Resident Evil Village

I didn’t catch the Van Helsing similarities, but the P.T thing is extremely obvious. That entire section just feels like a condensed playthrough of P.T.

Started Village of Shadows, and I really don’t like it. Went in from my HC NG+ file where my guns are roughly halfway upgraded, the standard ghouls are taking about 12 handgun shots to put down. And even better, they randomly have armor protecting them from being stunned by the shotgun, so sometimes they’ll get knocked down, but most of the time they just tank the shots. Lycans get up so fast it’s laughable. It’s definitely reminding me of Inferno from RE3 remake, where the game clearly doesn’t want you to really fight, unless you have the special weapons.

The fight with Lady D almost didn’t happen because I had to use up every bit of ammo I had, it was another new RE boss where you run around in a circle a thousand times, shooting back at the enemy occasionally. There’s a reason a lot of people are saying to wait until you have infinite ammo to even bother with this difficulty.

Been doing some mercs, while it’s not as good as in the other games, I’m still enjoying it quite a bit. Each level has rounds, each in a slightly different area, and in between you can upgrade your guns with whatever money you find in the level. Doing this during mercs is kind of interesting, since I find myself really going for fire rate and reload speed a lot, which are usually the things I save for last when I play these kinds of games.

The extra time pickups are still here, and there are randomized skills you can choose from. There’s one that gives a chance to blow up the enemies when you kill them with a gun, which is awesome and quite OP. The 5x knife damage is great too.

I’m curious to see how long this game lasts for me. There’s still a lot of experimenting I want to do but I don’t know how interesting it’ll really be.

Finished VoS. Didn’t really like it at all. The den is a good example of how sloppy these new REs can be designed. Shitloads of enemies that don’t react to anything consistently aside from explosives, Lycans basically magnetize toward you for a grab and move WAY faster than you, enemy health all around is through the roof if you’re not using upgraded NG+ weapons. Probably skipped 70-80% of the enemies in the run tbh. Maybe it’s best to view it as a bonus difficulty and just stick with hardcore. I’m going to save up to get some of the different weapons and mess around with stuff.

It has to be said, though: I booted up RE4 last night and played for about 2 hours, and that game is still just such a masterpiece. And anyone saying Village is better than 4(especially “in every way” lol) either has crippling recency bias, or completely missed everything good about 4. In my two hours of just comparing the two games briefly, I actually couldn’t find anything that Village does better to me. Now if I say this on GFAQS or Reddit, my specific mechanical talk will get completely ignored, and I’ll be told to take the nostalgia goggles off(even though there are plenty of new entries in long running series I like the best).

Anyway...anyone else playing? Or am I alone here? Haha

I haven't even gotten the game yet due to Halo eating up all my hours. That said I think once the recency bias falters, it will get it's place in the series just like RE2make did which at the time was "the best game ever made" and now it's pretty common to see players rank it below the original release (which is a good place for it imo).

4 is still just...pfff. How that game managed to happen is beyond me. It's on my to-play list soon actually for my CRT. Going to do no-merchant again, had a lot of fun memories of that when I was a kid.

In a few months the game will barely be spoken of, and we’ll see how everyone really feels about it. And yeah, REmake2 is a good game, but the praise it got at release is similar to what we’re seeing now with Village.

>no merchant run
I’m doing that now, heh. It’s amazing how much mileage you get out of the knife and well placed handgun shots.

It's because they're all mechanically blind fools. We know this.

They apparently went so far as to have a unique meme that Heisenberg references depending on language. In Japanese he calls Chris a 'gorilla', which is his nickname in Japan after he got so roided out in RE5: https://twitter.com/strongest_human/status/1395049575795236869

I stopped playing this after house benvenito. I have 0 desire to keep playing. The combat is trash top to bottom. I would rate this game slightly above RE Revelations for me. Absolutly D tier.
Deadly premonition has better combat.
Don't ever touch this birdman, you will puke.

>slightly above Rev
I absolutely hated Rev so it’s definitely much higher for me, but I see where you’re coming from.

As it stands right now, these are my feelings toward the main games in the series:
S: REmake, 4, 2
A: 1, 3, 5(yeah I said it)
B: 2 remake, 6
C: 8, 3 remake
D: 7, 0
F: Rev 1 and 2

>Don't ever touch this birdman, you will puke.
No plans to. Looks horrendous.

So far for me it would be:

S: REmake, 4, 3
A: 1, 2
B: 0, REV2, 5
C: 6, RE2make
D: 7

Haven't played REV1 yet or RE3make.

Let's just play RE4 forever. That's what I'm doing.

I think if you play RE4 and REmake forever, you'll probably start uncovering more tech for the next 10 years haha. Those games really are just..pfff...so good.

>let’s just play RE4 forever
Way ahead of you. I was just playing it.

I’m noticing another interesting thing about the insane recency bias everyone is experiencing. People can’t differentiate between a game utilizing an element well or specifically, and just using it in general.

I’ve seen some people bring up RE8 doesn’t do hit reactions as well as RE4(if doesn’t). The response is always “uhh, Village does have hit reactions! See, it is RE4 but better!”. But let’s actually break this down a bit. Let’s compare Professional in 4 to Hardcore in Village.

