Gamers have given a thumbs up to old school Resident Evil action, but will the game’s success affect Resident Evil 7 and beyond?
The new remaster of the original Resident Evil has become the fastest-selling digital download in Capcom’s history, in both North America and Europe.
Not only that but it broke day one sales records for PSN, and ended up as the best-selling digital game for the PlayStation 4 in January – and the second best selling for the PlayStation 3, after Minecraft.
‘It’s been great to see so many positive comments from fans that have enjoyed this new release,’ said producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi. ‘The team here at Capcom Japan have worked hard to bring the game to the latest generation of consoles and we are thrilled at this news on its performance.’
Although we enjoyed the game in our review it’s a fairly straightforward port of the original 2002 GameCube remaster, with a lot of rough edges.
The big question now though is what affect, if any, this success will have on future Resident Evil games. It certainly proves that there’s an appetite for old school survival horror, but will Capcom feel it’s enough to justify a big budget sequel or reboot?
The next game in the series is spin-off Resident Evil Revelations 2, which although it looked pretty good when we last saw it is clearly fairly low budget.
But when we interviewed the producers they implied that work on the next mainline entry in the series was already underway and that it would be ‘revolutionary’. Hopefully, thanks to the success of the remaster, it’ll also be scary.
Fans might also hope that it would lead to a similar remaster of Resident Evil 2, but that would have to be started from scratch and would be extremely costly – so it’s not the dead cert you might have imagined from this news.
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