Resident Evil Village has been largely well-received since it launched last month and is already breaking records on Steam. However, a video titled "Making of Resident Evil Village - The Internal Struggle" released on the Resident Evil YouTube account makes it clear the game's development was heavily impacted by internal conflict and especially by COVID-19.
At the beginning of the video, it's explained that the team wanted Resident Evil Village to be a game about the struggle to survive, a theme that became unpleasantly ironic when the pandemic forced production to a halt. This unexpected pause continued for a full month before the team was able to return to the office. Although the development of Resident Evil Village had begun before Resident Evil 7 was finished, the developers soon realized they needed to overhaul a lot of what they'd already made.
Director Morimasa Sato reports that he spent a full month sitting at home in self-isolation, worrying about the state of the game. When he finally returned to work, the rest of the team agreed with him that Resident Evil Village needed a lot of work or nobody would enjoy playing it. Fortunately, they'd all had a month to sit around and brainstorm ways to fix the game, particularly the combat, which had ended up veering off course. Resident Evil Village is filled with scary moments that wouldn't have hit nearly as hard if Sato and his team hadn't ratcheted up the game's tension in the wake of their month in self-isolation.
The idea of working on a game about the horror of infectious diseases and parasites while living in fear of a very real disease is terrifying. Many shots show the developers working with masks, trying to point out flaws on each other's computers without getting too close and risking infection. It's difficult to imagine how tense those months of development and re-development at Capcom must have been, especially once a focus test and Quality Assurance both had strong negative reactions to the game's demo build. Ethan Winters not being able to die in the game's story is one thing--players losing interest in frustrating, boring combat is something else entirely.
Changing core gameplay balance in the final stages of development is a difficult and risky task even when the developers aren't already on edge, but the Resident Evil Village team decided to make the changes anyway. A meeting was held between QA and the development team to ensure everyone was on the same page and they all began working out the most efficient way to fix the game. With the final deadline looming overhead, the team focused on getting players invested enough to second-guess their decisions. The result was a smashing success. An argument could be made that the pandemic saved Resident Evil Village, though it certainly didn't make for a calm work environment. Hopefully, the production of Resident Evil 9 is going more smoothly.
Resident Evil Village is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
