Even though I loved the original, I'm fully willing to accept some gameplay changes to make it less arcade, and more suspenseful, challenging, and dark. I DO worry a bit that without Mikami, Capcom might struggle to achieve such changes as well as he could. He certainly demonstrated with The Evil Within, he could make even regular zombies more capable as far as tracking the location of the protagonist by sound, being harder to sneak up on, and being very unpredictable when prone. The match throwing, bottle stunning, and scrap gathering also added more dimensions to combat variety, resource strategy, and challenge.
I say all this however knowing full well I'm in the minority, otherwise Mikami wouldn't have dumbed down TEW 2 by making zombies only track by sight, then quickly retreat, adding an auto takedown cover system, and making it pretty easy to evade a lot of the tougher enemies by sneaking past them in a large open world area. I mean hell, you really don't even have to kill the Guardian on your first forced encounter with her, she's pretty easy to sneak past, even whilst gathering a fair bit of loot. In fact there's not a single Guardian in the whole game you have to kill, making the intimidating design of the mosnter feel pointless.
So yeah, I'm all for a survival horror aspect in games, and a dark atmosphere, but it has to be serious about it when it comes to dealing with enemies. Otherwise it feels like you've only been duped into thinking it's world is dark and hard to survive. The best Survival Horror games to me are the ones that take a few play throughs to master, and scale well into higher difficulty modes by making enemies more alert and faster, and traps harder to disarm. TEW 1 did all this and what I mentioned above, yet most players were too impatient to learn how to play it well enough to fully appreciate the design.
I'll end by saying while Mikami has revealed he is not really interested in making survival horror games anymore, I have to wonder if that wouldn't be the case if more players had appreciated what he did with TEW 1, vs causing him to think he had to dumb it down to the fake survival horror mess that TEW 2 is. A lot of players like I said just lack the patience anymore to appreciate games that are designed with really good replay value by making you work for that win.