starts ringing which gets their attention, which gives Ethan a chance to escape. That is except the grandmother, who watches us as you topple the chair and have to waggle like a fish looking for a way to unbind yourself before they return.
Now to the more general stuff past the story bits there:
-Playstation Magazine UK says if the rest of RE7 can match-up with the five hours they played of the game, we're looking at the next 10/10 game they'll be rewarding.
-There are doors in the Greenhouse coated with insects that will damage you if you try to open them. The only way to take care of them is to burn them or to take them on with your knife. You can shoot them, but your supplies are limited and do you REALLY want to shoot individual bugs in a swarm?
-Say the setting is stunning with a lot of details and interesting rooms which help breathe life into the adventure. From moth-eaten furniture, yellowing newspapers, battered grand father clocks that tick, and they say may be one of the most graphically impressive games currently in HDR mode for 4K on PS4 Pro, which they played on. It looks near photo-realistic.
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In the kitchen they find a hardware bill pinned to the wall, which shows the Bakers' have been buying lots of rope, pet colors, a saw, and some other things. But what are they buying all this for, and more so, if they've been missing, why are they burying things from a local store?
-A number of things to interact with in the environment, can explore pantries, mess with the sink, investigate lamps, and more, which help detail the environments.
-The first heart sinking moment they get into is when they realize
the only way forward is by following where the family headed out to.
-They think the sound design in RE7 is well done, gets to their nerves trying to dictate early in if a sound was the sounds of the house or something coming to them which makes them curious and anxious to go around the next corner, open up the next door, recreating the sort of morbid curiosity the original RE1 had done for them.
-Ethan adds map updates in real time when you investigate stuff in the environment, to notify which doors are locked, blocked, etc., ala the older Silent Hill games.
-Talk about their first encounter with Jack and his dynamic AI to try to corner or locate you, and how he's a brute that smashes through furniture and walls after you.
-There's a collectible in the game in these bobble heads, which you have to strike (melee, gun, etc.) to obtain, but they don't know what they do (maybe they're like the emblems in RE5 & RE6 and are tied to unlockables?).
-If there was any doubt, they confirm here that Save Rooms in RE7 do have save room music. The first save room also gives you your first healing items, a green herb and a chem pack.
-Chemicals are a crucial item in RE7, they come in regular (yellow) and strong (red) colors, and combining them with various elements create new items. With herbs they can create stronger healing items, with gunpowder they can craft different types of ammo. You can also combine them with psychostimulant pills which will give you a brief few second effect which will give you a brief moment to see a Google Map-like information spew of the area, including all hidden supplies nearby, any enemies that are nearby, and when using the stronger variant, will also show especially well hidden things like collectibles, well hidden grenade launcher ammo, and more. But you can choose what you want to combine your chemicals with for either health, for ammo, or these pills for this brief information feed showing everything nearby. There are limited chemicals and all that, so gives you some options of how to handle your supplies.
-They say to believe them the chemical pills are actually useful, there is a surprising amount of well hidden items and supplies in RE7, and you'll need all the supplies you can get.
-Grenades and Grenade Launcher ammo comes in different flavors, including a 'Poisonous' kind which creates a cloud of poisonous gas, and incendiary for fire.
-Recovery items are by default mapped to R1 for quick use, though it prioritizes which one is in an earlier slot first. Can put weapons & items to the D-Pad to switch between quickly without going to your inventory. There's an inventory grid system like RE4 and organizing your inventory is important for play. You can get pocket increases for your inventory as you play (you start off with only eight slots, but can get increases to add four additional slots). Unlike RE4, the game doesn't pause when you go to your inventory though.
-Ethan doesn't talk a lot, but is not a silent protagonist. He'll make interesting or amusing comments when you observe the environment. In older RE's, you'd get flavor text when observing things, in this one you actually get to observe and move them around and Ethan may make a vocal comment, like when observing a rack of drying socks, he exclaims, "Jesus, these stink!", and such things.
-As you make your way through the game, you get phone calls to talk to a mysterious stranger who seems to know a lot about the Baker's and your current position, but claims she wants to help you. You usually get a phone call from her once you've completed a major objective in the game, can answer and talk to her from one of the various phones in the environment, or neglect it.
