Designing Resident Evil | Resimania

game design is really complicated even before you get to the immensely talented people who work incredibly hard programming modeling animating and texturing games the people who write the story in the dialogue the musicians who compose the music for the game the voice actors who bring the characters to life and of course the qa testers who make sure the game isn't just raw garbage on release day even before the monumental and intricate work of everything else that goes into a game the most basic element the gameplay is itself really complicated why is that well i suppose on a very basic level game design is about understanding how people react to things and what kind of reactions you want from a player and why and then figuring out how to get them and every little part of that sentence is a huge question in and of itself today i want to ask how resident evil makes you afraid on a technical level like how do you make a game that makes people react like this no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no if you want to understand game design resident evil is actually a great place to learn the series may at times struggle to tell a story that you can follow along and understand but it tells a crystal clear story in its design and today i want to look at that story to understand the franchise from a different perspective this is a franchise that threw a lot at the wall and had to sift through everything that stuck combining and recombining deconstructing and redesigning until today we find ourselves in the midst of a resident evil renaissance this is the game design story of decades of hard work that produced a truckload of hits and a [ __ ] ton of misses and still manages to bring around everything and produce some of the sharpest aaa games being made today this is welcome to rezzymania a video essay trilogy about resident evil where i've played over 90 hours of zombie games and people keep on giving me money so i keep talking about it like all good stories our story tonight contains big hunky men some of them good some of them bad large rocket-propelled grenades and at least one hypothetically cute dog in this episode of resumenia we need to expand our scope a little but not to consider the other games or the multimedia franchise rather we need to consider the extraneous attempts the discarded projects the content that hit the cutting room floor your posts are bangers and your selfies are hot congrats sweetie but now show me the drafts video games of course were invented by satan to destabilize society by convincing teens to smoke estrogen and touch butts and as such the industry has always been the domain of evil wait where was i going with the spit capcom were reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy when resident evil 1 was being developed which is why the team behind the first game started small in fact when shinji mikami was first tasked with the sweet home remake that would become biohazard the game we call resident evil he was the entire team the game was entirely his vision at least while capcom added more staff to his team and he trained them up for the project sound designer hideyaki at sumi said in interviews that he used the voices of the staff for the moans of zombies in early games you can actually hear him as some of the zombies in resident evil 2 and even shinji mikami is some of the voices of zombies in the original the first game was initially imagined as much bigger in scale with whole entire extra mansions that were cut as the vision ran headlong into the various limits of budget team size and the memory capacity of the ps1 like i said at the time capcom was nearly bankrupt something they've only ever come close to once according to speculation after capcom is a big company with lots of different franchises but the story of resident evil can be kept close to a surprisingly small crew and while lots of factors can be attributed to why resident evil 5 and 6 are like that mr president one really simple thing we can point to is that they were literally made by different people ever since resi5 capcom has been swapping out a lot of the team between each game which has proven more effective in recent years as they released four of the best fresy games ever made yes a lot of this video is going to be me fawning over how absurdly good seven and eight and the remakes of two and three are and i make no apology for that because they [ __ ] rock they whip they [ __ ] it's worth spending a long time talking about how good they are resident evil 2 and 3 remake are hot girl [ __ ] and i am going to prove it but this is also going to be a technical breakdown so for this episode welcome to my game design laboratory we're doing science my game design laboratory may look like the other side of my living room but trust me science to draw us into the world of game design i want to ask a question is a scary gameplay moment part of the plot undeniably it's important to your experience of a story but is it part of the story let's start with an illuminating example in resident evil 2 remake the interrogation room of the police station contains a two-way mirror in leon's playthrough the mirror has already been smashed but in claire's playthrough when you go into the interrogation room it hasn't yet and then of course it does a liquor explodes out of the mirror and tries to do whatever that tongue do [Music] with the game environment changing in the two playthroughs based on something that happens in one of them it kind of feels silly to not say that this is part of the plot so we're starting to think about how resident evil actually works lots of modern games work on making their enemy ai cleverer and balance the challenge for the player almost mathematically programmatically spawning in new enemies not so in resident evil not even in the most recent games or the remakes every enemy is placed carefully lovingly and there are a finite number of them you could give names to every zombie in raccoon city and i'd probably be disappointed if i found out the developers didn't do that using our haunted house analogy from last time this is no surprise every fright and scare has a lot of thought put into it re gameplay typically incorporates survival horror combat and puzzles but when you play one of these games over and over the finite and carefully designed enemy encounters start to feel like their own constantly evolving puzzle and you come to know the solutions so well that specific fights become quasi plot points to your play through and they kind of ah right somebody planned each and every encounter with every ghoul and goblin in the series in resident evil 2 this is especially apparent where each encounter with the liquor specifically is extremely tense and memorable they even have their own musical theme if you're familiar with my channel you know i usually don't shut up about all these wacky ideas i have about how uh we shouldn't set fire to the planet or cops shouldn't be allowed to murder people and like the fruits of society should maybe be shared equally between its inhabitants but this is the game design episode the last essay in the series is the ideology of resident evil so i'm going to be straining as hard as i can not to bring up politics in this one cia fm boy you pretend to be a political how do you do that capitalism is the only system that supports cat boys great let's talk about world design part one raccoon city let's start by talking about the setting it's good to think about the settings of resident evil games because in a very literal sense game design is tied to the worlds that games are set in but for resident evil this is even more true than in other franchises the original resident evil game came out in 1996 in 1996 games looked like this [Music] [Music] and yet somehow in 1996 resident evil looked like this [Music] the original resident evil and in fact the whole original trilogy were able to look so good through a little visual trickery while the character models on screen were live 3d animation everything else in shot is a pre-rendered background this is the hidden reasoning behind resident evil's iconic fixed camera angles loading a pre-rendered background with some characters on it takes a lot less processing power than running a full live 3d environment allowing the backgrounds to feature a lot more detail because of this approach the designs of the mansion the police station and the rest of raccoon city are all driven first and foremost by the enemy encounters the puzzles and the puzzle of the setting itself because you almost never see a part of any of these settings that your character isn't currently standing in in fallout new vegas or cyberpunk 2077 you can go right out into the desert and see the city from far away but in the original resi trilogy the only part of the world that ever exists is the bit right in front of you literally the slight lag between shots is the computer loading in the next powerpoint slide leon kennedy will dance around on top of you can still today see a little of how the 3d design influenced the rpd of resident evil 2 versus the rpd of resident evil 2 remake the safe room at the bottom of the stairs that contains the dark room is surprisingly hard to find in the remake i've seen players actually miss it all together and that's because in the original when that safe room was put there there was a camera pointed right at the door it was impossible to miss in the remake when you control the camera it's possible you ran out of that hallway where you just encountered four zombies you saw the stairs and legged it as fast as you could up to the next floor without even looking around missing one of the few places in the game where enemies can't follow you and one of the rare places in the game where you can save your progress hey cia femboy you have a take on this twink rights yeah wait i mean yeah what what rights don't twinks have the right to have cops at pride uh-huh the right to work for private military contractors that's not true the right