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Game remakes have always been something of a minefield for developers and publishers, and right up until the game launch, it can be impossible to tell if a remake is going to be welcomed with open arms or shunned forever by the fanbase. Companies have been trying to mitigate the risks by involving the community during development for decades now, but Capcom decided to take the premise a big step further.
Rather than picking its own next project from the substantial library of Resident Evil games, the company has decided to leave their next remake up to the fans themselves.
Remake Success and Horror Stories
To see how we got to this point, let’s look at some recent examples of remakes going well or horribly wrong. Starting with some well-known flops, nothing has gone down so poorly in recent years as Warcraft III: Reforged. This remake of the classic Warcraft III was a laundry list of everything you shouldn’t do in a remake; the developers added nothing substantial, didn’t deliver on promises and somehow managed to produce a downgrade to a game that was decades old. See also the remake of Goldeneye for a game in the same category.
On the other hand, plenty of games have seen impressive remakes in recent years. Both the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon franchises have received remake compilations that have gone down smoothly with old fans. Let’s not forget that Capcom has managed to do an admirable job with Resident Evil remakes already with the first three titles getting positive reviews from critics and fans alike.
The Fan Factor
The key factor behind the success of all these games? They listened heavily to the fans and didn’t try to fix anything that wasn’t broken, resisting things like trying to shove multiplayer modes into traditionally single-player games or adding in features like heavy-handed microtransactions that detract from the experience.
This all makes Capcom’s latest step of asking fans for suggestions for future remakes into a natural progression. Like many franchises, Resident Evil fans are heavily opinionated on the best games in the series and for Capcom to arbitrarily choose a new title to work on would risk blowback from the target audience. While an audience vote will naturally incur some heated exchanges online, any blame for a game getting chosen is deflected onto the fans themselves.
Source: Pixabay
It’s also an excellent way to measure which titles are the most popular, something that companies often have trouble measuring. Fans, after all, are the ones who know the franchise better than anyone, and that’s true across all kinds of media. Movie franchises and book franchises all have more experts outside the company than inside, and this even extends to things like slot games that have full franchises themselves. If you go onto a real money online casino and look up game names with Rich Wilde or games ending with ‘of Dead’, you’ll find series that have a decade of entries and a legion of veteran players who are experts on each.
How Will It End?
Capcom has avoided making any kind of public poll for their next remake, instead limiting to entries on feedback forms for Resident Evil fans. While this will hopefully avoid any organised efforts on the part of a specific game’s fans, it does mean that it’s impossible to tell which direction the decision will go.
Feedback from fans so far is understandably split. For many fans, the fact that the Dreamcast title Resident Evil: Code Veronica has been overlooked so far is already a crime against gaming, especially as it’s considered an equal to the best games in the classic series. Set between the second and third mainline entries, it’s a prime candidate for a big remake. In the same vein is Resident Evil Zero, a slightly less-acclaimed game but a popular title regardless.
Others are instead looking forward to a remake of the next main game Resident Evil 5, although the one thing that almost every fan agrees on is that Resident Evil 6 should either be very heavily changed or left out entirely. It has some of the worst review scores of a main Resident Evil series game to date thanks to ditching many of the franchise’s most iconic elements.
Will Capcom Follow Through?
At the end of the day, Capcom is under no obligation to actually listen to the results of its survey, especially given that it’ll likely be the only one to see them. Given the current trend, a remake of 5 is almost a certainty, but for the side titles, it will have to be a case of waiting to see what happens.
Then again, if history has told us anything about gaming, it’s that not listening to the fans is one of the riskiest moves that can be made.
Feature Image Source: Unsplash