Resident Evil Village’s QA Department Really Didn’t Like the Game’s Combat At First

When the team shared a demo version of the game with a focus group of players, they noticed that “The enemies were very aggressive, but the players found they didn’t need to think that hard while playing because of this”.

Sharing the concerns with Quality Assurance Manager Shutaro Kobayashi, he agreed, revealing he had “a really strong negative reaction”, and that “The game’s content was completely divorced from what the development team thought they had made”.

Player reactions indicated that the game had “too many enemies, and they’re overly aggressive” while not having enough ammo to defend themselves. Project Manager Tatsuo Isoko described playing the game as “a real slog”. But despite the criticism, Sato “found the development members at Capcom do a great job of listening”.

The team wanted the theme of the game to be “the struggle to survive”, but in playtests, it seemed more like a struggle to even enjoy the game. Bringing the QA and development teams together seemed to be the solution though, as the developers directly heard the concerns of the testers.

The solution, as revealed by Sato, was to not “make the player panic about by just throwing aggressive monsters at them, (instead) we make them paranoid about if and how they’re going to be attacked. Then, when an enemy appears, it’s relentless.”

Whether you enjoyed Resident Evil Village or not, the video is definitely worth watching for a peek behind the curtains at one of the biggest games of the year. In other Capcom news, the company has had a fourth record-breaking year, Monster Hunter World has sold over 17 million units, and a movie director has accused Capcom of stealing a monster design for Resident Evil Village.

Liam Wiseman is a Freelance News Writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter @liamthewiseman