to enact a genocide against indigenous guatemalans to protect the free market interests of a fruit company that's a real thing the cia did yes it is yes it is in his superbly written atlas of the design worlds that we explore in video games titled virtual cities constantinous demopolis describes raccoon city like this nestled deep in the foggy but wonderful arkley mountains raccoon city was a typical american city of the midwest surrounded by a craggy countryside of lakes rivers and ravines as well as the old growth raccoon forest the city was part of nature's beautiful diverse tapestry and i agree there is something very organic feeling about raccoon city it feels like as a natural space that people really live in and i think that part of that comes down to the way you progress through the whole thing as one big map you never have to wait on loading screens between areas because every time you move across half a room the game switches to a new fixed camera angle revealing two more chompy boys for you to get killed by instantly it seems like an interesting trade-off the way the movement is hampered by the fixed camera angles versus the organic free-flowing design of the world but i think there's an argument to be made here that it's not a trade-off at all but rather a trade on i'm trying to say fixed camera angles are good actually a lot of focus is put on fixed cameras as a tone setter in survival horror lack of control building of tension blah blah blah however this tends to describe the approach in videographic terms rather than ludological terms damn i invented a word for video game science and it turns out it already exists isn't latin fun i mean that we talk about how fixed cameras make the game look instead of the impact that it has on how the gameplay feels and that might sound like splitting hairs but you'll probably understand better what i mean later the fixed cameras make it more stressful to navigate the world because there could be a zombo right there where the shot changes and that makes you move through the world slower paying more attention to the environment which they've been able to make look better because of the fixed camera angles paying more attention to color contrast lighting style decor the effects camera angles and the design of the world feed into one another in a symbiotic cycle it isn't a trade-off at all it's a win-win constantinous demopolis goes on raccoon city was originally mentioned in the first resident evil but only visited by players in its 1998 sequel even then little of the actual city was shown but players and critics were too satisfied to notice building up the excitement apparently worked as did the pre-rendered backgrounds that allowed for higher resolutions and greater detail than would have been possible in real time 3d these backgrounds lend the world its distinct feel and permitted control framing and the effective setting up of scares this is a recognizable feature of the way these games work the gameplay drives the creation of the world that might seem strange if you were setting out creating resident evil 2 you might imagine the setting would come first and all the puzzles and their pieces and the enemy encounters would get fitted into it but game design is an iterative process you might have the raccoon city police department concept of the setting first but the shape of the gameplay dictates the shape of the world what i like about the police station in resi 2 is that it doesn't try to explain a chronology of what happened it isn't the set of a murder mystery spoon feeding you clues to the timeline of events just a place where people used to work it's messy it's chaotic and it looks like it was abandoned in a hurry in order to form a defensive perimeter which then collapsed as konstantinos puts it raccoon city feels like it actually existed before the zombies it is deeper than a cardboard prop connecting indoor levels its varied zombies are representative of a wider population and the few roads shown are rich in street furniture architectural variety and activity they feel both typical and representative enough to paint images of a wider town before the catastrophe besides the skyline of raccoon city glimpsed in the main menu was modeled after montreal the vast police station on the other hand seems iconically odd as it was housed in a former art museum in order to explain the bizarre puzzles scattered throughout the building it is such overlapping influences restrictions and sensibilities that shaped raccoon city an intriguingly skewed vision of american midwestern urbanism crafted by japanese game developers using late 1990s technology under the influence of 1970s and 1980s zombie movies to the game design lab one element that can really help us unpack the difference between the designed worlds of resident evil 1 2 3 4 7 and eight as opposed to the worlds of five and six is elevation a lot of classical stories like to play with senses of elevation as well as distance and this is something that can make the design of a fictional world incredibly compelling in dante elierie's divine comedy the pilgrim starts at the middle point of the afterlife and has to travel all the way down to the lowest part of hell before climbing all the way up into heaven in lord of the rings some of the darkest moments of the story take place underground and the terminus of their adventure is a volcano a mountain you first have to climb up and then throw the one ring down into in the most philosophically significant work of the last 80 years vampire the masquerade bloodlines some of the nicest goodest characters live on the ground level or beneath it while the prince the pinnacle of all evil lives at the top of a skyscraper which creates a sense the world is perfectly upside down perverted and wrong because of the parasitic vampire-like exploitation of the working class by the bourgeoisie there are however reasons besides communism to play with elevation in your fictional worlds there aren't really but all the boys will stop watching unless i pretend they know a little more than me about this how do video games even work what does this button do oh did i win in resident evil you descend deeper into the chaos and madness of the spencer mansion first hoping to escape then pushing deeper through the secret facilities underneath and finally arriving at the lab where you're shown the ultimate life form making the fight with the tyrant the final barrier between the subterranean evil of the mansion and your airborne escape by helicopter in resident evil 2 you explore the police station open an underground passage to the car park travel further down into the sewers and then the umbrella facilities beneath the city in nemesis you're chased across the city by the chunky lad reinforcing the sense that nowhere on the surface of the city is safe now that the t-virus has bubbled up out of the sewers and onto the streets and once again you find yourself in a deep underground facility at the end of the game speaking of subterranean horror the original resi iii had giant worms i keep telling you this is a franchise for women not to belabor this point unendingly i just want to point out one more small example in resident evil village the village itself is the neutral elevation and each boss exists in an area not too far from the village as the crow flies but on quite different elevations for example lady dimetrask and heisenberg absolutely [ __ ] loathe each other and castle de metresque is well a castle while heisenberg's factory sits in a massive chasm in the earth creating a physical sense that both characters are powerful and important but in opposing ways that isn't even the example i meant to talk about though there are just so many of these in donna benaviento's house when you unlock all of the escape room puzzles but before you activate the nightmare baby you have to climb down into a well it's a dead end in the earth a deep narrow claustrophobic chamber and clearly a bit of an homage to the ring the game is building your sense of dread proportionally to how far down in the level you go the point is playing with elevation can give something a real sense of significance the first three games take you deep underground rezzy iv ends with a fight on top of a castle elevation isn't everything but it is key to a lot of the series world design so when a game gives you a wide open flat level where you just ride around on a hoverboat hunting down black people resident evil 5 is really racist it bears repeating but it's also boring and bad to play and which of those is a greater crime who can say it's the racism rezzy 5 starts in a city then travels to tribal wetlands and then wildly whips back and forth between oil fields and the exploitative neocolonialism of petrol companies and indiana jonesy puzzle temples chapter 5 is more or less just five consecutive boss fights and yes some of them take place in an underground umbrella facility but all the significance is killed by a combination of neither knowing nor caring what it is you're fighting and the fact there are just so many bosses in a row more like resident evil 5 bosses in a row got him chapter 6 takes place on a boat then on a plane and then the plane crash lands inside the crater of an active volcano where wesker much like the one ring is shot from a helicopter by two cia agents with rocket launchers it's a mess where's the progression like i said elevation isn't everything but it and all the other issues are tied closely together in the same way they would be tied together well in a game that worked in the other games the feeling of progression that the elevation and other design elements give you make you feel like you're moving up a chain of power police station police chief secret experiments umbrella corporation evil cult monster cultists evil prince mutated cult leader in resident evil 5 on the other hand you just go from one place to another place to another place to another place there are two car turret fights back to back and in the second one the car isn't even moving