Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is an upcomingsurvival horror video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is slated for release on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with the PlayStation 4 version including full PlayStation VR support. The game will be the eleventh entry into the main Resident Evil series, and the first main series installment to be played from a first-person perspective. It will be released worldwide in January 2017.

Resident Evil 7 was announced during Sony's presentation at E3 2016. Later that day, a gameplay teaser titled Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour was released to the PlayStation Store, which was meant to show the direction the development team had taken and is not a part of the final game.

Gameplay

The player controls the protagonist, Ethan, from a first-person perspective. As with previousResident Evil games, the player will have access to a variety of weapons including pistols,shotguns, flamethrowers, explosives and chainsaws in the fight against enemies described as mutant creatures. However, according to developers, players should not expect a "gun fest". Other notable mechanics of previous Resident Evil games, including puzzle-solving, resource management, and healing herbs are also confirmed to appear in the game. Quick time events, on the other hand, will be entirely absent. The PlayStation 4 version of the game is also playable from start to finish in VR using the PlayStation VR headset, but the core gameplay mechanics will remain identical between both modes.

Story

The game is set approximately 4 years after the events of Resident Evil 6 in the fictional city of Dulvey, Louisiana in the Southern United States. It features a new protagonist named EthaN  who is a civilian that lacks much of the combat skills that most of the main characters of the previous Resident Evil titles displayed.  Ethan is on the search for his missing wife, which leads him to a derelict plantation mansion, home of the Baker family.

Although connections to previous games in the series will be made, the game will feature an entirely new cast of characters . The title of the game, which for the first time contains in it both the "Resident Evil" and "Biohazard" brand names of the series across all regions, is said to be a clue to what's behind the game's plot .

Development

Following the release of Resident Evil 6, producer Masachika Kawata noted, Capcom had a lot of internal discussion regarding the direction of the next installment.  Capcom staffers recognized that the scale of the last game, which had bioterrorism attacks happening across the world, had grown out of hand and as a result what made the series special had been lost.   To regain that, Kawata's boss, Jun Takeuchi, who is the executive producer of the game,  requested that the series be "stripped down to its core": horror. The developers figured scaling back the game to one location and using a first-person perspective to immerse the players in the environments, would be the best way to achieve that . 

Development began around February 2014.   The game is built on a new engine, named RE Engine, which includes VR development tools.  Kawata explained that the decision to make the game first-person was made well before they thought about VR.  A year before the game's announcement, Capcom presented to attendants of E3 2015 a first-person horror themed VR demo called KITCHEN,   which ran on the same engine.  While Resident Evil 7had been in development long before KITCHEN, with the latter the developers saw the opportunity to evaluate how the RE engine and its VR capabilities would be received by the public.   As a hint to the demo's relation to, at the time unannounced, Resident Evil 7, the logo of KITCHEN had the letter "T" designed with a small gap to it so that it looked like a "7", but Kawata said that went largely unnoticed.  Four months later, in the company's annual Integrated Report, citing positive reception of the KITCHEN demo, it was stated that theResident Evil development division of Capcom (Development Division 1), would be focusing on creating experiences for the VR market. These included both a new VR engine and games for the eighth generation of consoles.

In interviews following the game's announcement at E3 2016, the game's director was revealed to be Koshi Nakanishi, who previously directed Resident Evil: Revelations, leading a development team exclusively from Capcom Japan and numbering about 120 staff. However, 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 ofSpec Ops: The Line.  Speaking of first-person games similar to Resident Evil 7, Nakanishi said they played "all the first person horrors out there like [...] Outlast" but decided in contrast to them to offer weapons to the player so that they can fight against the enemies.  At the time of the game's reveal, development was 65% complete.

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.

Japanese rock band L'Arc-en-Ciel created the song "Don’t Be Afraid" for the game.