Slashdot Mirror
Resident Evil 5 Dev Talks Demo Feedback
MTV's Multiplayer blog sat down with Jun Takeuchi, producer for Capcom's Resident Evil 5, about the feedback they've gotten from the game's demo, which has been downloaded over 4 million times. He comments on the changed control scheme, which has generated a lot of discussion and criticism, by suggesting that their decision will become clear once the full game is out. "We understand that there are many people who want to run and shoot at the same time, but it's not the right alignment for the game." He also says the finished game will have shorter loading times, and he briefly discusses the media-fueled race controversy over the fact that Africa's zombies have dark skin. Takeuchi says, "People will be able to play the game and see what it is for themselves." Kotaku recently ran a preview of Resident Evil 5.
In other words, everyone really hated the control scheme, but we don't really care what the customers think. We know better than them. It's not like they've played FPSs or Zombie games before and know what they like.
I played the demo. The controls were horrid. It -acts- like FPS controls, except that you can only turn very slowly, you can't move and shoot, and basically just can't deal with everything that's going on without a lot of grief.
I am by no means King of FPSs, but I know a good control scheme when I use it.
On the other hand, they're following the same tradition that has prevented me from playing every other RE game: Horrid controls.
As for the decision becoming clear once the game's out... It's already clear! Hubris, ignorance and laziness. Period.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Of course, nobody cared that the first 4 games featured white zombies.
Also, I'd imagine that if the game, set in Africa, featured exclusively white zombies, there would be just as much "controversy" surrounding it.
The moron who wrote the article decided that every piece of zombie lore and the objective of every zombie game and movie suddenly is racist if the zombies are black.
"It's like they're all dangerous; they all need to be killed. It's not even like one cute African -- or Haitian or Caribbean -- child could be saved. They're all dangerous men, women and children. They all have to be killed." - like all the other zombie games where you try to save the zombies. Or most modern FPS. Or space invaders. Killing everything has a long tradition in video games.
"this dark, dangerous continent filled with people who only want to do you harm goes back a long, long way." - yeah, the first zombie movies used it, and so did King Kong, the Odyssey, "here there be sea monsters", etc.
"he doesn't really interact with them, he sort of walks through this thing and it's sort of, "Is he there? Is he not?" It's a very strange thing, and it taps into sort of this very racist iconography" - Noninteractive characters in video games are now racist?
"The music that they're using in the trailer is very reminiscent of the music used in Black Hawk Down which was set in Africa -- Somalia" - Oh just give me a fucking break already. You're really stretching this stuff.
This next quote rams my point home:
"The imagery is not the same. It doesn't carry the same history, it doesn't carry the same weight." - So, since the zombies are black, and there's a different history, shooting a black zombie has much more weight than killing a white one. Under this standard, RE4 is full of racism if you look at Spanish history.
Sorry, but the arguments claiming racism were pathetic. Especially the first one:
"Wow, clearly no one black worked on this game." - The only truly racist thing I found in the whole article, because it:
a. creates a stereotype ("all black people think like me, no non-black could possibly think like me")
b. makes a wildly inaccurate assumption based on personal prejudice (see above)
c. is wrong factually (anyone want to make a bet that no Capcom employees working on RE5 are black? Anyone?)
d. is wrong morally (I hope I don't have to explain this)
Could the game be racist? It's possible, I haven't played it yet. Is anything in the trailer that this guy talked about racist? No.
This sentence no verb.
The one thing I still use my Nintendo Wii for is Resident Evil 4. I couldn't believe the difference the motion control scheme made in terms of offering such refreshing game play for a survival-horror style game. I had played RE4 on the PS2 and enjoyed it but the Wii version shames the previous platform releases overwhelmingly.
Literally pointing and shooting at the screen for Resident Evil 4 on the Wii has spoiled my expectations for what Resident Evil 5 was going to be on the PS3/360.
Even if they improve the control scheme (I've played the demo, hate the controls) it's not going to be as fluid and fun (at least in my opinion) as the Wii version of RE4.