you just go wherever the [ __ ] the game decides you're going and then at the end chris redfield punches a [ __ ] boulder chris redfield punches a boulder in a volcano and it's not even to defeat wesker it's just to make a stepping stone for shiva to jump on [Music] the human race requires judgment resident evil 6 likewise is a mess oh [ __ ] there are clear design intentions you can tease out for instance in leon's playthrough you start low and end high and in chris's playthrough you start high and end low and the crossover point is where the two men find ada wong it's like poetry it rhymes however chris's playthrough starts at the top of a chinese tenement building and walks downwards but then cuts to a flashback to eastern europe where the level design is almost completely flat in a series that's notorious for its deep underground labyrinths the flatness of the level tells you immediately not to give the slightest [ __ ] about this place and this is supposed to be where you find out chris's entire motivation the intentions were there but there is absolutely no consistency or coherent design ethos jake and sherry's story is the most extreme version of this going up and down into different countries simply wherever the story needs them to be to interact with the other characters rather than having any kind of structure of its own ada's playthrough which should be the one that ties everything together revealing the deepest truths of the political corporate conspiracy also just kind of goes wherever the game that should have given the most concrete sense of the world of resident evil instead makes it harder to believe the resident evil takes place in one coherent world setting at all if you ignore rezzy 5 and 6 it's actually easier to believe that resident evil takes place in one contiguous world because the world design ethos is the same and now a word on behalf of our sponsors the whole wrestlemania series is sponsored by boxu boksu is a japanese snack subscription service that sends you a monthly package of japanese snacks naturally when they got in touch i thought they'd be a perfect fit for this series it has this handy leaflet that tells you about all the snacks you're getting and actually tells you where they come from as well i'm gonna have some of these apple gummies they taste kind of like apple pie actually the smell is just like overwhelming i kept the packet around for ages because like the smell is just so nice boxy makes such a perfect and memorable gift for anyone in your life who appreciates japanese food and culture especially in a time when people aren't able to travel the world as 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surface they draw together unrelated aesthetics and ideas in ways that make them make sense together a carnival of hillbilly horror or gothic horror or bio-weapon horror a haunted house with a motivating theme these aren't the only settings of the main series though because as it happens resident evil 4 was in development for six years and in that time the team developed several iterations of the game overhauling the entire world several times in between so before we move on completely from world design i think we ought to talk about part 1.5 four resident evils speaking to game spy about rezzy iv and its previous iterations hiroyuki kobayashi producer on both resident evil 4 and devil may cry said the first story idea we had was going in to destroy the main base of umbrella in europe the second concept was that leon was hit with a bizarre disease in which he started to see illusions and monsters that weren't really there he would attack and strike out at them but he couldn't do them any harm the third version had zombies it simply didn't feel fun then we said no more zombies and that was that this is a pretty good summary but you need to know there are actually four versions of resident evil 4 not three and it's important to talk about all of them the version that kobayashi didn't mention here is the cool version okay so i called the first version of resident evil 4 they were making the cool version because of something funny i saw on wikipedia it's not something the developers were ever actually calling the game on wikipedia it says the original version was going to be more cool and that eventually shinji mikami stepped in to say that resident evil isn't supposed to be cool and that's when the project spun off and became devil may cry instead if you dig into the sources that's not what anyone actually said and mikami's problem was with the action-oriented format the game was taking and the lack of exploration or puzzles compared with the previous games there's the lesson kids don't believe everything you read on wikipedia that said this cool version was going to be a big departure and resi 4 probably wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for the cool version the protagonist tony was as opposed to cop protagonists and previous installments going to be someone with special powers gained from umbrella's experiments and his bombastic combat maneuvers weren't showcased well in fixed camera angles so the team decided to leave the iconic pre-rendered backgrounds of the franchise behind and opt for a dynamic camera system instead resident evil so meaningfully shaped the survival horror genre and resident evil 4 so meaningfully reshaped it that i think it's fair to say here that the genre as a whole owes something to the cool version part of what was happening here it seems was that shinji mikami was beginning the process of moving on from resident evil and trying to hand over directorial and creative duties to other staff but at the same time couldn't completely remove himself from the project this first cool version that became devil may cry was directed by hideki kamiya but when it got underway mikami felt it just didn't fit with the world of resident evil they had built so far and so kamiya took the project to capcom and rebranded it as devil may cry it's interesting to note for the discussion of world design that knowing they were giving leon kennedy a fun little european gap year members of the dev team spent 11 days in spain and the uk taking pictures of statues and architecture for texture references i hope they got to try a wig and kebab the next version of the game retained some of the previous elements while starting to move a little closer to what we're familiar with the protagonist was now leon and he would have a sidekick and in the game he would be in the main headquarters of umbrella in europe this fits in well with the established law because in resident evil 2 you can actually find a note explaining where chris has gone where he says he's in europe dating hot chicks but on a closer reading the message is clearly code for a mission he's on investigating umbrella corp having leon infiltrate umbrella as well could have worked really well by continuing the franchise pattern of having the protagonists just barely miss each other and never quite link up in this version leon was also infected with the virus giving him special powers like tony this version wasn't officially scrapped or spun off but rather iterated upon leading to the hookman version in 2005 when resident evil 4 finally shipped pre-order copies included a playable demo of an earlier version of the game which had been shown off at e3 way back in 2003. the demo has leon traversing some sort of old building with fancy decor and old paintings as the building comes to life and attacks him with suits of armor dolls a mounted stags head and finally as a painting of a man holding a large meat hook comes to life and chases him around the level this is the hook man version and honestly resident evil 9 should be hook man i'm just saying what everyone else here is thinking i've become a hook man stan now give me that hooky stabby spooky boy in the hookman version leon sees everything in a bluer hue when the house comes to life and attacks him making it unclear if he's really lucid or in some kind of dream and something i find really interesting is that one of the scares in the demo are living dolls i said before that benevanto's house and village didn't seem to have a clear gothic horror inspiration but have we just found the inspiration here capcom please if you turn the spooky doll nightmare house from the hookman version into beneviento i am begging you please put hookman in resident evil 9. the developers said there wasn't really a fully fleshed out backstory to hookman or the setting and that makes sense because it seems like the developers were just playing with different mechanics and preparing the technology while the writers worked on the setting and story the other really compelling thing about the hookman version is that it's literally a haunted house and i cannot tell you how vindicating that is however it might have been the literal haunting of this setting which was its downfall it was actually shinji mikami who insisted that in the original resident evil nothing would have a supernatural origin everything would come from umbrella's laboratories so this is just my speculation but it could be that the more paranormal ghostlier feel of the hookman version might have been why it didn't go anywhere which is why you have to hire me to write it i have everything figured out and there's a scientific explanation for everything it starts when hookman's lover is tragically killed the fourth iteration of resident evil 4 before was actually released so leon infiltrating not umbrella's headquarters but instead the castle of oswald spencer the wealthy eugenicist who's mentioned you exploring resident evil 1. again leon was going to have a young female sidekick but something pretty special about this version was that the two of them were also going to be accompanied by a zombie dog would the dog have been cute hypothetically a cute frankenstein dog i can see that working would leon have been able to pet the dog now we're asking the really important questions this setting where two protagonists explore oswald spencer's castle of course