A lot of fans were surprised when Capcom announced that Resident Evil Village, also known as Resident Evil 8, will be coming exclusively on next-gen platforms. After all, earlier rumors suggested that this new RE game was meant to be a cross-gen title. And, industry insider Dusk Golem has shared some details about Capcom’s decision to abandon old-gen platforms.
According to Dusk Golem, Resident Evil Village had a lot of pop-in/long texture loads on old-gen consoles. Thus, Capcom has most likely decided to drop the last-gen versions of the game to make it so it has no loading at all (not limited by last gen hardware) and push the graphic overhaul further without the limitations of last-gen tech.
(2/3) load times because the game has you travelling through most of the Village and had a lot of load zones. Because there's a bigger focus on exploration this would lead to the last-gen console versions having notable issues, and it was holding back how pretty they could make
— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) June 13, 2020
(3/3) certain scenes. So they decided to drop the last-gen versions of the game to make it so the game had no loading at all (not limited by last gen hardware) and push the graphic overhaul further without the limitations of last-gen tech in mind.
— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) June 13, 2020
In case you weren’t aware of, Dusk Golem had leaked some details about Resident Evil Village prior to its official reveal.
Now while this sounds reasonable, we suggest taking it with a grain of salt. After all, this statement is not coming directly from Capcom. There are also – unconfirmed – reports that the trailer had scenes from old and new builds of the game. This could explain the low framerate of the Resident Evil VIllage trailer, as well as the graphical inconsistency between some character models.
It will be interesting to see whether the final version of Resident Evil Village will look better than what Capcom showcased in this initial trailer. It will also be interesting to see how the PC version runs on systems that have HDDs instead of SSDs.
Stay tuned for more!