In 4, you can:
-Shoot an enemy in the leg to get them one knee, for a melee
-Shoot an enemy in the arm to make them drop their weapon. From here, they either pull out another weapon, making them vulnerable, or go for a grab, and if they get you, lets you waggle the stick hard to get a free kill
-Shoot an enemy in the head for a melee, which gives you iframes, grouping, knockdown, even ring outs
-Shoot an enemy in the leg while they’re running to make them fall

In Village;
-You can shoot an enemy in the leg to make them go down on one knee, but the number of shots it takes is inconsistent, and there is no follow up attack
-You can shoot an enemy in the arm to make them drop their weapon. However, they don’t pull out another one(unless in my 4 playthroughs, I’ve just never seen it). There is also no dynamic regarding an enemy grab which gives you access to free damage, since there is no more waggling the stick to get enemies off of you. Enemies also no longer throw their weapons, which can be shot/knifed out of the air, adding another layer to this enemy type
-Enemies don’t really run, so shooting them in the leg to knock them over isn’t an option
-Headshots are not a unique stun or reaction, and there is no follow up melee

It’s just sad how nuanced mechanical talk can’t happen. Bringing this up on most forums will just have people say “lol I got hit reactions, sounds like you need to git gud”. Being blinded by hype is an incredible phenomenon.

I'm simplifying things massively here, but it's another example of the trends of modern game design (particularly for "AAA" titles). A lot of games just don't focus their attention on interesting mechanics. They want to make movies that you can play. It's gotta look pretty, it's gotta be cinematic, it's gotta have an elaborate story. All of these elements are fine... as long as your gameplay is good, too.

Just for the record, I do like this game, but it'd just be flat out wrong to suggest it's gameplay design is amongst the best in the series. The game has this weird design whereby you're both (almost equally) encouraged to do and discouraged from doing repeat playthroughs.

The upgrade progression, bonus weapons, NG+ system, all encourage repeat playthroughs. To contrast, the linear exploration and puzzle solving elements, lack of nuance in combat and bloated slow sections kill off the appeal of playing more than once. Capcom have tried to create replay value without really considering the design that should go into it.

Now I'm finished with Mercs (I got the SPOILER weapon for SS ranking each stage), I don't know when I'll play it again. Oh, and just incase it hasn't been mentioned yet, the PC version has some dogshit optimisation in certain parts of the game that absolutely need fixing.

>In Village;
-You can shoot an enemy in the leg to make them go down on one knee, but the number of shots it takes is inconsistent, and there is no follow up attack
-You can shoot an enemy in the arm to make them drop their weapon.

Apparently this only works on normal. It definitely doesn't work on VoS. There is a YT video comparing reactions. Which is hilarious because the one difficulty that is hard enough to possibly use this, they removed it.

>It’s just sad how nuanced mechanical talk can’t happen. Bringing this up on most forums will just have people say “lol I got hit reactions, sounds like you need to git gud”. Being blinded by hype is an incredible phenomenon.

Yes, mechanically blinded.

They're just stupid. Gamers in general are. Majority have something wrong in the head.

So judging by that video, they had one year to make the game “work”, so they just nerfed everything? I guess that explains a lot...

Playthrough #5 is about done. Getting pretty bored at this point. 5 playthroughs is a lot to most people, but this is a series where I play every installment way more than that(pretty sure I went through RE2 remake 10-15 times in its first couple weeks). The fact is, there’s really nothing this game does that I can’t get from RE4. At least with 5, there was co-op, and some fun new weapons and stuff. And 6 was really its own thing entirely, there’s no other game in the series like it.

Even though I will say I find the game to be good, it kind of has me thinking about sequels. With development costs and time, and how safe every dev has to play it for publishers and shareholders, I don’t know if I can continue to get excited for sequels. During 6th gen we would get sequels made in 1-2 years that were awesome(like GoW2 or Ratchet 2). But now we wait 4-5 years for stuff we can see coming a mile away. And it has me thinking about this series: they changed the style so many times, only for them now to go back to RE4 and water it down? Why?

So...

They removed the aggressive army of enemies to make it like 'you won't know when you're going to be attacked'? You mean like every horror since PS2 days? GENIUS!

And remove anything remotely interesting in combat? What?

At least something good came out of this game.

Just finished playthrough #6, and I’m done. I had an urge to keep playing, but it really was because I wanted to unlock the NG+ weapons and stuff, the game isn’t really all that great to actually play(at least compared to the highs of the series).

It’s commendable that Capcom still gives us games like this, no open world, no trendy bullshit, just a linear experience with a good bit of variety. It’s not amazing but we have so few games like this left, I can’t help but be thankful for it in some ways.

Doubt this will be on my RE rotation like REmake/2/4/5 but I’ll probably keep it anyway. Don’t really like getting rid of my games anymore.

>It’s commendable that Capcom still gives us games like this, no open world, no trendy bullshit, just a linear experience with a good bit of variety. It’s not amazing but we have so few games like this left, I can’t help but be thankful for it in some ways.

Don't let Capcom see this.