-First Boss Fight Spoilers:
There's a fight with Jack in the garage, you can shoot and take him out but he's a strong foe. However, they find some car keys in the environment and their method to defeat him is to shoot him so he staggers, and then to take control of the car and begin to run him over until he's passed out unconscious. Apparently one aspect of RE7 is most encounters have multiple ways to deal with them, this was one solution but they could of also defeated him normally and a Capcom employee pointed out other methods, which was one of their design goals in the game.
-Apparently the whole first part here and the first boss are still part of the 'prologue' of the game, it's from here you enter the main hall of the Baker Plantation and the game begins to really open up.
-Direct Quote: "It's here, approximately 20 minutes into our adventure, that we really begin to get a sense of how special Resident Evil VII is set to become. If the breathless opening duel with Jack reminded us of Resident Evil 4's frantic beginnings, we're now dropped right into Resident Evil 1 territory. The Baker family's creaky house is more like a mansion, and it's a place we'll have to slowly pick apart over the course of many hours."
-They're tasked to find three emblems to leave the house, and to find animal-themed keys with doors marked which key to use by the pinned-up corpses of said animals, ranging from scorpions to crows and more.
-Has a number of direct series calls, from draining bathtubs to depositing gear in magically linked boxes to keep inventory slots open, an enemy smashes through a window, and other such things.
-Moulded, the 'zombie type enemy' of the game (apparently victims of the Baker's strange rituals), come out of areas with black moldy slime from the walls and floors, their limbs can be hacked off, if you get headshots their heads begin to leak and eventually explode in an exaggerated but awesome way.
-Moulded can be frightening in how they chase you in packs, but like the older RE games zombies, they can't open doors like the Baker's can. One technique they got was to lure Moulded through open doors and lock them in a room they didn't plan to return to anytime soon by slamming the door on them. Can quarantine them until you can come back later with better weaponry, in their time with the game they had picked up a flamethrower, a grenade launcher, and a .44 magnum, for example.
-After you escape the house, you find out RE7 is a lot bigger than you may expect, and are met with a rusty trailer, a pair of locked gates, and a partially submerged swamp house. The trailer is the shop in the game. Bird Cages hang from the trailer with a coin slot and a number. Having been using pills, they had found a few hidden coins. The cages have a slot for you to insert coins in, insert enough coins and it swings open for you to take what's inside. The first shop in the game has a steroids syringe which increases your health permanently, for five coins there's a stabilizer syringe which permanently increases your reload speed with guns, and for nine coins there's a weapon, a .44 magnum you can obtain.
-Mention it's interesting how they blend both classic horror game design, more modern Resident Evil game design, and more modern horror game design. It never feels odd or at ends, and RE7 is surprising how incredibly natural it all feels despite it mixing new, old, and its own unique take on things.
-They can't talk as much about the second location, but they mention how it has swarms of insects you have to fight and crowd control which gives a feeling more similar to the newer Resident Evil games, but it feels in place with the classic RE feeling as you explore as well and have to also deal with the bigger enemy in Marguerite, who is their pick for being a more terrifying foe than Jack (they claimed she managed to scare them shitless twice during their time with the game).
-Get to a point where they're super low on supplies and have to barely scrape by, a very Resident Evil feeling moment for them as they have to clutch to near nothing but their knife and terrified of death around the next corner while they try to make their way to a safe room.
-Talk about the horror aspect of RE7, which they find interesting. they describe it as kind of a blend of Western and J-Horror, the setting, the Baker's, and slasher elements of the Baker's are unmistakably Americanized, but then there's a psychological angle they can't go into full detail about, a weird humming and suddenly vanishing grandmother who watches you, a figure of a little girl you can see in the corner of your eye but when you go to look she's suddenly gone. RE7 manages a weird blend of both intensity and subtleness which is interesting to see play out.
-VHS sequences are optional, but they strongly suggest hunting down the tapes and playing through them, some of them are really special.
-While holding out your gun, you can press Triangle on the PS4 controller to switch ammo types. There's special types of ammo you can craft.
-Claim some of the most tense moments of RE7 manage to put them on edge in a way no other game has since the iconic village tussle of Resident Evil 4. To quote: "We're well aware of the dangers involved in name-dropping what's widely seen to be the series' finest entry. Know that we don't do so lightly, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard presents a very different shift in style and tone to Shinji Mikami's masterpiece, true, but our time in the game surpasses every single expectation we had while heading over to Capcom- Our caution is a natural symptom of being burned many times by Resident Evil. Is it perfect? Possibly not. In one boss fight, the hit detection felt a little off. In our one encounter we died twice, and a loading screen text pointed out a game feature we didn't know about (and can't talk about yet). And the old-school horror fans inside us are a little sad that there are automatic checkpoint reloads (on Normal difficulty) on top of a manual save system (although we'll concede that the game is surprisingly brutal on normal even, and that some players may die an awful lot). But three small blips in a four-hour run-through that contains more high points and higher highs than Resident Evil 5 and 6 put together? We reckon that's an unprecedented reversal of fortunes for the ailing horror."
