And rightly so: it’s often a stupid idea that is the most successful!

Capcom commemorates 25 years of the franchise on its YouTube channel for Resident Evil (known in Japan and Asia as Biohazard). Shinji Mikami, the developer who laid the foundations for the franchise, talked about how they didn’t want to use fixed camera angles in Resident Evil 4 (the first three had them) but instead used an over-the-shoulder camera because they thought it would have worked better. However, it became such a practical solution that it became one of the main reasons behind the game’s success.

And Jun Takeuchi (Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’s executive producer) talked about how the team at Epic Games that developed Gears of War were so impressed with Resident Evil 4 that they adopted the camera style. Mikami said the camera view felt natural. They didn’t want to do anything innovative, but that’s what everyone else was saying, whereas they just said they wanted to use something that worked. The first person to praise the camera system was Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai, and when he found out it was Mikami’s idea, he congratulated him.

Takeuchi, meanwhile, was working on Lost Planet (as a producer). When he was out with the team at E3, the Gears of War team reviewed Lost Planet: Extreme Condition’s camera system and many asked why they didn’t use Resident Evil 4’s. He replied, “it’s a completely different game”, to which the Epic Games people revealed that RE4 had influenced GoW. Mikami said it was weird because, despite all the words of praise, there was no sense of what they had created. It was just a “hopefully; it will work” approach: if you punch someone in the stomach in a fight and even with restraint, they collapse in pain, you’d think, “wow, I did it.”

And in the previous video, Takeuchi talked about how Capcom (not so often compared to Konami) had an idiotic idea: have microtransactions in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard because the Japanese publisher wanted a live service online multiplayer game. It put pressure on the developers, who realised the marketers’ nightmare by making a traditional single-player, first-person horror game (while Capcom’s idea was realised in Resident Evil: Resistance…)

Source: VGC