It's because that style of game doesn't sell anymore. It's not timeless at all. It's tedious and unpopular and only looks good because of nostalgia. Better things came along and showed us that those games ARE obsolete. Because people don't want 'em. Critics are largely irrelevant. Critics whine about Call of Duty and it only gets bigger. Critics praise obscure stratgey jrpg's and no cares but other critics and few fans. Critics don't move games.
Spelunky is a great example of doing that right. Resident Evil never was. When you die in Spelunky it's always your fault (the controls are great!) but more importantly, you restart instantly. You don't have to wait to get back into the action. When you do respawn, you don't have to sit through the same boring section you've memorized from playing 20 times already, you have to adapt to a new environment. Even the music changes up!
In RE and a lot of games, none of that applies. Instead, when you die you have to sit through a lengthy loading screen. Frusterating. Then you have to sit through the exact same rooms with the exact same enemies again. It becomes boring and monotonous, especially when you're good at a long section before a save point, but then die at a hard section right before the next save point. You have to sit through the same bullshit over again just to get to the actual challenging part. It doesn't make death meaningful, it just wastes gamers time, and turns engaging and challenging scenarios into an exercise in frustrating time-wasting.
Classic Alone in the Dark style horror is dead, RE4.and Amnesia killed it.
Some styles should stay dead, specific features don't make horror, it's more on the storytelling and art design than crippling players.
There were moments of the beginning of RE4 that definitely feel SH to me. The absolute very beginning.. the first time you played it? Scary shit. Ditto with the scene with the creatures attacking you in the house. That scene was -classic- horror movie, and I think they should do more stuff like that in RE.
If they took the basic approach of RE4, severely cut down on bullets and guns, cut the QTE nonsense, and had the major set pieces focus on building a frightful atmosphere (more house under siege moments, less boat chases and explosions), I think you'd have a survival horror game. And a great game. A great survival horror game.
Yet, instead, we have this co-opy action nonsense nobody cares about.
The newer generation of spoiled brats don't understand this, and never will. Based on the demo of RE 6, i am very worried about one of the best series in gaming. The western media hatred for japan is ruining things left and right.
Tank controls are not outdated. That is like saying 2D games are "outdated". I cringe at the ignorance displayed hourly on the internet. We live in a world that is experiencing a zombie apocalypse,, but it is not with brain eating dead people, it is the zombies of the mind as they are sickened by GMO food, poisoned by vaccines, and stupified by government propaganda, public school, and your shameless politicians that act like teen celebrities more than grown men and women.
In a word, we be: FUCKED.
You might as well complain that Sonic should bring back blast processing.
But it's true, the gaming industry has changed too much since then to ever go back to something like this - unless it was a cheap DLC or indie game. if you actually think they could have stuck to this formula and survived the mainstream market, you're kidding yourself. RE would be dead, dying, or stuck in japan like every other survival horror franchise from the "golden era".
I love the changes made in RE4 because i feel like it opened up the fanbase saved my favourite game series' life. i know a bunch of 'purists' are going to scoff at that comment, but i absolutely love the resident evil universe and i'm happy i can still enjoy it today. :)
Geezus, the limp d*ck response of PC-tards, F.E.A.R., aka, lets durrr addd gurns to The Ring n ur sell it to moronzzz. It's shit second and third sequel should have been a top off that the premise was so ass it never had a chance of surviving. Compare that to RE's billion dollar franchise. Kthnx now.
People who whine about classic RE's limitations are just crippled by impatience and short attention spans, mistaking deliberate design decisions that add to the atmosphere and tension with technical limitations that get in their way of rushing to the end of a game in time to get to the next one.
It's sad.
That said, I still enjoy RE4 and to a lesser extent RE5. To me they're just "different" - but too confident with RE6 though.
Even worse is the idea that because a design feature works in popular game then it immediately invalidates and ages the features of other games who must then adopt those ideas, because sales are all that matters. It's partly this kind of thinking in both designers and players that is leading mainstream games into becoming a grey, soupy morass of generic sameyness.
