I miss the old style Resident Evil, that is, from 1-3 and Code Veronica. I put together some suggestions for future releases of Resident Evil which I'd like to see. Please be aware that I'm not really intending to "bash" the modern games, although they're definitely not for me, but these are a few ideas and like-minded players are welcome to chip in with their own ideas or give me some criticisms about mine. Here goes:
Get rid of J’avo - save those kinds of enemies for the Prototype series. Resident Evil works best with zombies and monstrous bio weapons for bosses. Zombies can still be challenging. Spawn more of them, fight them in tight spaces, have certain zombies who are faster than others. If the game returns to the survival horror style then finding weapons to deal with them should be a challenge in itself. I don’t want a fire-fight with them, although maybe some chaotic spraying of bullets with bad-aim would be alright.
Give us creepy locations again. A mansion. A police station. A hospital. A city hall. A school. Not outdoors, there’s too much freedom and it isn’t as scary because an escape seems too probable. Also, there isn’t a lot of room for lighting effects to control the player’s mood.
Get rid of your co op partner. Maybe for brief sections of the game I wouldn’t mind a partner, but it’s just not Resident Evil to have a mule/bullet sponge/button pusher with you the whole time.
Get rid of skill points. Or at least as they are in their current form. I don’t want to have to route through boxes to find skill points, that’s just stupid. If the player is to level up, have it happen naturally i.e. accuracy improves with each successful hit, maybe there’s a boost for headshots. Character perks are OK, for example one character might be able to upgrade weapons with parts, another might be able to mix herbs.
Lose the fancy martial arts and wrestling moves. I don’t think that, in a panic, any character would realistically perform a carefully executed roundhouse kick on a zombie. Neither would they grab them in a headlock and do a bulldog/DDT type wrestling move. Have the melee combat suited to the game. Shove zombies to the ground or into other zombies, kick them in the stomach, hit them with the butt of your gun. Have a dodge system like in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis but a more fluid version suitable for today’s generation of consoles. The current moves are a change, but I don’t think they’re very useful, I don’t really see why I’d need to lie on my back to shoot something. Have some cool sprint/evade moves instead, they’d be much more useful.
Bring back puzzles and traps. Creepy riddles. Red and blue jewels. Mansion/equivalent building keys. Zombies bursting out of cupboards when you’ve read their disturbing diary entries. Computer controlled door locks. Rooms with poisonous gas. Collapsing ceilings. If I just want to run-and-gun through a game I’ll buy Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (which is essentially Chris’s section of the demo) or Gears of War.
I haven’t really enjoyed a Resident Evil game since Code Veronica. If the current style of gameplay is to continue, well, it’s a shame as far as I’m concerned. Heavy action could always be present in mercenaries modes to keep those type of players happy. These new games just don’t do it for me. I don’t really remember anything significant happening in Resident Evil 5 since playing it. There’s just nothing that springs to mind; not like when you first see that zombie in Resident Evil take a chunk out of Kenneth!
Anyway those are just a few ideas, there are more I had in mind but I either can't recall them right now or they're too minor to be worth noting down.
Get rid of J’avo - save those kinds of enemies for the Prototype series. Resident Evil works best with zombies and monstrous bio weapons for bosses. Zombies can still be challenging. Spawn more of them, fight them in tight spaces, have certain zombies who are faster than others. If the game returns to the survival horror style then finding weapons to deal with them should be a challenge in itself. I don’t want a fire-fight with them, although maybe some chaotic spraying of bullets with bad-aim would be alright.
Give us creepy locations again. A mansion. A police station. A hospital. A city hall. A school. Not outdoors, there’s too much freedom and it isn’t as scary because an escape seems too probable. Also, there isn’t a lot of room for lighting effects to control the player’s mood.
Get rid of your co op partner. Maybe for brief sections of the game I wouldn’t mind a partner, but it’s just not Resident Evil to have a mule/bullet sponge/button pusher with you the whole time.
Get rid of skill points. Or at least as they are in their current form. I don’t want to have to route through boxes to find skill points, that’s just stupid. If the player is to level up, have it happen naturally i.e. accuracy improves with each successful hit, maybe there’s a boost for headshots. Character perks are OK, for example one character might be able to upgrade weapons with parts, another might be able to mix herbs.
Lose the fancy martial arts and wrestling moves. I don’t think that, in a panic, any character would realistically perform a carefully executed roundhouse kick on a zombie. Neither would they grab them in a headlock and do a bulldog/DDT type wrestling move. Have the melee combat suited to the game. Shove zombies to the ground or into other zombies, kick them in the stomach, hit them with the butt of your gun. Have a dodge system like in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis but a more fluid version suitable for today’s generation of consoles. The current moves are a change, but I don’t think they’re very useful, I don’t really see why I’d need to lie on my back to shoot something. Have some cool sprint/evade moves instead, they’d be much more useful.
Bring back puzzles and traps. Creepy riddles. Red and blue jewels. Mansion/equivalent building keys. Zombies bursting out of cupboards when you’ve read their disturbing diary entries. Computer controlled door locks. Rooms with poisonous gas. Collapsing ceilings. If I just want to run-and-gun through a game I’ll buy Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (which is essentially Chris’s section of the demo) or Gears of War.
I haven’t really enjoyed a Resident Evil game since Code Veronica. If the current style of gameplay is to continue, well, it’s a shame as far as I’m concerned. Heavy action could always be present in mercenaries modes to keep those type of players happy. These new games just don’t do it for me. I don’t really remember anything significant happening in Resident Evil 5 since playing it. There’s just nothing that springs to mind; not like when you first see that zombie in Resident Evil take a chunk out of Kenneth!
Anyway those are just a few ideas, there are more I had in mind but I either can't recall them right now or they're too minor to be worth noting down.
