Capcom paid attention to the criticisms of the Resident Evil 3 Remake.
In an interview with PC Gamer on Tuesday, Resident Evil 4 Remake producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi said that players can expect the length of the remake to run "about the same" as the original RE4.
When Capcom remade Resident Evil 2 in 2019 it was met with near-universal acclaim, but the 2020 follow-up with Resident Evil 3 was not such a hit. Many players complained about how short and linear it was compared to the RE2 Remake, pointing out that it even cut areas from the PS1 game.
With a game as beloved as Resident Evil 2, Capcom succeeded in recreating it without screwing anything up; with RE3, it seemed to have missed an opportunity to improve and bulk out what was always a bit of an underbaked game. 2004's Resident Evil 4, meanwhile, is a long game by modern action standards: HowLongtoBeat has the main story pegged at 15 and a half hours, roughly double the length of an RE2 Remake campaign. Would this remake, too, be lopping off some chunks of the game to make the project more manageable?
Apparently not.
I asked Kobayashi if the reviews and player feedback for Capcom's last two remakes had informed any decisions for Resident Evil 4 Remake, and he specifically brought up length as a factor.
"When we started production on RE4 we looked into what people thought was good [in the RE2 and RE3 remakes] and what could've been done better," Kobayashi said. "One example is the play time for RE4 is about the same as the original game."
Kobayashi's statement still leaves us with a lot of unknowns: There could be significant changes to some of RE4's environments even if the overall length remains roughly the same. The Remake may be jettisoning the Mercenaries minigame, or the "Separate Ways" mode that let you play as Ada Wong after finishing the campaign. But based on how closely the game's intro sticks to the original RE4, I think Capcom's treating this one with particular reverence.
