leoooooon! —
More information to come in next week’s “Oculus Gaming Showcase.”
Sam Machkovech
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Capcom
On Thursday, Capcom announced that its megaton horror series Resident Evil will soon return to virtual reality. But instead of adding a VR mode to the upcoming Resident Evil VIII: Village, slated to launch next month, the game-maker threw horror fans a curveball. The project, as it turns out, is Resident Evil 4 VR, a wildly revised port of the 2005 classic, and it appears to be an Oculus Quest 2 exclusive.
You read that correctly: Quest 2, as opposed to Rift or other PC-VR platforms. No release date or estimate has yet been confirmed.
The VR port was announced as part of the latest announcement frenzy otherwise dedicated to May 7’s RE8, and it confirmed that Oculus Studios and Armature Studios (made up of ex-Metroid Prime developers) are leading the VR port’s production. Because of Armature’s recent ties to Oculus, in terms of releasing exclusive VR games for its Rift and Quest systems, that collaboration points to this game remaining an Oculus exclusive.
Knife in one hand, pistol in the other. It’s time to play Resident Evil 4 in VR.
Oculus / Armature / CapcomAnother angle of knifey-gunney.
Stare down the abyss with weaponry at the ready.
Why use a typewriter to save your game, when you can use it to finger-peck a masterpiece in VR?
Use both hands to reload guns. (Hopefully, this isn’t a pain in the butt to do in VR.)
Assault with a deadly weapon.
Reload with a deadly weapon.
A peek at the revised inventory interface, designed for real-world hand use.
Another angle; you’ll have to look from left to right to manage the interface’s full breadth.
This doesn’t look like a difficult puzzle. But who am I to judge?
Representatives for Oculus and Facebook have so far only described the port as a product for “Quest 2,” as opposed to a more generic platform description that might hint to the “Oculus Link” system, which streams PC games to the otherwise portable Quest headset family. If Facebook wants to clarify any additional ways to play the game, we’ll have to wait for next week’s Oculus Gaming Showcase, which will premiere on Twitch and YouTube on Wednesday, April 21.
The port appears to heavily revise the original game, which launched on Nintendo GameCube in 2005 as a third-person, over-the-shoulder adventure—and one that revolutionized how the series would play for years to come. Some of that action, particularly the twitchy gun-driven combat, will likely be a solid match for the first-person view of a VR game, but RE4‘s cinematic scenes and massive bosses are another story.
Thursday’s debut trailer avoided clarifying exactly how the original game’s more ambitious moments will translate to VR. Instead, Armature and Oculus took the opportunity to show some basic combat, including a moment where the player held a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, along with a VR-friendly inventory management screen, a puzzle that required turning a lever with hands in virtual space, and some “reload a gun using both hands” gimmickry.
Amusingly, this port serves as a reminder that the game’s original 2004 announcement came as part of a “Capcom Five” press conference of exclusive games for Nintendo’s then-struggling GameCube platform. Months later, Capcom was forced to clarify that RE4 would indeed launch on the era’s dominant PlayStation 2 after all, and it wound up being ported to roughly 4,000 other consoles in the 16 years since.