Speaking with the Daily Star, Resident Evil 2 producers Tsuyoshi Kanda and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi revealed that the toughest part of remaking Resident Evil 2 was the giant alligator encounter.
KANDA: [laughter] 20 years ago, the graphics that we had weren’t photoreal and that meant you could get away with… a lot of things. Things that maybe you couldn’t today. You could be fantastical with the creatures and it wouldn’t stand out too much.
So making a giant alligator - that’s a real challenge [laughter]. Trying to update that into a game where you’ve got scanned faces, motion-captured actors, photorealistic environments… it’s really, really hard. Where do you even start!
HIRABAYASHI: To make that convincing in any way was really tough. For a while, we were just thinking, ‘shall we just cut the alligator altogether? It’s too difficult’. But we knew there’d be a fan backlash, we knew we had to create one of these perfect fan-favourite moments, so… it’s a tough one, but it’s there.
It was tricky to do without changing the game’s tone a lot. We’re competing with people’s memories with this game, too, and that’s really hard. Trying to make a convincing scene where a human-sized character - a guy with a knife - is taking on an alligator… that’s really silly. People don’t remember it as silly because the whole game was groundbreaking at the time, but that moment was ridiculous. It was a difficult process for us, making that work today.
KANDA: It might be easier for us to answer that question when the game comes out though - we have our own thoughts and what we liked and what we didn’t, and people might feel differently to us on that level.
HIRABAYASHI: Perhaps they have the perfect version of the game in their heads and what we do undermines that? We’re just trying to make a game that feels right and feels like what you might remember from a gameplay perspective the first time.
The Resident Evil 2 remake is due for release on January 25th, 2019 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. You can check out Kai's hands-on preview from E3 2018 right here.
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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