Resident Evil 7

Resident Evil 7’s developers on new engine and new first-person perspective


Capcom has published a new interview in which RE7 producer Masachika Kawata and director K?shi Nakanishi revealed some new information about Resident Evil 7. Kawata and Nakanishi talked claimed that Resident Evil 7 will not be a reboot and explained why they decided to use a new game engine, as well as a new camera perspective.

As Nakanishi said about the RE engine powering Resident Evil 7:

“Our artists, programmers, and the whole team are just all really fussy people. We all want to get exactly what we want out of game development. If you’re using a third-party engine or one created by another company, it feels like there are places that you have to reach to scratch an itch compared to when we design an engine ourselves. We want to know exactly how to find our way around an engine. We decided the only way to make the game with the highest quality possible was to make our own engine for it that was dedicated to making this amazing experience. It’s really a sign of the team’s dedication as artists to not only make a new game but a new engine as well.”

Regarding the first-person perspective, here is what Nakanishi and Kawata had to say:

Kawata: Both myself and the director, Mr. Nakanishi, felt if we want people to experience horror and experience it in the most direct, visceral way possible, then literally putting yourself in the position of seeing what the character sees is the best way to do that and so it was our motivation for the first-person camera change.

Nakanishi: Of course it’s a big change, so first we got a prototype working and we put first-person in place and we wanted to see if we could make Resident Evil work in first person. As soon as we had it up and running we were really confident that this was the way to move forward. We were really happy with the way that Resident Evil feels in first person.

Resident Evil 7 will be released this January!