-By the time their play session was up, they still had many questions they wanted to know, still doors they hadn't opened yet, and things to hint towards a grander scale of the whole game. They still hadn't met Lucas, found many VHS tapes yet, and they had found plot points that had begun to hint at something beneath the surface threat that there's something else bubbling away that's being built up to, but something they can't quite put their finger on, but itching to find out.
-The biggest question they have is if the rest of RE7 can live up to the 4-5 hours they've played? When they came to play RE7 they wouldn't have dared thinking this game might be a GOTY contender for them or something they're seriously considering has the potential for a perfect score from them, but now that they've spent time with the game, it feels like without any major slip-ups later in the game, that RE7 may be something truly special.
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Then they have a developer interview with some more details.
-A Capcom employees take on the enemies in RE7: When you have a game with a cast of characters who includes the enemies, you want them to be interesting. They can't be shallow or dull, as it will ruin the experience. The characters and enemies you encounter in RE7 aren't coming out of a generator, they all have histories, personalities, some malicious, some tragic, some terrifying, and you learn more about the characters, the enemies, and the setting as the game goes on.
-Capcom employee talks about how they debated if they needed enemies even outside of the Baker's, the sub-enemies for the player, but they decided to include them to help embellish and give greater power to the Baker's, and more varied gameplay experience for the players. and to help give it the classic Resident Evil flavor. Also add there's more sub-enemies we haven't seen yet outside of the Moulded and insects.
And then a interview with Jun Takeuchi, the executive producer on the RE series.
-On the reception of RE6: "You know, I think Resident Evil 6 was a great game and it certainly has its fans. Of course, we also heard feedback from a lot of fans who thought it had gone too far in the direction of the action-blockbuster, and they wanted us to go back to the roots of survival-horror. The timing was right because in the run-up to the series 20th anniversary the team at Capcom was revisiting what made Resident Evil so unique and special. We thought: "How can we make people in 2017 feel the same sensation that they would have felt in 1996 playing the first game?"" That's how RE7 was born.
-Mention while the series has had first-person viewpoints in spin-offs before, this is their first serious attempt at making a first-person survival-horror game. There were concerns at first, not least because each member of the team had their own opinions and perspective on what Resident Evil is. One thing that came up a lot was that Resident Evil is a game that's often been based on hero characters, like Leon and Claire and so on. If you're going to be in first-person you can't see the character on the screen, is it really the same kind of game? Is that still Resident Evil? But eventually managed to convince the team, and they hope players, that first person can work with Resident Evil while still being Resident Evil, and that being in first-person allows for a much more playable and interactive game that gives new possibilities, to build off of Resident Evil and not abandon it. As more of the team has played the game, and now journalist, they're happy everyone who's played has had it click and realize that this IS a Resident Evil game, and it clicks even with those who had their doubts.
-He talks about his own perspective of RE. He worked on the original Resident Evil with Shinji Mikami, and remembers how they created survival-horror in the first place. He drew a lot from them trying to define a new genre back then for when he was working on RE7 to bring Resident Evil to a new perspective and live up to the series 20-year legacy and return to horror like fans had demanded. He thinks to make good horror, you need to be brave enough yourself to venture into territory you're not familiar with and explore. He thinks a key element of Resident Evil is that you never know what's going to be around the next corner, the game doesn't fall into a predictable rhythm but builds itself up and goes in surprising directions. He thinks you need an easy to understand ground but with an uncertainty of what's behind the next door.
-Talks about the balance of referencing older games and also allowing newcomers to play and not be alienated. It's a difficulty balance to get right, and they mention one of the biggest focuses of RE7 during its development was 'balance'. They knew if they didn't strike a balance the game would suffer for it, for puzzles, encounters, story, pacing, everything. To make it so you enjoy when things come, they don't overstay their welcome, and when to mix things up. With series fans and veterans, they tried to put in references that could be enjoyed by both people who had played the series, and also had never played it. Because we see the game through a new characters eyes, things are new to him, even if the world around him might have elements familiar to long series fans. That was their kind of approach to references in particular, but mentions Balance was one of the biggest design focuses for RE7.