is actually the premise of a resident evil 5 dlc where jill and chris go to confront spencer and wesker and then jill is mia presumed dead but actually is booby mind control crystal of course in resident evil 5 all of this is communicated by flashback unless you play the dlc so i'm wondering why they didn't stick to this premise for resident evil 4. so what did we learn from all this extra detail about scrapped games that they never made i don't know i write the script i make all the jokes i edit the video do i have to draw your conclusions for you too jesus part two resource and inventory management when you've played a few of these games and you can see the ways in which the good ones are good and the bad ones are bad an incontrovertible statement begins to form in your mind resident evil has a rhythm what makes a good resident evil game good i hope we'll get an answer to that on a quite technical level today but a nice quick fun sexy answer is the ones that are good are so good because they have the rhythm what do i mean by that let's take an example in resi 2 remake you get the red book but in the statue's hand to get the scepter to retrieve the jewel to put in the box to get the police badge to activate the computer to open the armory in the star's office in the star's office there's a battery which goes in the detonator which knocks down the wall which gets you the statue puzzle which you solve for the third medallion allowing you to open the secret underground passage from the police station to the parking lot those are two short sets of steps which lead you to a weapon upgrade and a new area to explore game progression is made possible by you completing steps which will not always be consecutive or available one after another but linked together in a satisfying way it comes to feel a lot like cooking a complicated meal several steps are required to make a sauce which is itself one part of one dish and if you have the timings perfectly figured out you find yourself dancing around the kitchen through what should be a daunting task in a way that is instead exciting and fun in reality the red jewel can't be fitted into the box to retrieve the police badge until you get into the observation room if you're playing as claire you can't go in the observation room until that sweet licky boy busts through the two-way mirror at you in the interrogation room if you're playing as leon you get into the observation room with the club key you do it different ways depending on your playthrough but the item is withheld until a certain point in the game either way round meaning that the steps i described before can't be completed in that order by the player you have to have opened the secret passage and completed the parking lot story before you can get the bejeweled box so you can see already how finding your way through all of this even when you know every solution to every puzzle is quite challenging but the keen viewer will have also noticed that every solution involves some kind of item you get the thing to take to the place to do the thing to get the whatever to open the blah blah blah the club key i just mentioned even is one of four card suit style keys that open specific doors around the station and here's the thing about items they take up inventory slots if you have eight inventory slots and need to carry your pistol knife spare ammo several different keys the items that solve puzzles boards to board up windows to stop zombies coming in and a little green hub to make yourself feel better you can see the issue right and realistically your pistol does nothing against liquors so you want to carry the shotgun or the grenade launcher which are long items so they take up two inventory slots instead of one inventory might not seem important but the size of your inventory is literally the restriction which creates that sense of rhythm this is something the franchise has played with since day one in the original chris's playthrough was labeled hard and jill's playthrough was labeled easy and there were few mechanical differences between them because the simple but monumental difference between them was that chris only has six inventory slots and jill has eight look who doesn't have pockets now men the two and three remakes give you extra pouches to increase your inventory two slots at a time throughout the game from a minimum eight up to a maximum of twenty at the same time the game keeps giving you new kinds of enemies to fight and each new kind of enemy needs a new kind of weapon as you navigate the spencer mansion the raccoon city police station the streets of raccoon city the baker family home or eastern europe you catch little glimpses of how that rhythm should go little bits that make the puzzle pieces lock nicely together but the eternal challenge is the balance of your weapons ammo items and inventory if you know the complete playthrough and can reliably defeat every enemy in the game you can take part in the dance experience the beautiful totality of the rhythm but if you can't either because of your own skill as a player or the design of one of the games it can be frustrating in an unpleasant way a lot of people for instance get stuck in the rpd parking lot because new items aren't readily apparent and the steps to open the next area for exploration aren't as clear as they are in the rest of the game the dance that should go enter the new area clear out the enemies pick up the items figure out what they do solve the puzzles rinse and repeat get stuck somewhere between steps three and four in the comments a lot of people pointed out after the last video that i didn't talk about resident evil zero despite claiming to be covering the main series of games and that's because resident evil 0 is a piss little game for clowns and babies clown babies a garbage game for hogs that's not my real take i don't think resident evil 0 is particularly bad or good it's not resident evil 6 it's cut from the same cloth as 1 2 and 3 and it's certainly no code veronica but let's talk about why some people don't like it and in particular let's talk about why i think those people don't understand what they don't like about it in resident evil 0 in the training facility area once you get the fire key you open the fire key doors so you can go to the study so you can move the table so you can stand on the table so you can reach the moose head so you can retrieve the iron needle so you can solve the clock puzzle so you can go in the clock puzzle thoughts so you can get microfilm a so you can get microfilm b so you can combine the microfilms so you can get the mo disk so that you can put the mo disk into the podium and solve the desk puzzle so you can open the night doors so you can go to the chest room so you can solve the chess puzzle so that you can get the book of evil so you can retrieve the black statue wings so you can construct the black statue balancing the scales allowing you to move to the next area as much as it might sound like i'm just listing things the same way i was before in a good resident evil game you should complete short phrases of puzzle solving that allow some flexibility or at least the illusion of it because you could either solve the painting riddle or find the parrot's missing beak you both feel free to do whichever you want first and enjoy the challenge of inventory management choke points are rarer because the player almost always has multiple options for what to do in resident evil 0 you're almost always just trying to solve the next puzzle to progress the next stage with no overlap or flexibility and with that the challenge of inventory management disappears as well why worry about what you're carrying if the miscellaneous items you have on you will almost definitely be exactly what you need for the next puzzle in noah's video noah says what i've seen a lot of people who dislike this game say that resident evil 0 is bad because it's silly it has an opera singer mind controlling leeches on a train and yes that is silly but with all due respect to the og i think noah is wrong here opera singer mind controlling leeches is silly in exactly the same way that all of resident evil is silly all the time in resi 2 remake you're chased by a giant alligator in the sewer in resi 3 we make the massive bulbous head of the toy uncle rolls down the hill and nearly crushes you in resident evil 4 there's a quick time event where you sprint away from a 30-foot statue of a four-foot man in resident evil village heisenberg none of these things are seen as detractors from the franchise the same way i unironically love when the snake busts up through the toilet in hard ticket to hawaii and then ron moss drives through the wall on his motorbike and shoots it in the head with a rocket launcher i would argue this isn't an aesthetic issue at all but instead that magical rhythm simply isn't there the wonderful dance of gameplay that makes a resident evil game just right is missing from resident evil 0 and has a lot to do with inventory management if the leech singer had been in a game that got the rhythm right we would all unanimously agree that it is very silly but doesn't detract from the game joseph anderson regularly says that gameplay is king and as serious and political as my hyper-pretentious commie trans girl media analysis gets it's hard for me to disagree there that's why i'm paying so much attention to game design in this episode gameplay is king and it's the experience of the gameplay that shapes your experience of the game first and foremost next episode for instance i will spend an inadvisable amount of time talking about resident evil 5 and 6 in a positive light because i'll be analyzing the franchise politically but there's no way around where i could ever call either of them good games because they simply are piss and or ass to play they just suck in an incredibly ironic move the silly and contrived fiction of resident evil zero is a perfect reflection of the real problem the game takes place in a second but very similar mansion in the arclay mountains right