Today, through the blog of Capcom, the company published an interview with producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi, responsible for making Resident Evil 7. In conversation, they talked about the first-person perspective of the game, the name change and they have also made it clear that the new release is not a reboot.
“It’s not a reboot and we’re not throwing away the series’ canonical storyline,” Nakanishi said. ” It’s the new numbered title in the series and it’s a sequel to the existing mainline series titles.”
“After I say that and you try the demo, you may say “Really?”, because it looks nothing like any of that, but trust me,” he continued. “We need to have a bit of mystery in survival horror, so we’re trying to make you wonder when you play it how could this possibly be connected? That’s part of the appeal.”
Moreover, one of the changes in the series that attracted the most attention is that Resident Evil 7 will have a first-person perspective. In this situation, Kawata said that this decision was made for players to experience the horror of more direct and visceral way possible.
Nakanishi, meanwhile, said that they were interested in making Resident Evil 7 a game in first person, but first made several working prototypes. “As soon as we had it up and running we were really confident that this was the way to move forward,” he said. “We were really happy with the way that Resident Evil feels in first person”.
For the name of the new game, Kawata explained that they intended to combine the title of the West and Japan, to give the players an understanding that the game is in one place now.
“Obviously you can tell we wanted to merge the two titles we’ve had. As fans may know, the game has been called Biohazard ever since the beginning in Japan, and it’s been called Resident Evil in the West. We really want to have the big, impactful feeling of the series being in one place right now, and having one future it’s heading towards. To do that, we brought the two titles together into one with Resident Evil 7 biohazard. It’s the opposite in Japan, it’s BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil.”
Resident Evil 7 will debut on January 24, 2017 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC. The version for the system of Sony will feature support for PlayStation VR.
