However, if Resident Evil Village interests you at all and you would rather not buy it on spec, Resident Evil 7 is available now for a fraction of the cost and has a truly banging, very scary first half.
Instead of vaguely Spanish pod people, this time the series travels to eastern Europe with vampires and werewolves, but the same classic “spooky woods, peasant village, and imposing castle” type of levels.Īs the next mainline installment, Resident Evil Village continues 7‘s first-person perspective and faceless protagonist (hopefully to later include a VR playable mode, but as of yet nothing is announced), all the better to make it a more approachable prospect for new fans. Resident Evil Village fully continues this trend with a (sort-of) return to the sprawling European pastiche of Resident Evil 4. The recent games are drop-dead gorgeous: from their graphical effects, to the realistic human models - and of course, the monsters - all the way to the wide variety of locales and little environmental details that radically enhance believability. Platform: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X | SĬapcom‘s flagship series is on something of a tear right now, one that even the middlingly received Resident Evil 3 remake was unable to trip up. However, you should still find several big single player experiences to anticipate on a variety of systems, so for May 2021, we are taking a look at Resident Evil Village, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, and Biomutant.
It might just be their time.If you look at the release calendar, this month is a variety platter: big remasters, mid-tier ports to Nintendo Switch, and a lot of smaller games hitting PC with console releases still up in the air. And that doesn't mean that it's someone's fault or that a bad choice was made. I hope BioWare regains the magic at some point, but it's possible they won't. Your favorite author's written some bad books, favorite musicians have put out some bad albums, take your pick. Your favorite producer of entertainment in every medium has probably put out some shit at some point. It's hard to sustain creative output over decades. The context is different, where the thing you loved about those games may have been original and new, that's no longer the case, and there are lots of imitators, so your expectations have changed, and their desire to be innovative may still be present, and both might result in you not liking what they make. The pressures from EA are different, so where 10 years ago they may have been pushed to make an engaging single-player game, in 2020 they're being pushed to make a live service game with monetization.
There are different people at BioWare, so whatever talent made the things in their games you loved may be gone. Smaller game, smaller staff, and just as much of a challenge. If EA wanted them to make AA games, they'd have smaller budgets. Quite frankly, good games take a long time, and I truly believe that ME2 would also have been a mess with any shorter dev time. ME1 had a five year dev time IIRC, even more for DA:O. Even Inquisition barely came together in the end, with a three-year dev time. DA2 and ME3 also had 18 months, and look at how much of a mess those were. Even making ME2 was not a good experience for the devs, according to what’s been said of Bioware’s working conditions in the past.Įdit: and about development time - Anthem was started in 2013, but scrapped and redone so many times that it ended with 18 months of total development upon release. Constant pushing to be the next big thing, a need for player retention and endless developer crunch. I hate it, but that’s where the gaming industry is now. As more and more non-gaming investors buy into game development, we get more and more clueless people saying, “Okay this RPG sounds cool but how will it make us Fortnite money?” The only company consistently pumping out single player experiences is Sony, and they’re only doing that to sell consoles. Single player, campaign-driven games just aren’t attractive to investors anymore. Any Hennig, lead writer for Uncharted 1-3, said that if she were to propose making Uncharted 1 today, nobody would approve it.