next to the spencer mansion it's a pale imitation of the spencer mansion in the way that resident evil zero is a pale imitation of what makes a good resident evil game good it feels like they had a lot of bits and pieces on the cutting room floor and wanted to make a prequel to increase the hype for resident evil remaster so just stuck them all together end to end with no thought to the rhythm of the dance resident evil code veronica uh oh here we go again i'm sorry the human race requires judgment resident evil code veronica among other kinds of massive dumpster fires is a massive dumpster fire of game design too in the biblical sense the cyberpunk 2077 sense the game is actually broken in at least a couple of extraordinary ways that anyone should have noticed if anyone was checking famously a late game solution requires you to have a fire extinguisher item which you plausibly left in a puzzle that demands all of your metal items really early in the game and if you didn't have the foresight to think you might need a fire extinguisher later then the game becomes uncompletable at this incredibly late stage in real life of course a fire extinguisher is a very important item in a crisis in resident evil you have no way of knowing whether it will be more important than the pirates wooden leg or the pocket watch shaped like a dinosaur another problem an outright glitch on some platforms is caused by an item called the player manual the play manual is a book that tells you how to play the game because [ __ ] you and [ __ ] intuitive self-explanatory play experiences i guess it's an item that takes up an inventory slot despite actually being a file you can also read in your files tab and that causes its own problem with players who don't realize they have an inventory slot taken up by a completely unnecessary item for most of the game but it also causes a problem when the game gets confused by the item which is also a file when the player goes into the file tab to read the player manual as a file the game deletes the manual but the next selected item after the manual for some reason becomes inexpendable in other words when you use the item it doesn't disappear so in a game where at least in theory inventory management matters a lot a bug makes it possible to either wind up with a permanently occupied slot you can never empty or literally infinite ammo or healing items this bug is pretty funny and would be a little game breaking in most games that have inventory at all but i hope i've explained the delicate balance of inventory and resource management enough now that you understand why this is especially bad in a resident evil game inventory management isn't something i thought i would ever actively enjoy but somehow resident evil at its best makes deciding what should be in your inventory actually fun like at the end of resi 2 remake when leon gets to a slow moving elevator in which he will have his final battle with mr x the elevator needs a special type of fuse plug to work the same is true for claire and her big battle with eyeball william birkin the thing is the fight will start as soon as you use the plug and the plug takes up two inventory slots and here after everything faced with this i felt elated i never thought i would actively enjoy inventory management but resident evil 2 remake showed me how wrong i could be okay let's talk about ammunition and guns guns are hot but cox leftoids don't want anybody to have them so you support community self-defense then why are you promoting terrorism i swear to god i will send you back to twitter and get a refund i'll come back as an nft and be more powerful than you could possibly imagine you know the thing i worry about with making videos this long is what if there's someone who's watching who's just having a really bad time like what if there's someone who's watching right now who's just [ __ ] seething because they think my video game opinions are so bad but for some reason they think they have to watch the rest of it to that person hey you don't you don't have to do this go do something you like instead call your best friend and see how they're doing on the face of it weapons and ammunition seem like a pretty simple game design element if you want to make a game harder give the player less ammo and make each bullet do less damage simple still here resident evil manages to innovate in many games different weapons do different things for instance crowd control for stunning or even taking out many enemies at once long range versus short range for different combat arenas elemental buffs and debuffs nonetheless the weapon progression remains pretty simple at the start your basic weapon is okay at killing basic enemies at the end you have the mega weapon that's okay at killing the boss monster or really good at killing 12 basic enemies at once in resident evil weapons are far more locked to specific enemies plant monsters and liquors don't give the slightest [ __ ] about your shitty little toy pistol leon put that [ __ ] away on the other hand plants are weak to fire and lickers are weak to acid both of which claire has in her big girl gun the grenade launcher oh baby a triple in resident evil 4 leon encounters a special type of regenerating zombie that seemingly has no weak spots that is until you view it through an infrared scope when you realize the living organism has these little organs randomly placed around the body that you can take out with one hit provided you hit them exactly on target this is such a cool idea and takes your rifle an already precious high-powered weapon and makes it 10 times more precious as a resource because now it's the only weapon that can kill this specific really shitty enemy the game even acknowledges this outright a little later on by giving you one of these guys that you have to get past and covering him with spikes so if you don't shoot him right in his weak spots you're [ __ ] this was such a cool idea that when the plant monsters were redesigned for the resi 2 remake they included similar little organs on the bodies you can shoot if you don't have any kind of incendiary weapons and if you hit them just right it takes them out you however are probably panicking and won't spot them because a zombie made of trees is coming to bite your head off in rezzy 3 the original and the remake the weapon you use to kill nemesis once and for all is a special umbrella prototype energy weapon because the developers know that giving each type of enemy its own special weapon makes the enemy more special and of course nemesis the most special boy ever to live deserves a gun that's just for him it's also however an extension of this philosophy that aiming and shooting and combat should all be part of a puzzle and so nemesis gets his own gun which is itself a puzzle because so are all weapons and so is everything everything in the game is a facet of the big puzzle which is the game itself residents evil 0 1 2 3 code veronica and 7 all used storage boxes which can be accessed at various points and always contain everything you left in any of them this works to facilitate the more puzzle focused gameplay because you never know when the mayor's shoe is going to turn out to fit into the cobbler's door puzzle and open the next area so it makes inventory management a fun challenge resident evils 4 and village use a primary and secondary inventory system where the main inventory that the player has access to is backed up by a second inventory they can only access when talking to a merchant this is because those games are far more combat focused and as a result inventory management isn't something that's meant to be fun in them you just buy more inventory space when you need it and managing your inventory is never really a concern with that however the joy of managing your inventory is never really a possibility and to me that's sad but what's all this about merchants money buying combat focused gameplay that sounds bad and scary and not like resident evil to me i think it's time to talk about part three video game economics way too many games now have economies because they want to sell you stuff part four speed okay okay seriously even if it can be summed up really simplistically this is a very interesting topic in the last 10 to 20 years we've experienced a lot of changes in gaming some of them expected better graphics more striving towards 3d realism others less expected for example why do so many people now like to play games where they work isn't that a contradiction a work game and yet job simulators are more popular today than they've ever been since the beginning of video games many games have put the player in the shoes of the character with a particular profession often police or military and not to leave it unsaid plumber but these games don't focus on the nature of the work and many of them deviate from the player character's job altogether some of the earliest work simulators one could argue at least were games that let people explore the fantasy of having a really cool job where the player has a lot of power and agency like roller coaster tycoon or simcity but what's really curious about this trend is a move towards jobs that don't offer any obvious power fantasy there are now not only games that allow us to design our ideal theme park or city but games that simulate being a truck driver train driver farmer or courier for my part i think i can offer an insight from a perspective of someone who does a job for which there exists a job simulator yes there is a youtuber simulator and while in some respects it does simulate the work and life of a content creator the uneasy feeling i get thinking about it might tie in to what people like about this type of game i feel quite bad thinking about all the labor that i put into my job being sold as a fun experience to be played although i should maybe acknowledge a chip i probably have on my shoulder here i do get told by people that my job is too easy and that i get paid too much and in reality i haven't had a full day off in months and i barely