T w e n t y S i d e d
And so we come to the end of Resident Evil 5. Chris posted his final thoughts on the game on his site. He puts Resident Evil 5 in historical context and talks about the trajectory of the Resident Evil franchise. This is obviously his wheelhouse more than mine, so give his post a look if you’d rather hear from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
What a strange game. Obviously this sort of story makes me crazy on a fundamental level. I doesn’t matter if the stupidity is intentional or not, I spend the entire time arguing with the storyteller in my head. The entire premise of a story that is [attempting to be] both ridiculous and scary runs directly counter to my sensibilities.
But let’s shove the story off to one side and look at the gameplay. I think this was an interesting entry in a very narrow sub-genre. There aren’t very many games built around two-player co-op like this. Most of the mechanics work pretty well. The game doesn’t just “allow” for co-op play, it’s built around it. It both encourages teamwork and rewards you for it.
Arenas almost always have multiple points of attack, and it’s impressive how balanced it was. We didn’t end up competing for targets, getting in each other’s way, or confused about what the other person was doing. The various mechanics for opening a door / giving your buddy a boost / shoving a thing together were simple but fun. The rescue mechanic was a good way to encourage you to stick together while also giving you a little leeway to break up and explore. The players are encouraged to stick together without resorting to the strictness of (say) Left 4 Dead.
But then there were a few baffling design decisions. The double-jeopardy of quicktime events where you both die if one of you fails is a bad twist on an already horrible mechanic. There was a bit in this week’s episode where one player gets trapped in a cage with nothing to do for several minutes, and I have no idea what the game designer was thinking when they came up with that.
And then there’s the mechanic where breaking a box is more likely to give ammo for your partner than for the person who broke the box. That was deeply annoying, although I think the blame for that should go to the horrible inventory system. There’s nothing wrong with players collecting stuff for each other, but doing so in a game where you’re always starved for space is just a flow-breaking killjoy. Having your buddy hand you bullets just when you need them is great. Having your buddy say, “Hang on. Do you have free inventory space? Stop what you’re doing and come over here. I need to pick up this object and I don’t have space and I need to trade with you and maybe we can consolidate some of these item stacks and also hurry up we need to pick up these bullets before they despawn” is terrible. That’s the opposite of teamwork.
The entire end sequence in the volcano was a showcase for all of the game’s failings. The story was taking center stage, the cutscenes reached peak absurdity, there were tons of very demanding quicktime events, and it was somewhat muddled what the players were supposed to be doing.
I’m not sure what we’ll be playing next. We’re still hashing it out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this goofy game from Capcom’s middle period. Thanks for watching.
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The ammo system, if it’s pulling from the same logic as RE4, is designed to always give you ammo for a weapon you’re not using at the “moment” / haven’t been using for a while.
In RE4 this was to encourage you to switch up weapons, and playstyles, and prevent you from becoming too comfortable with one single tool (and in the case of the Mine-Thrower, to keep you from stockpiling too much ammo at once), and acted in tandem with the “active difficulty” system.
But RE4 had a much more spacious inventory and had a system where you wouldn’t get ammo for a gun type you hadn’t bought / acquired, this doesn’t have either of those safety nets and so the problem with that system is amplified. It’s frustrating to get ammo you can’t pick up and store for later or use immediately, and you can’t easily change weapons to use it without gun juggling with your partner.
I don’t know if this game would work anywhere as well with the attache case system, I’m tempted to say it would be better, but the 9 square is quick, simple, and easy to understand, especially when accessing inventory doesn’t pause the game play.
Either way the inventory system or the ammo drop logic needed a rehaul, and they didn’t do ot.
I think the 3×3 square could have worked if they had modified it slightly. For example, as Shamus mentioned, a space for your current armor (which you never need to actually use as an item in combat). Or a “send to your partner” space, so you can trade items even if both inventories are full. Or have the ability to push items to your partner, even if they’re nowhere nearby, without even needing to pick it up first. That almost completely eliminates the juggle of clearing a space in your inventory, picking up the item, going over to your partner, and having both players stop what they’re doing to inventory manage the trade. Just have a button to pick up the item, and a second to pass it to your partner.
The next game in the series, RE6, was also co-op oriented, but since I never played it with another person I don’t know how it’d handle its mechanics. For instance, in single player mode while you’re still always joined by an AI partner they don’t collect or spend ammo and there’s no way to exchange inventory items. I do not know how this changes in co-op (obviously they’re not going to leave one of the players with infinite ammo). No idea what happens with QTEs either.
I do know that they at least added a “second-wind” mechanic to skirt through the issue of dying if the other player doesn’t reach you on time, where you can try to kill some enemies while dazed and if you score a kill your dying state is stopped and you get to go back to playing normally, albeit at minimum health. And while that entry is generally seen as the one where the franchise jumped the shark the complaints were generally about the excessive action shlock of the game (did I mention one of the enemies is a human transformer?) and not the gameplay itself, which was more or less streamlined. There are no more obligatory tank controls, for instance (though you can still keep them if you fancy the extra challenge), and all guns just get added to your inventory forever once picked up, so you’re never in a situation where you have ammo for a gun you don’t have.
Anyway, good luck picking up a new title. How about Portal 2? That’s a fun game to play co-op, though it’s probably too short and I don’t know how much commentary you can make on what’s basically a bunch of samey-looking environments.
Also: “Lots of money spent, lots of people died, all so one man with a bad moustache could get the orgasm he always wanted. That is the actual plot of Resident Evil 6. It’s like if Lexx had the same budget as an Avengers movie.”, Noah Caldwell-Gervais.
