LOS ANGELES, California (AFP) — There were screams of joy when Playstation announced during its keynote address that the seventh chapter of the hit gaming series ‘Resident Evil’ was to be released in January.
However, the screams of joy turned to screams of terror for some gaming enthusiasts when Capcom, the game’s publisher, allowed them to play the virtual reality version of their ‘survival horror’ story in their very own house of horror in the midst of the E3 convention.
The demo sees you in a dilapidated, dark and disheveled house and you have to find your way out of it. Through torchlight, you examine your way through the rooms trying to find clues or useful objects.
But, like every ‘Resident Evil’ game, there is always the walking dead to be wary of.
Masachika Kawata, the producer of ‘Resident Evil Biohazard’ was at E3 to talk about the game – specifically the virtual reality elements of it.
“VR brings an absolutely unprecedented level of immersion to the horror experience of ‘Resident Evil’. It’s a totally new dimension as to how you experience the fear especially because in VR the headset tracks your movement and you can look around the environment using your own head and see everything around you. It’s going to blow you away completely,” he said.
“It’s really fun to work on the game and to think of when the gamer is immersed in the experience what kind of things can we do to shock and scare them and I really have fun watching people play these games and seeing them enjoy the experience that we’ve crafted for them. In particular last year’s E3 we showed our ‘Kitchen’ tech demo for Playstation VR which was known as Morpheus at the time. We actually set up a camera and filmed a lot of the people that came to our booth to play this intense VR horror experience and we took the video back with us to Japan to show the people on the team because they don’t really get much of a chance to see normal players experiencing the stuff that they make and they were really happy to watch those videos because the reactions were really amazing especially the American players who are very over the top in the way they react whereas Japanese people are much more reserved so watching them scream and shout through the demo was one of the highlights of the show last year and it’s one of the things that makes it worth being a game developer in my opinion,” he added.
But, if being immersed in your own horror story is too much, then Kawata and Capcom have a solution for the faint-hearted.
“The VR element of the game is completely optional so if it genuinely too intense for some players then they can have the option to play in normal mode on their TV screen but apart from that the game is horror but moment by moment there is a kind of balance. There are moments of relief and then there are scary moments so I think overall when you look at it as a piece of entertainment people are going to really enjoy the experience in its totality when they look back and they’re going to think it’s a really great ‘Resident Evil’ experience,” Kawata said.
Capcom have vowed to continue to work on the game and its virtual reality experience until its release early next year.