Capcom toned down Resident Evil 6’s horror for mass appeal

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   October 3rd, 2012   |  

Uncategorized

The publisher admits it went for a more action oriented approach with its latest game as the horror genre only appealed to a niche market, although they do admit that they tried to retain some horror elements in the game.

Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, the producer of Resident Evil 6, has come out and defended the developer’s approach to the latest game, which many purists of the series are slating for being too action oriented with not enough of the classic horror elements.

Resident Evil 6 is Capcom’s largest project to date with over 400 staff members working on the four separate campaigns of the game. The latest instalment in the series sees Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield, Ada Wong and Jake Muller all have storylines of their own as well as a coop component.

However, fans were worried that the game may be too focused on action and not enough on the survival horror genre which are the series’ roots. Capcom on the other hand have been trying to turn the Resident Evil series into an action horror game since the fifth instalment of the core series and the game’s producer explained why.

When asked if it was possible to make a horror game that could appeal to the masses and sell well, Hirabayashi responded, “I believe you can do it – you can make a horror game with mass appeal.”

However, he went on to explain that a game based solely on horror would have limited appeal than a game with a blend of mainstream action and elements of horror. He said, “I think you can create a really great form of horror entertainment, but if (Resident Evil 6) were the quintessential horror entertainment, it might not have mass appeal. It’ll have nice appeal, unfortunately.”

The producer went on to explain that the need of the hour was to create games that sold well but also conceded that they knew there would come a point where they would lose the old-school Resident Evil fans if they went too far with this idea.

“We’re making games and we need to have mass-market appeal in order to survive. It becomes an issue of tracking one way or the other. How far do we go into horror before we lose the support of the average player?”

According to him, the studio has no issue with making the Resident Evil games terrifying, however, that would reduce the audience of gamers that would be interested in the title and thus the studio would lose out with below average sales.

“I’m fine with pushing it up to 11 in terms of horror. But maybe that’s not something we can do and still be saleable.”

Does that make sense to the reader? Let us know in the comments section below.