cover the expenses of a two-person household even with all the money i get from patreon twitch adsense and very rare sponsors all of my gripes and grievances are because i find the idea that someone would try out even a pale facsimile of my job for fun quite insulting i'm sure there are truck drivers who feel the same way about truck driver simulator of course but to resolve the apparent contradiction of games where you work and this tension around job simulators i think we need to talk a little about what fun even means we have an idea based in a layman's understanding of neurochemistry that fun is kind of this thing that happens right you get a reward or succeed in some way and your brain gives you dopamine at least in theory but if that were the case why have a game at all why not just have the end screen mario gets the princess every time 10 out of 10 perfect game remember to like and subscribe why isn't animal crossing just a mall where you have infinite money well because the rewards themselves aren't what make us happy the nice thing about home decor and animal crossing is the challenge of decorating your house the way that you want and even more so when each adornment requires you to spend hours farming fishing building etc because the experience of fun is in the game itself rather than in the reward in the utopia of rules on technology stupidity and the secret joys of bureaucracy the extremely smart-pilled and quotable champ late great david graber writes western intellectual traditions have always tended to assume that humans powers of reason exist first and foremost as a way of restraining our baser instincts the assumption can already be found in plato and aristotle and was strongly reinforced when classical theories of the soul were adopted into christianity and islam yes the argument went we all have animalistic drives and passions just as we have our powers of creativity and imagination but these impulses are ultimately chaotic and antisocial reason whether in the individual or the political community exists to keep our lower nature in check to repress channel and contain potentially violent energies in such a way that they do not lead to chaos and mutual destruction the emergence of bureaucratic populism as i've been describing it corresponds to a complete reversal of this conception of rationality to a new ideal one most famously summed up by david hume that reason is in ought to be the slave of the passions rationality in this view has nothing to do with morality it is a purely technical affair an instrument a machine a means of calculating how to most efficiently achieve goals they could not themselves be in any way assist in rational terms reason cannot tell us what we should want it can only tell us how best to get it in essence it's fun to manage to do complicated or stressful things and that's a huge part of video games in general from an analytical perspective we often talk about concepts of fantasy and power in games but from a design perspective those aren't really very useful concepts instead designers like to think about the feelings you want to elicit in a player and how the balance of challenge and reward creates those feelings the kind of stress that this challenge creates is the flip side of the satisfaction that we get from labor the good feelings that you get when you clean or gather up fruits or build something are counter balanced by the stress of a messy chaotic world okay but what does this all have to do with economies and what does this have to do with resident evil game genres are usually named for core mechanics and resident evil is a survival horror franchise horror is when the game makes you afraid but what are survival mechanics you could try saying their mechanics that mediate whether or not the player character is alive but health is a prime example of that and yet lots of games that aren't survival games have health as a mechanic i think the best way to define it is that the balance between the challenge of surviving and the reward of progression through the game is the core focus of the gameplay survival as a mechanic is the labor of staying alive you could think of it like a job simulator where the job is not to get munched by a zombie so video game economics economies exist in video games wherever resources are exchanged between parties in prey the item recycler is a kind of economy because your resources are converted and exchanged and you get a different resource back along the same lines skill points that can be spent fungibly into a skilled tree are a kind of video game economy there is a mechanical bleed between experience points and video game currency where a lot of games will let you spend the points that you got in a level on rewards whether the game calls those points currency or not video game economies are complex and wide-ranging and in some cases extremely predatory where the economy is priming players for spending real actual money on in-game purchases where their real money translates into video game currency which cannot translate back here however thankfully that is not the case economy actually comes from a greek word for household management and in this regard i think it's interesting to see how economies within games interplay with inventory management specifically in resident evil games tend to either be more inventory management and puzzle focused or more combat focused and feature explicit trade with currency remember the six slots that chris redfield had in resident evil one well in resident evil 4 leon has one two three four uh a lot looking at this it's safe to say the puzzle of inventory management is now a thing of the past and yet it is still possible to run out of space if you do so and want more you have to see the most delightful character in the game welcome the vendor a bafflingly cockney man in deep rural spain wearing a face mask and a hooded trench coat is an iconic example of resident evil camp a character who exists only to give a face and voice what are you buying to the economy mechanics and yet instantly a fan favorite what are you selling likewise in resident evil village there is a jolly returned fellow called the duke who operates a traveling pop-up shop just like the vendor which appears wherever you go and allows you to top up ammo upgrade guns buy more inventory space sell unnecessary items and even improve your character stats consider that in resident evil village there are puzzles you can complete to give you big crystals which sell for a lot of money allowing you to upgrade your inventory size or make other significant changes this is remarkably similar to puzzles in the remakes which you solve in order to get extra slots in your inventory in resident evil 4 as opposed to previous games enemies drop items when they die which are determined in part by random chance when you boot up nemesis on normal mode there are a precise number of handgun bullets you can get through the entire game not so in resi 4 or rezzy village interestingly although the games haven't strayed into the toxic predatory world of in-game purchases randomized item drops do rely on a similar game logic to gambling and we could go into how this kind of game psychology is inherent to games that bring currency and trade mechanics in however what i'd like to focus on is that in rezzy there is clearly a push and pull between inventory management and economy mechanics and that this is tied closely to a push and pull between puzzle and combat and if we're going to acknowledge that i'm just going to say that right economy mechanics aren't fun inventory management can be fun currency management cannot people don't like to be overly critical of resident evil 4 and i'm aware that i already have been and i'm trying not to burn through my goodwill with the resi fandom but at the same time i think it's extremely worth our while to consider the ways that the design of four led to the design of five which led to the design of six the human race requires judgment in other words to what extent is everyone's favorite rezzy responsible for the crimes against gaming that came afterwards in particular i'm talking about the vendor i'm sorry comrades but you knew this capitalist dog was going to get it eventually no matter how funny his accent is what are you selling in re4 there was the vendor a thinly veiled in-universe explanation for the currency and purchasing that had been added in re5 the thin veil has blown away like a tissue in a hurricane and the economy mechanics simply appear between each level with no diegetic explanation on top of that re5 was co-op and added a lot of new mechanics to the base of four to accommodate that rezzy six threw yet another boatload of additional unnecessary mechanics on top of that with the push and pull between puzzles and inventory management versus combat and economy mechanics i think we can pretty solidly argue that resi 4 5 and 6 are an observable progression of feature creep leading to the awful bloated mess that nearly killed the entire franchise we'll talk about this more later but village clearly recycles a lot from four and while it is itself a masterpiece just like four was i find myself asking is my favorite large sun the beginning of the end is the duke a herald of an oncoming progression of feature creep in this new resident evil trilogy are video game economies bad well capitalist ones are yes i was really expecting some kind of response from cia fm boy for that one i'm an anarchist what what since when socialism can exist with markets but tankies don't admit that the only problem with capitalism is monopolies that's not what anarchist means the problem with the left today is what what i'm a leftist you literally work for the cia i'm still a human being jesus christ examining the difference between what makes inventory management and resident evil fun and what makes economy mechanics distinctly less so reveals the core thesis of design philosophy here inventory management like a job simulator it's fun because it's a little stressful in a specific way that