At least the indie scene has really come along this generation
/soapbox And the same genre shift seems to be starting with DMC. /sb
It's not that they changed the camera and controls, but the emphasis on action, the ammo-producing corpses, and abandonment of familiar locales. Obviously the survival aspect is more niche than action (gee, no shit), but why serialize an IP just to transform and disfigure it later on?
Lost in Nightmares DLC was an example of how slow, atmospheric gameplay can still apply to the 3rd person perspective. I'm not saying we have to return to mansions and/or Raccoon City. The spirit of a familiar town overrun by geneticly manufactured zombies is what matters. Things could have escalated to metropolises that don't resemble a mansion or police department at all. To reiterate my point, more than the camera perspective changed with RE4.
The saddest thing is that the biggest entry into survival gameplay died because people would rather play an action shooter with a sprinkle of shock scares (which are optional if RE5 is any indication). A genre dies because of corporate homogenization, and when people complain, others can't bear to listen because they're too busy aping on the camera tropes and miss the entire point. There's a time and place for each genre, and no justification to transform a series known for one into another.
Don't get me wrong the first game is a classic but that doesn't mean it's not a poor game, also is anyone over the age of eight actually scared by any of these games?
I also think it's survival horror, and that people are perpetuating some kind of weird argument that a game isn't survival horror if it has x amount of action. Which is pretty bullshit if you ask me.
There is also no survival horror game where manouverability through the environment is extremely fluid and responsive.It is all about taking away power from the player and not making him some vanquishlike sliding and strafing god.
Even Amnesia, one of the most praised survival horror games of the last years does not control entirely perfect.
Of course I forgive the game because it's didn't commit these sins now; It committed them like 16 or 17 years ago, back when games of it's kind were still in their infancy. And I don't mean survival horror games. I mean mature games with spoken dialogue on a console.
It was ahead of it's time. How many other games used voice acting in their in-game engine back in the mid 90s?
But the game sucks today. Even the REmake is barely worth a person's time. The only thing that will scare you are the zombies and dogs that pop out of closets and through windows. Typical horror fare.
Resident Evil 4 was and remains the series high point. All that came before were great at the time but serve no purpose today other than to remind us where this once great series came from.
"You were almost a Jill Sandwich"
Tank controls are just as much an artifact of early 3D design as pre-rendered environments that force the player to shoot blindly and willy nilly at an enemy that they know is there but illogically can't see, or having bizarre, abstract puzzles (read: fetch quests) that require retreading most of the environments repeatedly to pad game length. These are old game design stop gaps, not things that actively improve an experience. Metal Gear Solid was a tense game that discouraged shoot-outs with a top-down perspective, yet the lead could move in any direction, and crawl, creep or run as the situation demanded. And it was fluid. The momentum is always forward, puzzles at least attempt to make sense, even when they are fetch quests, and you could save in most situations, cus people got shit to do and don't need games telling them how to spend their time. As soon as MGS released the developers of Resident Evil should have made efforts to improve functionality on a basic level, at the very least just so there isn't as much of a cognitive disconnect between what the player wants the character to do and what they are actually capable of doing.
You like old games? That's super sweet. That means that you were playing them when they released, cus otherwise I find it incredibly hard to believe that you'd accept that kind of treatment if it were released today without that firsthand experience in the way-back-when. Resident Evil 4 and 5 may be a bit too shooty-shooty and lack any meaningful suspense, but they are very playable, in a way that is fun. Fun that doesn't require the player to be the unique type that gleans satisfaction from anxiety, and have that be the only method the game allots you of getting said satisfaction. I'm looking forward to 6 because I like the cheesy, ham-fisted storyline and the playability of the recent games. I'm sure I'll find it scary enough, I tend to get panicked pretty easily. That said, I am getting the huge box set of most of the series for PS3, because the early games to hold value as the foundation for a lot of modern design choices, and are probably still enjoyable in their own right (I'm more patient than I was fifteen years ago). I think if you spent more time thinking about what the modern games offer, instead of what they lack, you'd enjoy yourself more and wouldn't need to pine after bygone eras so much.
