I love watching people trying to describe why some RE games are good RE games, and why other RE games aren't good RE games. It never makes any sense. The game evolved into a great franchise. What initially started out as a creepy zombie game where a group of people were trapped in a mansion is now a fleshed-out storyline with memorable characters. I completely agree with you that Capcom needs to take back their control scheme and make it theirs, and it looks like they're attempting to do just that.
When I think about Resident Evil, I don't think about "survival horror." I think about Leon, Chris, Jill, Wesker, etc. That's Resident Evil to me.
In regards to the game evolving into what it's become, I think that's a natural state of the universe the characters exist in. If you watched the CGI movie Degeneration, whether you liked it or not, you could see that they wanted the world to sort of 'exist' with the threat of Umbrella's brand of bioterrorism. The way it was in the media, the way its management is handled by that world's authorities, all of that informs how they want the game settings to be modified.
I'm not naive. I know RE 5 was developed during a time period where the co-op experience was being touted as a necessary part of any modern video game. The same way that 'open world' seems to be such an important part of game development these days.
But I'm not talking about the co-op part of 5 here. I'm talking about the fact that it takes place in Africa and there is a worldwide unit working against it and that Chris and Leon and those characters have all evolved with the world and adopted new roles and responsibilities as a result. Which, of course, means that if you';re going to use them in a game, you have to take into account exactly what they're doing at the time and place of the game they want to design.
In that respect, I love what Capcom tried to accomplish with RE 5. Making it more than just an isolated mansion means that the threat is much bigger than some experiment in a secret mountain research facility. It's on the black market, and in a pseudo realistic world, it's going to get distributed and going to be a problem much in the same way that, say, Homeland Security worries about Al Queada and dirty bombs. The story outgrew the mansion, so the gameplay had to do the same thing.
I just miss the more direct references to Romero movies and such. I really liked that about RE 2 and 3. So I'm glad that they seem to be going back to it. I'm really curious, however, about the scene in the 6 trailer where Chris is making his way past people on the panicked streets of China. Feels like those early parts of the original Dawn of the Dead when the swat team is trying to liberate the projects and things go to complete shit. Raccoon City was very much the same way. I';m looking forward to that particular vibe in RE again.
