Capcom’s Resident Evil Village launched earlier this month and is already breaking records on Steam. But according to a video released on the Resident Evil YouTube account, the game’s combat was far from perfect during development.The video — “Making of Resident Evil Village – The Internal Struggle” — shows how the development team struggled to get the game into a state that everyone was happy with as well as the impact that COVID-19 had on development.According to Director Morimasa Sato, “development came to a complete stop at Capcom due to the self-isolation caused by COVID-19”, and work on Village was halted completely for a whole month. Upon returning to the office, and having had a month to reflect, the whole team agreed that “they needed to fix the game”.When the team shared a demo version of the game with a focus group of players, they noticed that “The enemies were very aggressive, but the players found they didn’t need to think that hard while playing because of this”.Have you played Resident Evil VIllage?YESNOSharing the concerns with Quality Assurance Manager Shutaro Kobayashi, he agreed, revealing he had “a really strong negative reaction”, and that “The game’s content was completely divorced from what the development team thought they had made”.Player reactions indicated that the game had “too many enemies, and they’re overly aggressive” while not having enough ammo to defend themselves. Project Manager Tatsuo Isoko described playing the game as “a real slog”. But despite the criticism, Sato “found the development members at Capcom do a great job of listening”.The team wanted the theme of the game to be “the struggle to survive”, but in playtests, it seemed more like a struggle to even enjoy the game. Bringing the QA and development teams together seemed to be the solution though, as the developers directly heard the concerns of the testers.The solution, as revealed by Sato, was to not “make the player panic about by just throwing aggressive monsters at them, (instead) we make them paranoid about if and how they’re going to be attacked. Then, when an enemy appears, it’s relentless.”Whether you enjoyed Resident Evil Village or not, the video is definitely worth watching for a peek behind the curtains at one of the biggest games of the year. In other Capcom news, the company has had a fourth record-breaking year, Monster Hunter World has sold over 17 million units, and a movie director has accused Capcom of stealing a monster design for Resident Evil Village.
Liam Wiseman is a Freelance News Writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter @liamthewiseman
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