I played the Leon campaign with a friend at some point. It was pretty fun in a schlocky sort of way but I hesitate to call it a good game, lol. Still, anything’s a good time when you play it with a friend.
RE6 still had a segment like this right before the finale for instance. It makes sense to stick the AI in there for one setpiece, but it seems really weird to have these parts with games very clearly designed with co-op in mind.
That cage scene actually makes perfect sense. You know how – when you’re playing co-op – you always have to pause when your buddy has to go to the bathroom? It’s disruprtive, wastes your time, and totally breaks your immersion!
But with scenes like that, you now have a built-in bathroom break! So, next time when your buddy asks for you to pause the game so he can go pee, you can just tell him to hold it in, and wait for the appropriate scene!
I already commented on the stream last week, but I’d just like to reiterate how much I liked it! Can’t wait for the next game!
I recall that the game you played a long time ago — Obscure — had a co-op mode, but am not sure if anyone could play it again …
A friend of mine actually did a co-op LP of that game really recently
Glad I was able to make it to the final stream at least! What a confusingly silly game. It felt something like an improv-by-committee plot, but where all of the “yes and…” was a genre change. Definitely got some Terminator 2 vibes from the ending, along with perhaps a little Akira, but like the rest of the game leading up to it, there isn’t enough commitment to be campy fun, enough spectacle to be impressive, or enough thematic consistency to be thought provoking.
Fun note about RE5. You remember that scene where (I’m going off of very old memories here) Jill and Wesker end up at Ozwell Spencer’s house? And this is the only time in the entire series where we actually see Spencer, even though he’s the most talked-about person in the entire backstory, and multiple people speculate about what his real motivations might be (since nothing Umbrella does actually makes any sense)? And it turns out that he basically thought of Wesker as his son, and wanted to engineer him into a godlike being to replace humankind? Even though it’s not clear what exactly what he was doing to that end and Wesker already had his own stupid “make me superhuman with viruses” plan that they retconned in with Code: Veronica?
This is all actually reused material from an early build of Resident Evil 4! One odd thing about the series up until at least RE5 is that every game seemed to start as an attempt to do something radically different from what they ended up doing. This was never more true than in the development of RE4, which was so tumultuous that they ended up spinning off into a couple of other projects… but more on that in a second. After RE3, which itself was meant to be a very different game than Nemesis as it released, putative director Hideki Kamiya had big plans for RE4. He wanted to get away from Raccoon City (since they blew it up, might as well) and the cast they’d established, and go in a radically new direction mechanically and tonally. He had the idea for a character named Tony Redgrave, who would track down Ozwell Spencer, his more-or-less adoptive father, to his mansion on Mallet Island and sort out some sort of mystery related to Tony’s superhuman abilities. Yes, Tony would be a superhuman like Wesker became in later games, with incredible strength and agility, which would lend itself to Kamiya’s other big idea: he wanted to make a game centered around melee combat. Stylish melee combat, with a dynamic camera in all-3D environments. Of course, it would basically turn out that all of Spencer’s nonsensical ideas about engineering virus weapons that radically alter human physiology were never about bioweapons, or running a successful business; he had the motivation he’s revealed to have in RE5: replacing a flawed humankind with a new, superior breed of superhumans of his own devising.
So while Hideki Kamiya was pitching his main idea for the gameplay, a radical change from previous RE games’ gun-centric survival horrror, a stylish melee action brawler with a superhuman protagonist set on resolving his old baggage tracking down a mysterious antagonist in a giant gothic European castle on Mallet Island, someone (likely series creator and producer Shinji Mikami) gave Kamiya a very, very good piece of advice: make this game, but don’t make it a Resident Evil game; make this a new IP that won’t be weighed down by the existing brand. And just like that, Devil May Cry came into existence, and from it, the character action brawler genre. You can see nods to this in DMC, such as Dante using the alias Tony Redgrave, and in a character also named Tony Redgrave in the backstory of Bayonetta, also directed by Kamiya.
Don’t know about you, but I still want to see the hook man show up in a game. But yeah, probably not a Resident Evil either. Even back then when the previews for that particular build of RE4 were being shown I thought it looked interesting but not particularly RE-like. Of course, we never got to see previews for the hack-and-slash version of the game, which probably would have turned a lot of people away. Like, Jesus, people already complain that the 4-6 entries are too action oriented. Imagine if we had had the DMC-style game instead.
My monitor is dirty, so I read that as:
“Huh? It must be one of those sermons I don’t remember too well.”
The people were ASTONISHED at his doctrine.
There’s one very important detail you forgot: Hideki Kamiya doesn’t like scary games, or horror in general, which was one of the reasons he wanted the combat to be stylish and fancy!
Oddly enough, I’ve seen people note that Resident Evil 4 feels as if it has some of that Devil May Cry DNA inside. Leon making jokes against self-serious scenery chewing villains, for example, and gameplay being separated into chapters that contain rankings of your performance. Nonetheless, yeah, RE4 is probably one of the titles that had the most ridiculous development history.
I really liked these streams and am very happy that RE5 won out. It’s dumb but funny dumb. HALO is dumb but also dull, no PARTNERS!!! and punching boulders there.
Also Shamus griefing Chris so much with the “come on!” button never failed to make me happy!
He wasn’t griefing, he was helping!
Come on, over here, we need to go, come on, I’m helping, come on, the chapter end is over her, this way, come on Partner!
You could play one of the SNES Final Fantasies in 2-player mode (yes that feature exists). I am sure that would be fun.
I appreciate the author’s thoroughness in addressing Mini Crossword potential counterarguments.