you can master and draw satisfaction from you are succeeding at the job of not getting munched and that feels good when however you get currency be it money or points for shooting zombos only to spend that money on more big gun and more space to fit more bigger gun in the stress has been designed out you're not supposed to think about it and yet you still have to you still have to make decisions about what to spend your currency on and in creeps a new kind of stress this stress however isn't fun this is the paralysis of choice stress this is the what if i spend my money badly stress the sold my soul to the company store stress this isn't the rewarding challenge of a skill that can be mastered this is the nagging feeling that whatever you do you could have done something better but not in a way that you understand there's nothing there to get good at but the game still makes you think about it long enough to doubt yourself i say that this gets at the core of the design because everything in resident evil is a finely woven balance between frustration and progression resident evil isn't a franchise that takes you on a roller coaster of different emotions instead it's a bit more like dark souls there's one feeling all the time but it feels really good it's a bit like a job simulator feeling but more extreme it's like you paid off all your debts to tom nook in animal crossing turned around and said okay now give me the hard stuff that's the feeling it's the rhythm it's the stressful fun of resident evil and the labor of survival horror it feels so good to get it right because that feeling is all about discovering a new set of skills and then mastering them and the absolute peak of those feelings is part 4 speed running let's talk a bit more about stressful fun i've been talking for insert video length here about resident evil game design now and a clear emerging pattern is that where other games employ a balance between challenge and progression resident evil users challenge in harmony with progression it's like what i talked about with the fixed camera angles before a symbiotic relationship between how stressful a game is and how fun a game is being a resident evil fan is a little like the perfect relationship even when it's stressful it's a little bit fun too but ladies if your man is constantly boring you with call of duty aesthetics and is all the wrong kinds of stressful you're dating resident evil 6. dump him honey stressful fun is the same kind of apparent oxymoron as horror game do people really want to be frightened when they're playing a game isn't gaming supposed to be relaxing you shouldn't want to spend your free time draining a slime-filled bathtub with a zombie in it to find a key to a swamp puzzle should you let's explore the sick little minds of resident evil fans horror fans more generally and talk about why people enjoy being stressed we'll start with specific examples where re is an absolute peak form to illustrate my point in the raccoon city police station all the lights are out of course they are don't think about it too hard some zombie ran around with a hammer smashing all the light bulbs so you have to look around the station with a flashlight which casts a narrow beam searching for everything with a torch is stressful because it makes the active searching more technically difficult and that added stress makes all scenes in the dark scarier we love to philosophize about the human tendency to be afraid of the dark but this is something else like think about it would you rather have a torch or just not have one it's actually scarier to have a torch in a game than just be in a dark environment only a little part of any room is visible to you at a time which adds a whole extra level of complexity to the simple act of just looking at stuff it's exactly the kind of change that makes gameplay a little more stressful in exactly the way that makes it more fun you constantly worry that your beam will move across a spooky little guy and you'll have to switch to fight mode but at the same time searching with the flashlight is a discernable skill you can master which feels really good the earliest rooms that still have lights on are the rooms where there are typewriters which you use to save the fact the lights are on in all safe rooms makes an enormous difference to your experience of the space these are your comfort zones in between zombie-filled corridors of the rest of the station which you know you can fall back on when the stress is too intense but by the time you make it to the top floor you probably will have developed a level of comfort with the torch and gotten used to lit rooms being safe and then you enter the library which is well lit and seems safe at first and then you plummet through rotten floorboards onto the lower level and get swarmed by a load of zombies at once see how the game gave you a basic stressful situation to master and then right at the point where you were getting used to it the game completely [ __ ] with your sense of safety in exactly the same way the main hall of the station is a safe room for almost all of the game and enemies can't come in safe rooms but when mr x shows up and follows you around the building he gives no [ __ ] and walks right into the main hall anyway leave me alone go away for another example let's think about the kennels in the lower level of the police station where you find the parking lot the morgue the shooting range the generator room the holding cells and the kennels i love this dumb little game why are all these things next to each other it's like the art museum part of the station is just offices and the parts that are actually a police station are just like shoved in the basement right where was i in the lower level of the police station you encounter a bunch of zombie dogs obviously the idea of a dog that doesn't die when you shoot it is one that would send a shiver down the spine of any american police officer but here it isn't the monster design but an innovation of level design that's scary the scariest part of this whole level is the doggie doors there are little gaps in the walls that let dogs run around and get between rooms you wouldn't expect them to be able to get to and in all the hallways there are these weird barricades that stop you from being able to move straight forwardly but the dogs can jump clean over them the level design hampers your movement while at the same time giving them extra ways to move more easily it feels more realistically scary in the sense that it resembles another sentient mind hunting you it feels like a real animal is coming after you especially in contrast to the zombies the dogs are really not smart when you get a good look at them running into walls and botching basic turning mechanics but they don't need to be sparked to be scary they're dogs what makes a dog scary in real life is its speed and ferocity and the game replicates that perfectly by giving the dogs extra ways to maneuver the map that you can't use and effectively blocking off your points of ingress and egress basically the same concept is at play on a much much larger scale in resi iii nemesis nemesis is just set to follow you around the shortest possible path but he can also jump really high and far if you manage to get too far away and he occasionally just busts through walls creating shortcuts that you wouldn't have video games are magical things and different people express their love of video games in different ways some of us show how much we love resident evil by getting a tattoo of the nemesis on our ass others express our love by making hours upon hours of video essay content about it and others still express their love by learning to play games really really really fast let's talk about speed running to want to dedicate so much of your time to the minute details of mastering an almost completely non-transferable skill play and replay a game until all possible appeal and basic visceral fun has gone out of it and past the point where it transforms from a piece of art into an unknowable other mechanical and cold the green reigning code of the matrix streaming down before your unblinking eyes you have to want to suffer at least on some level right speedrunners are people who like to suffer and gamers are people who deserve to suffer so in that sense they fit in really well the human race requires judgment in a video about speedrunning notorious beaver botherer h bomberguy said that speedrunners enjoy a sort of logistical fun like the pleasure you'd get from having your taxes done early and i'd like to expand on the distinction between that and what i'm talking about here because i think that while similar they are distinct to be clear i think harry's right on the money that speedrunners enjoy a sort of logistical fun of getting games done as fast as possible but also i think that normal people don't enjoy games the way that speed runners do necessarily or sometimes they do and that's what's so interesting about resident evil when people get into mario 64 certainly they aren't very interested in completing the game as fast as possible but speedrunners are fundamentally these are different experiences when you play resident evil though the beginner player and a speedrunner both want it to be over as soon as possible albeit for different reasons when nemesis appears at the start of resident evil 3 nemesis i cannot wait until the end of the game when i'll pull out my great big gun and put it in his mat wait we did this joke already each section of the game puts pressure on the player to complete it and move on to the next and each game design element makes that a struggle and so the basic appeal of playing these games works a lot like how speedrunners actually approach a game the developers seem to be in conversation with the speedrunners too viewing them as their most dedicated fans in residue remake when you blow up the wall to get a final medallion in the west storage room that makes a lot of noise and noise of course attracts liquors naturally you'll try and get out