Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7 is the first full-length game to use Capcom's in-house RE Engine. The development was led by Koshi Nakanishi, director of Resident Evil: Revelations. A year prior to its announcement at E3 2016, it was presented as a virtual reality demo called Kitchen. The team took inspiration from the 1981 film The Evil Dead, scaled back the game to one location, and used a first-person perspective to immerse players. Two downloadable content scenarios were released, Not a Hero and End of Zoe.


Resident Evil 7 was released in January 2017 for PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox One, followed by a cloud version for the Nintendo Switch in May 2018 in Japan and December 2022 worldwide, and PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions in June 2022. It also supports the PlayStation VR headset. The game received generally favorable reviews and was considered a return to form for the series; critics praised the visuals, gameplay, story, innovation, and uses of virtual reality, but the boss battles and final chapter drew some criticism. By December 2023, the game had sold 13 million units.^[1] It was nominated for several end-of-year accolades. A sequel, Resident Evil Village, was released on May 7, 2021.

Development[edit]

Following the release of Resident Evil 6, Capcom conducted internal discussions regarding the direction of the next installment. A preliminary version of the game, developed in 2013, featured a more action-oriented gameplay, similar to that of Resident Evil 6. This version featured Leon S. Kennedy and Sherry Birkin battling zombies in Venice, Italy with a Telltale Games-inspired choice mechanic. Taking inspiration from the 1981 film The Evil Dead, the developers decided to scale back the game to one location and use a first-person perspective to immerse players and return the series to its roots of survival horror.^[14][15][16] Development began around February 2014.^[17] The game is built on a custom game engine, named the RE Engine, which includes virtual reality (VR) development tools.^[18] The decision to make the game first-person was made well before VR was considered;^[12] VR development started in October 2015, for which a separate team was created.^[19] The introduction of VR demanded that textures be more detailed, discarding flat textures and inaccurate object sizes that had previously been used.^[20]


A year before the game's announcement, Capcom presented to attendants of E3 2015 a first-person horror-themed VR demo, KI7CHEN, which ran on the same engine.^[18][21] While Resident Evil 7 had been in development long before, KI7CHEN was seen as an opportunity to evaluate how the RE Engine and its VR capabilities would be received.^[12] As a hint to the demo's relation to Resident Evil 7, the logo of KI7CHEN had the letter "T" designed so that it resembled a "7", but it went largely unnoticed.^[17] In the company's Integrated Report of 2015, the Resident Evil development division of Capcom was stated to focus on creating experiences for the VR market, which included the new VR engine and games for the eighth generation of consoles.^[22]


The game was directed by Koshi Nakanishi, who previously helmed Resident Evil: Revelations, leading a development team numbering at about 120 staff.^[15] For the first time in the series, the narrative designer is a westerner—Richard Pearsey, writer of the two expansion packs of F.E.A.R. and one of the narrative designers of Spec Ops: The Line.^[23] At the time of the game's reveal, development was around 65% complete.^[17] Some of the creature models in Resident Evil 7 were first created in physical form—a number of them from actual meat—by make-up artists, to then be scanned through the employment of photogrammetry. This technology developed over half of the general assets of the game, but posed a problem in researching the setting of Louisiana because its considerable demand for equipment made it unviable for transport, which required Capcom to model by hand.^[24]


According to Jun Takeuchi, the high-ups at Capcom wanted Resident Evil 7: Biohazard to be a live service game with online multiplayer and microtransactions. This was putting pressure on the development team until Takeuchi was asked to join the project and scrapped those plans.^[25]


The game's score was composed by Capcom's lead composer Akiyuki Morimoto, Miwako Chinone, and Satoshi Hori, with additional contributions from Cris Velasco and Brian D'Oliveira.^[26] Its theme song, an arranged version of the traditional American folk song "Go Tell Aunt Rhody", was written by Michael A. Levine and performed by Jordan Reyne. Levine's step-daughter Mariana Barreto was the original choice, but ended up doing the background vocals. The song went through about 20 versions until completion.^[27] A soundtrack was released digitally by Sumthing Else Music Works alongside the game on January 24.^[26]