We have all been waiting impatiently for the RE2 remake release, and chewing our way through every scrap of info we can get our hands on, so here is another small piece of news to keep the hype train rolling. In a recent conversation with Metro Gamecentral, Game Director Kazunori Kadoi and Producer Tsuyoshi Kanda talked a bit more about the new graphics and visual tweaks they will be employing for the new game, making the graphics almost movie-grade. Here's the excerpt below:
Kazunori Kadoi: The RE Engine is, as you said, the same one from Resident Evil 7 biohazard. Over the process of developing several games with it now we’ve been able to get better at using it and we’ve been able to fine tune the engine as we go along and improve it. So I’m glad to hear you thought it looked good and were able to see an improvement over Resident Evil 7. Our key words for the graphic concepts this time are ‘wetness’ and ‘darkness’. And we’re trying to make it so we have this almost tangible, wet gore that you see on-screen. It isn’t just red-coloured gore, it actually feels really realistic and jumps off the screen at you. That realism also comes across in the characters as well. We’ve used photogrammetry to scan models and add that into the game, and then animated them. So I think every aspect of them really leaps off the screen as feeling almost like a movie-like quality. Also, a less visually obvious aspect of the engine is that the way it’s designed is that it really helps us iterate very quickly, when we’re developing. So we can put things together very quickly and get them up and running, and see how they look. And we can do a lot of process of trial and error, because it isn’t taking a lot of time to commit to things. And that really helps us to work towards getting the kind of visuals you want to express.
Tsuyoshi Kanda: The performances are using full body performance capture, so we’ve got the scanned models who provide the appearance and we’ve got the full performance captures that can be implemented directly in the game. But we actually don’t just put them in and call it a day, we take a look at how the performance feels in a game and then we go in by hand and fine tune aspects – whether that be facial expressions, lighting, detail character animation moments… All those things are actually a level above just a performance capture; it’s also got a certain kind of craftmanship, an artisanal quality.
Artisan graphics.... dear lord. Well, no one likes hand-crafted, small batch graphics like I do, so I will continue impatiently waiting for this title, which drops this year.