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The producer confirms Resident Evil 7 has a scaling difficulty like RE4 had, where if you die a lot in a specific section, the game may tone the difficulty down some, or if doing well make the game harder.
-On the game being difficult, they wanted to make sure deaths didn't seem unfair or that they were killed by something out of their control. RE7 is a horror game, it's not a shooter game where dying is a case of losing a life or losing progress. They think dying is part of the horror experience, and wanted to try to smooth out the patch to allow dying to be productive and not tedious. They went for this because they knew making the game too easy would detract severely from the horror, and they think survival-horror needs to have the right volume of player death potential for it to be effective. Ink ribbons don't exist outside of Madhouse to help player ease, but wanted to add it in for veterans and people who wanted the challenge.
-Resident Evil 7's setting was selected when they were scouting and had an amazing experience at an isolated farmhouse on a plantation, on a completely different scale than a regular farm, and the sense of isolation despite neighboring a so-called nearby place could be miles away. It was a huge place, and it really helped inspire the setting for RE7. They thought it was a perfect match for Resident Evil and their mission statement to going back to the series roots.
-They hope people will be able to look back at Resident Evil 7 as a classic like the original or some of the other entries. When asked about what he thinks the series may be like in another 20 years, on the 40th anniversary, if it gets there he hopes that people will look to RE7 for inspiration on the series going forward, much like how RE1 was an inspiration for them.
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Lot to unload, I know, but I thought this gave a MUCH better idea of what RE7 is more than anything else so far.
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UPDATE:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-dept...world-of-survival-horror-with-resident-evil-7
New preview by Rely On Horror. They confirm a few extra tidbits being Resident Evil die-hards:
01.) They tested and managed to surprise Capcom in how they beat the first boss fight with Jack Baker, confirming that an all knife run, while challenging, is possible.
02.) This felt a lot more like the original Resident Evil than they were expecting.
03.) The Bakers have more personality in them than most antagonist of the series. You learn a lot about them from a mixture of the environment (as its their house), what they say, notes you read, and how they go about things. The series has many monsters, but you often don't know the backstory of very few of them, with exceptions such as Birkin or Salazar. But the story-telling here is much more intelligent and brings out much more interesting and memorable antagonist.
04.) Boss battles they describe as a good deconstruction of them which works in RE's favor. "Capcom has taken the traditional boss fight and deconstructed it so that instead of looking for specific patterns, you just have to find a way to keep your ass alive while fending off an unpredictable madman that can use the environment against you just like you would yourself." But had it confirmed to him also each boss fight has several solutions to beat him, and he managed to beat the first Jack boss fight going knife-only.
05.) This actually confirms something I don't think was previously confirmed. I always thought the Dinner Scene was part of the same house the main hall was, IE the main house, but turns out the first house with the dinner scene is a separate house and you go through the garage to a separate building. He went back to the first house once Jack was defeated to scourge for supplies he missed while being chased knowing he was safe for a bit after beating the boss fight.
06.) "I was completely satisfied with how gunplay was handled in the game, and combat in general. I managed to find 40 bullets for my handgun, but despite that number, I still didn’t feel entirely safe. Aiming is realistic in terms of playing as someone who’s had no prior experience with guns (I compared it to the first time I fired a gun). There’s only a very small white dot to pinpoint where you’ll shoot, but the act of shooting isn’t as simple as just aiming that cursor where you want to shoot. Aiming is a bit floaty, with headshots being a little tricky to pull off for those used to traditional gunplay in first-person games.
I put the knife to good use as well, using it to slash through breakable boxes hiding items, and also using it for a small environmental puzzle that reminded me a lot of the spider-web-covered doors from the original Resident Evil. And, of course, I may have even used it during a certain boss fight *winks*. The one thing I didn’t use much of was the guarding mechanic, where you can make Ethan raise an arm to block incoming attacks, lessening the damage you’d normally receive from them. I did duck a lot, though, especially when Jack was wildly swinging his shovel at me."
07.) Apparently one of the goriest scenes of the whole series happens in the first hour of the game involving the Moulded, but not talking (or can't talk) about the specifics of that.
08.) Claim this isn't just Capcom suddenly portraying its love of Texas Chainsaw Massacre & indie horror games, but really feels like they went back to the drawing board to what made Resident Evil what it was in the first place while being innovative with it.
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