Throughout the marketing phase of Resident Evil Requiem, CAPCOM kept quiet about a few things. One was famously the presence of Leon Kennedy as a playable character, which leaker Dusk Golem swore about for a long time but remained unconfirmed until last month.
Another was the zombies, the key enemy in the whole series. How would they look? What would they behave like? It was only recently that the developers finally opened up about this. In a fresh interview with Gamespot, Game Director Koshi Nakanishi unveiled the twist: to make them more unpredictable, CAPCOM has ensured they retain some of their human behavior.
When making a Resident Evil title, the question of how to present zombies is always something that comes up in discussions. You want to have some variety, but at the same time, if you make too many changes, it doesn't feel like a zombie anymore, so there's always that element or that challenge of designing enemies for a Resident Evil title. In this setting, you're dealing with a lot of zombies who literally just became zombies momentarily or a while ago. It's pretty fresh.
Part of that fear experience is not knowing what the enemy is going to do when they approach you or when you see them, and so if you just had a standard zombie, you probably by now have an idea of what a zombie's going to do. But if you had these zombies here that retained some of their memories or behavior from their previous life, then there's more of a mystery element. You're not exactly sure what they're going to do.
That's certainly an interesting concept. Over the course of the series, zombies did become a bit trite and less scary than they were at first. Will this change in Resident Evil Requiem be enough to make players fear them once again? We'll know in a month when the game will be released across all platforms (PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and X, and Nintendo Switch 2).
Meanwhile, check out everything we know about the latest entry in CAPCOM's survival horror series on this page.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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