Resident Evil 8: Village was rumoured to be a cross-gen title before its official announcement, but when the game was revealed, it turned out to not have a PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version. We might have received an explanation on why Capcom has given up on the current-gen console duo.

AestheticGamer (who previously was correct with most of the leaks, and we hope he isn’t wrong about the PlayStation 5-exclusive Silent Hill soft reboot which hasn’t been announced by Sony and Konami yet) explained the situation on Twitter: „Okay, I got some clarification on why they made Resident Evil 8 next-gen only when it was cross-gen previously. With the updated graphic fidelity overhaul they’re doing (it’s still in progress), the way Resident Evil 8 was designed has lead to past-gen consoles [PlayStation 4, Xbox One] having a lot of pop-in, long texture loads, and load times because the game has you travelling through most of the Village and it had a lot of load zones.

Because there’s a bigger focus on exploration, this would lead to the last-gen console versions having notable issues, and it was holding back how pretty the developers could make certain scenes. So they decided to drop the last-gen versions of the game to make it so the game had no loading at all (not limited by last-gen hardware) and push the graphic overhaul further without the limitations of last-gen tech in mind,” AestheticGamer wrote.

It does seem to make sense. Pop-in is when things show up too close to you, texture loading could occur when you see a low-rez texture for a while before it gets replaced by the proper texture (Unreal Engine 3 and 4 titles tend t have this problem). Loading times – until now – could have been hidden by using long corridors.

Keep in mind that it isn’t an official explanation. What is official is that Resident Evil: Village will launch in 2021 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC.

Source: PSU

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