Resident Evil 7 got a surprise announcement at this year’s E3, along with a PlayStation 4-exclusive teaser demo. The game’s shift to first-person as well as the structure of the demo led to obvious comparisons with the cancelled Silent Hills revival PT. But RE7 producer Masachiki Kawata suggests that such parallels are coincidental.
“When PT surfaced we were already into development and we were surprised to see it,” Kawata said. Director Koushi Nakanishi added that “We were already using a first-person perspective before anyone saw PT, so it wasn’t as if we saw that and decided to do the same,” but the team considered another developer going in a similar direction with a storied franchise to be a good omen.
Resident Evil 7 is due to release on January 24, 2017. Check out our full list of upcoming PC games!
The apparitions appearing in parts of the RE7 demo had some fans wondering if the series is taking a supernatural turn, but it seems that’s not the case. “We haven’t turned Resident Evil into a ghost story,” Nakanishi said. ”At the beginning we did consider everything, though - and wondered what we could bring in for more of a supernatural dimension. But we didn’t end up going down that route.”
This is courtesy of an interview with Eurogamer, in which the two also discuss the challenges of designing a game with VR in mind. “Looking at what others are doing with VR, if you want to deal with the comfort issue - because some people do get sick - the most extreme solution is to just not have people moving, to be fixed in place,” Kawata said. “That satisfies the needs of people who need to feel comfortable with VR, but it also limits the game for those who want a full experience. They want to get out into the game going on around them, so we challenged ourselves to make a game that lets them do that.”
