Highlights

  • Resident Evil games continually evolve, from fixed camera angles to first-person exploration, setting new standards in survival-horror.
  • An open-world format for Resident Evil 9 could offer a fresh take, focusing on interconnected environments and puzzle-driven gameplay.
  • A potential transition to open-world in Resident Evil 9 aligns with the franchise's tradition of pushing boundaries and redefining gameplay experiences.

The Resident Evil games have never been afraid to evolve. With their first-person exploration in Grindhouse and Hammer Horror-inspired settings—a radical departure from the previous trilogy’s third-person-shooter gameplay and B-movie aesthetic—Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village established a brand-new format for the franchise. Now, with rumors that Resident Evil 9 will take the series open-world, it looks like Capcom might once again be pushing the franchise forward into uncharted territory. This could be good news for one particular subset of the Resident Evil fanbase.

Released in 1996, the original Resident Evil was groundbreaking. Fixed cinematic camera angles, tank controls, and resource management provided a template for a generation of survival-horror titles to follow. A decade later, Resident Evil 4’s radical new approach set the template for a generation of third-person shooters. While Resident Evil’s tendency toward experimentation has undeniably caused missteps, it’s also why the franchise has remained one of the gaming industry’s most interesting and important IPs for almost 30 years. It’s also why the persistent rumor that Resident Evil 9 will go open-world has a ring of truth to it.

Dragons Dogma 2 x Resident Evil 9
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What Resident Evil 9's Rumored Open World Could Learn from Dragon's Dogma 2

It's been heavily rumored that Resident Evil 9 could be going open-world and there's a lot it could learn from the recently released Dragon's Dogma 2.

An Open World Resident Evil Seems Like An Inevitability At This Point

Resident Evil is not a franchise that rests on its laurels. Each mainline entry in the series has iterated on previous games, adding something new, rather than simply falling back on a tried and true formula. Many fans are expecting Resident Evil 9 to once again do something completely new, and the persistence of the open-world rumor has gamers speculating about what such a radical change could mean for the franchise. While some have speculated that an open-world Resident Evil risks losing its identity—becoming just another open-world zombie shooter—others are more optimistic about what a more open environment could bring to the franchise, seeing it as the natural progression of Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village's renewed emphasis on exploration.

An Open-World Resident Evil Game Would Likely be Puzzle-Driven

With the first game tasking players with exploring a labyrinthine puzzle-mansion, and Resident Evil 4 being a coherent adventure through a single expansive environment, the Resident Evil series has been at its best when giving players the sense of moving through a large cohesive environment, rather than a series of standalone levels. The recent first-person games have embraced this, focusing on providing intricate, interconnected, immersive environments for the player to explore, with puzzles and tasks that feel naturally integrated into the games' worlds.

An open-world Resident Evil 9 could take advantage of Resident Evil’s exploratory tendencies. Developing on ideas present within Resident Evil Village’s central hub and combining them with the original trilogy’s core design ethos to create a small town (or section of a town), Resident Evil 9 could feature a number of individual buildings, each serving as mini Spencer Mansions with their own challenges and mysteries. A series of locales—a mall, a police station, a cathedral—could function almost like dungeons with unique puzzles and gimmicks, able to be completed out of order, but each providing a piece of a key which would allow the player to progress into newer, more difficult areas.

Eventually, players would have everything they needed to enter a final location—which, if tradition was followed, would likely be an Umbrella research lab. Weapons and items found in the world could be used, in addition to keys and puzzles, to gate off certain areas and limit progression, taking an almost metroidvania approach to world design. NPC interactions and story progress could be non-linear, with various outcomes depending on how players chose to explore the world, rewarding multiple playthroughs and finally bringing to fruition the 'dynamic conversation' system that Capcom promised would be present in Resident Evil 6.

An open world Resident Evil game would likely take particular influence from Resident Evil: Code Veronica . The largest of the ‘traditional’ Resident Evil games, Code Veronica made effective use of its varied, intricate world to set up a series of complex puzzles that often spanned the entire map.

Resident Evil 9 Going Open World Seems Like a Logical Next Step

Mainline Resident Evil games have always come in threes, and each trilogy's third game has always attempted something bigger and bolder than what came before. With that in mind, an open world Resident Evil 9 seems like the logical next step for the franchise’s first-person trilogy—and also the perfect way to pay homage to both the sprawling city-based Resident Evil 3, and the messy but wildly ambitious Resident Evil 6.

Resident Evil 9’s open-world rumors don’t seem to be going anywhere soon, but the Resident Evil franchise is anything but predictable. While fans may be eagerly speculating about the prospect of an open-world Resident Evil 9, only time will tell what Capcom has up its sleeve for its beloved horror franchise.