Speaking with the Daily Star, Resident Evil 2 producers Tsuyoshi Kanda and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi revealed that the toughest part of remaking Resident Evil 2 was the giant alligator encounter.
KANDA: [laughter] 20 years ago, the graphics that we had weren’t photoreal and that meant you could get away with… a lot of things. Things that maybe you couldn’t today. You could be fantastical with the creatures and it wouldn’t stand out too much.
So making a giant alligator – that’s a real challenge [laughter]. Trying to update that into a game where you’ve got scanned faces, motion-captured actors, photorealistic environments… it’s really, really hard. Where do you even start!
HIRABAYASHI: To make that convincing in any way was really tough. For a while, we were just thinking, ‘shall we just cut the alligator altogether? It’s too difficult’. But we knew there’d be a fan backlash, we knew we had to create one of these perfect fan-favourite moments, so… it’s a tough one, but it’s there.
It was tricky to do without changing the game’s tone a lot. We’re competing with people’s memories with this game, too, and that’s really hard. Trying to make a convincing scene where a human-sized character – a guy with a knife – is taking on an alligator… that’s really silly. People don’t remember it as silly because the whole game was groundbreaking at the time, but that moment was ridiculous. It was a difficult process for us, making that work today.
KANDA: It might be easier for us to answer that question when the game comes out though – we have our own thoughts and what we liked and what we didn’t, and people might feel differently to us on that level.
HIRABAYASHI: Perhaps they have the perfect version of the game in their heads and what we do undermines that? We’re just trying to make a game that feels right and feels like what you might remember from a gameplay perspective the first time.
Resident Evil 2 remake is due for release on January 25th, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can check out Kai’s hands-on preview from E3 2018 right here.
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