of there as fast as possible and that's why the developers put a unique hold button obstacle blocking your path to the library you have to hold and wait to move the bookshelf with a liquor right behind you it's agonizing this is part of what i was getting at the start of the video this is a part of everyone's experience even though you could technically do things differently there's a different exit to that room even that's just how sharp the world mechanics and enemy encounter design are the people who like resident evil are people who enjoy stressful fun and the people who like stressful fun are people who will like resident evil but the people who like it the most the ones who really need hardcore [ __ ] make it even more stressful for themselves on purpose after speedrunners began trying their hand at speedrunning the early games highly competitive players started doing no damage runs where as the name suggests you have to get to the end of the game without ever once being hit by any attack from there the speed runners of the rezzy franchise really entered sicko mode this was the birth of the knife only run where players aren't even allowed a gun in some ways this run is interestingly easier because you have far fewer items to manage in the inventory but in other ways uh you have to defeat an entire city full of zombies with only a knife 3b guys came up we bastards and i started stabbing [ __ ] out the horses what's particularly interesting about the speedrunning community in the resident evil games is that when the developers came to make resident evil 1 remake they put in a ton of extra modes one of them is called real survival and it's based on early versions of the original where the item boxes weren't connected and you just had to know where the items were if you put them down which is kind of a fun development note but also the item boxes were connected in the final game because it was just kind of bad to have them disconnected other modes though seem to be made especially for speed runner challenges one mode is called odz or one dangerous zombie where occasionally instead of the zombies that were supposed to be in a room there'll be one very dangerous zombie a zombie covered in grenades who runs at you when you enter meaning if you shoot him you die instantly the first thing here is obviously just what the [ __ ] who would want this you'd have to be sick to play the game this way and yet people do the second thing is the developers didn't just patch in this game mechanic they wrote an entire backstory for the zombie he's covered in grenades because he's a member of the team the protagonists came to the mansion looking for they made him canon they wrote the one dangerous zombie in as a canonical character i just can't get over this running grenade zombie what an awful thing to do to yourself damn that's hardcore i mean i've heard do you think that was all did you think that was the most extreme mode you fool you buffoon the most extreme mode in resident evil 1 remake is called invisible enemy mode and when you turn it on every enemy in the game turns invisible this isn't normal gaming that isn't logistical fun that isn't fun is it does that sound fun to you because to me that sounds [ __ ] incredible i can't even pretend i don't get it i've got the resident evil fever that sounds amazing to me my favorite thing about the odz mode is that once you switch it on it's just on forever and you can't turn it off no matter how much you restart the game so if you turn it on and then you try invisible enemy mode sometimes you'll go in a room where you think you know how many invisible zombies there are instead there'll just be one invisible dangerous zombie who runs at you and if you hit him he explodes killing you instantly and i say again this sounds amazing this is the appeal of playing resident evil this is it some sort of bug crawls in your ear when you play these games and you start to enjoy absurd punishing misery it should be awful it makes no sense but it [ __ ] rules different people express their passion about resident evil in different ways and i'm not a speed runner i'll never be a speed runner i played all of untitled goose game on the day it came out and that was maybe the one time in my life i was in the top 100 fastest playthroughs of any game just for a fleeting moment the way i process my resident evil fever is by writing about it and that's why i want to share something i think is really special here both in appreciation of the games themselves and the people who play them at an unthinkable and frightening speed that i will never understand if you complete resident evil remake in invisible enemy mode in less than five hours the game gives you a little unlockable there's a bonus picture of chris and jill that says well done and then it shows you this letter thank you for taking the time to play all the way through biohazard resident evil if you're reading this letter i salute you you are a truly remarkable player i imagine you must have had some pretty memorable experiences along the way the pain of seeing the game over screen time after time the sweet taste of victory after you finally beat the game the feelings of camaraderie you share with your character the excitement and the overwhelming sense of dread we believe games are more than just the product of a team of developers it takes the support of dedicated players like you to make a game worthwhile for this reason we are truly delighted when someone enjoys one of our games as thoroughly as you have therefore on behalf of the entire staff please allow me to express our gratitude and congratulate you on a job well done thank you very much for playing shinji makami part 5 everything you love over again before we wrap up i'd like to touch on something else about how resident evil 7 and 8 came together and by extension a big strength of the design of the whole series i think it's pretty obvious to people that resident evil 7 reuses a lot of design elements from the original game i mean the baker ranch is pretty spencer mansion-esque and actually you can find a document that confirms that diegetically the same architects that made the spencer mansion refurbished the baker ranch which is a pretty good in-world explanation for why there are a lot of literally identical puzzles in both actually it's the same architectural company the original architect went missing in the 60s while the baker ranch was refurbished in the 90s sorry this is deep lore just bear with me one second this makes me think of how they wrote a backstory for the one dangerous zombie it's a justification for the in-game design people in the same company were copying what the original genius architect made for example the shotgun can only be retrieved by finding a broken shotgun and replacing it because the door to that area is a trap triggered by the weight of the gun it's a reference to the trick ceiling that worked the same way in the original which first spawned the iconic line you were almost a jill sandwich rezzy village is if you think about it a near-carbon copy of rezzy iv more action-focused spooky village mutated villages there is even a tall aristocrat who chokes you oo woo etc one small thing i found really charming though within heisenberg's dialogue he calls chris redfield a boulder punching [ __ ] okay that's cheesy but it's also quite self-deprecating for the series to even bring up that judgment i find it endearing and optimism inspiring that the developers behind village were confident enough in their game and in the renewed success of rezzy as a franchise to poke some fun at one of the worst games in the series the way resi 7 and 8 recycle bits and pieces from previous games sounds like it should be fan service but it comes across as something else the opposite fan salvation after the previous two games were such nightmares betraying everything that had ever made the franchise good it manages to create a fresh experience that at once welcomes new players with open arms and introduces them to the core experience of what resident evil is really about and at the same time says to the older players who are burned by the series's mistakes we know what was good about our franchise come on in welcome home drain the bathtub there's a key in there for you the biggest strength of the series as we come to the resident evil renaissance is their ability to recognize what was great about the originals the spin-offs the scrap projects and hey even what worked well about the worst games they've made and bring it all back together into one cohesive fun terrifying experience it's everything you love over again the music in this video is made by molly noyes for the channel with additional tracks from the album rainbow road by patricia taxon i'd like to thank quill at quillightful on twitter who made my claire redfield costume sean tim and dj mule who lent their voices to the quotes in this video my supporters on patreon who make this all possible and you the viewer for watching all the way to the end if you want to support my work you can do so at patreon.com sophiefrommars and for two dollars or more than two dollars you can watch the final part of this series and all my videos early when they're done it'll be public on new year's eve but i'm trying to get everything done before christmas so i can finally relax please pray for me actually give me money on patreon that's a lot more genuinely helpful um anyway i think this one came out even better than part one and i can't wait to get on to the ideology of resident evil next time thanks for watching again and i'll see you soon bye for now [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sophie from Mars

Views: 93,410

Keywords: resident evil, resident evil 1 remake, resident evil 2 remake, resident evil 3 remake, shinji mikami, lady dimitrescu, resident evil village, sophie from mars, resimania, video essay, game design, analysis, claire redfield, cosplay, umbrella

Id: ewXZ9KQIQVw

Length: 83min 31sec (5011 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021