I think most people would cite "vulnerability" as a major element to the survival horror genre. To the extent that you can "fight back," it's less survival horror and more action.
Of course, I don't think this is an absolute truth. Left 4 Dead has lots of action and is all about surviving horror....
To repeat what Phoebus said, the elements this article praises have nothing to so with the camera or controls, but the post-RE4 fans don't realize there was more to the series than that, then proceed to ignore it.
BrainWasher - supply everything you said to DMC1,3,4's combat and you'll see why some people aren't happy about the change to in DmC. The changes to technical gameplay in that series are just as dramatic to its fans as these are here.
You've said everything just perfectly right, Allistair. I can't tell you how many times I've given this exact same speech to a group of friends. None of them have ever understood. Looking at the comments that have been written thus far, I can see that the overwhelming opinion is sadly that RE *is* dated. But as you say in your article, and as I firmly believe, it's much more that gamers and critics have gone soft. Anyone who's played through the Resident Evil remake can attest to this. Anyone who played through it with a walkthrough because it was too hard, or never finished it because they got too frustrated, missed out on one of the greatest immersive experiences that interactive gaming has to offer.
To me, humbly, no game has combined storytelling, game design, and aesthetics in a more pleasing, complex package. I've played a lot of games. I'm very good at games. I'm very critical of their quality, and I can firmly say, no game I've played has ever, ever held up to this one.
I'm alone in ^that, but I can't believe that people won't even admit that it's a great game based on the controls and save screens alone. I want to ask those people: What is important to you about video games? Do you want to just see flashy numbers and colors announce how much fun you're having? Do you want the game to tell you what it wants you to do obviously, in advance, so there's no way you can fail? Do you want to explore a genuinely frightening and dangerous world or fucking not?
That's what I'd want to ask them.
This was my very first RE game. It got me interested in the series, and even when playing through certain parts with a friend, there were times when we both freaked out. The first time Lisa Trevor knocked Jill over the head we looked at each other, both of us in suspense with a look that said "What the shit just happened!?"
I played through it so many times, and ended up getting nearly every subsequent release of new REs and catching up with rereleases of the older games.
The controls never stopped me from enjoying the game. Even being my first RE game, the controls never stopped me from enjoying the game. I played it in 2003, and even with an aging ten year old control scheme, IT NEVER STOPPED ME FROM ENJOYING IT.
Thank you for reminding me I love this game.
And that bit about ink ribbons really is true.. Having to find an item that has a limited supply (though, I always had far too many and never once ran into the problem you mentioned about only having 1 one you at a time), then having these type writers so spread out, made it way more scary in terms of not wanting to die.
What really helped this out too, in this release, was those red zombies, the ones that don't really ever die.
Oh, and the limited inventory space.. That helped lot too, you either take a ribbon or you can't. Jill wasn't so bad, but Chis was pretty rough.
Even playing Silent Hill 2 HD I found that there was far more save spots then I remembered there being, and the only thing that kept me scared at all was the fact I was trying for the "you can only save twice" achievement in my first time returning to the game in 10 years or so. Otherwise it was a non-issue, cause all I'd need to do if I wanted to save what I had done was backtrack to the room (albeit, doing so is kinda tedious in that game)
I play both! What a concept. You don't need to hate one thing to love another thing. This is the fundamental flaw in all of the negative commentary against japanese games. Isn't that a form a bullying, you pansies? LOL
Same goes for Nintendo hate. If you had been around, you would know that they've ALWAYS done things their own way, and could give a flying fuck what SEGA, or anyone else was doing. Understand? No. Of course not....just keep spewing your peer approved hatred for anything that you perceive is not accepted by the hipsters and your opinion will be safe! Hooray for U.
Ahem.
Resident Evil was never about fear, it was never ever a scary game. It was a fun horror game, whith solid mechanics and memorable style, setting and characters. REmake tries to be "scary" and "tense" in all the wrong ways, and, really, it shouldn't have even tried.
Anybody can make an action game, it takes a real artist to draw you in and leave you on the edge of your seat in pure terror
Nuff said

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