Sony and MS need some better wireless guns and controllers for games like this. If fighting games get arcade sticks, racing games get steering wheels, where are the rail gun controllers?
If it plays like RE4, it is perfect.
I am tired of dumbing down games by making every single one of them play like Quake. It is highly unrealistic.
I love RE4, play it all the time, and have never had a problem with the controls, nor have they impacted my performance or enjoyment of the game.
People complained about Silent Hill's control scheme, then they modernized it for SH4 which left the game unplayable for many veterans as you couldn't pick the old, more intuitive scheme.
The control issue is an issue for a very vocal minority.
There's also the spectre of the old racism debate, hovering the background. That debate is only going to get louder and more urgent once the game is released, and is being covered beyond the cosy world of the specialist gaming press, since there's imagery in here that goes beyond the general air of foreign menace that caused a ruckus in the first trailers.
One of the first things you see in the game, seconds after taking control of Chris Redfield, is a gang of African men brutally beating something in a sack. Animal or human, it's never revealed, but these are not infected Majini. There are no red bloodshot eyes. These are ordinary Africans, who stop and stare at you menacingly as you approach. Since the Majini are not undead corpses, and are capable of driving vehicles, handling weapons and even using guns, it makes the line between the infected monsters and African civilians uncomfortably vague. Where Africans are concerned, the game seems to be suggesting, bloodthirsty savagery just comes with the territory.
Later on, there's a cut-scene of a white blonde woman being dragged off, screaming, by black men. When you attempt to rescue her, she's been turned and must be killed. If this has any relevance to the story it's not apparent in the first three chapters, and it plays so blatantly into the old clichés of the dangerous "dark continent" and the primitive lust of its inhabitants that you'd swear the game was written in the 1920s. That Sheva neatly fits the approved Hollywood model of the light-skinned black heroine, and talks more like Lara Croft than her thickly-accented foes, merely compounds the problem rather than easing it. There are even more outrageous and outdated images to be found later in the game, stuff that I was honestly surprised to see in 2009, but Capcom has specifically asked that details of these scenes remain under wraps for now, whether for these reasons we don't know.
There will be plenty of people who refuse to see anything untoward in this material. "It wasn't racist when the enemies were Spanish in Resident Evil 4," goes the argument, but then the Spanish don't have the baggage of being stereotyped as subhuman animals for the past two hundred years. It's perfectly possible to use Africa as the setting for a powerful and troubling horror story, but when you're applying the concept of people being turned into savage monsters onto an actual ethnic group that has long been misrepresented as savage monsters, it's hard to see how elements of race weren't going to be a factor.
All it will take is for one mainstream media outlet to show the heroic Chris Redfield stamping on the face of a black woman, splattering her skull, and the controversy over Manhunt 2 will seem quaint by comparison. If we're going to accept this sort of imagery in games then questions are going be asked, these questions will have merit, and we're going to need a more convincing answer than "lol it's just a game."
"So because no Spanish person complained about RE4, no black person can complain about RE5?"
Ummm, that's not what I said at all. What I'm saying is that in RE4 you go into Spain, all the Spaniards become zombies (or close enough), and you kill them all. In RE5 you go into Africa, all the Africans become zombies, and you kill them all. Just because you kill all the Africans doesn't make RE5 racist, anymore than RE4 was. It's how zombie games are, you kill everyone who becomes a zombie, and everyone becomes zombies. The author is arguing that this basic premise of most zombie games is racist because this one takes place in Africa and the zombies are black. That's BS.
People are free to complain about anything they like. If the article was well thought out and had legitimate concerns, that would be great. But when their complaints are moronic I am also free to rip those complaints to shreds.
"It's a little absurd that you're claiming now the article is racist because of that one overstatement."
The absurdity is all yours, as I never complained the article was racist, I pointed out the one statement in the article that actually was racist and gave precise reasons why it was. It's really (not-Allanis-Morrisette-type) ironic.
BTW, you might want to look up paranoia before accusing someone of it again. Thinking an author is a moron and pointing out his fallacies is not paranoia.
This sentence no verb.