Capcom details internal clash between dev team and QA in new behind-the-scenes Resident Evil Village video

Developer Capcom has released a fascinating new video giving a behind the scenes look into the development process of the recently-launched Resident Evil Village, providing an unusually warts-and-all insight into the making of the game including a clash between the development team and quality assurance.

Like many games in the past year, development on the title came to a brief halt due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, however, once it resumed it became apparent that the team initally intended for the game to have a far heavier focus on action, with encounters that would feature far more and far more agressive lycans than we got in the final game. However, once the game was passed to the playtesting department, Quality Assurance Manager Shutaro Kobayashi remembers having a “really strong negative reaction” and that “the game’s content was completely divorced from what the development team thought they had made.”

In fact the reaction was so negative, as General Manager Makoto Kadono tells us in the video “I think everyone was panicking. ‘I can’t believe they’re telling us this now.’ ‘Will it be that bad if we don’t fix it?'” and that the general feeling was that the game worked fine as it was. The studio decided to bring together the most outspoken members from QA to a meeting with the development team to talk things out, and as Kadono puts it “To get this right, we had to start by planning the most efficient way to fix it. (…) To make people happy, we need to fix it no matter what.”

It looks like the teams came to an amicable agreement at the end with the teams able to look past their fears of their studio peers being angry at them, even if it did seem like a lot of work. Happily, as director Morimasa Sato tells it “things began to click” and project manager Tatsuo Isoko adds: “in the end, we were able to male a number of adjustments to achieve that “struggle to survive.”

It’s genuinely a fascinating watch and an unusually transparent display of the internal struggles between different departments of getting a high-profile game like Resident Evil Village to fruititon with such a large studio as Capcom. Resident Evil Village is available now on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC and you can check out our verdict here.