Resident Evil 4 Remake development was so buggy its director worried about a game delay
"That's not normal at this stage."
A new documentary has shed more light on Resident Evil 4 Remake's development, and shows its director concerned the game would not be ready for its release date.
A recent episode of 100 Cameras - a Japanese documentary series which puts 100 cameras in situ to capture the goings on in any given place - focused on Capcom. Along with a look behind the scenes of Street Fighter 6, the episode also showed a slice of Resident Evil 4 Remake's development (thanks, GamesRadar).
At the time of recording, there was only one month left before Resident Evil 4 Remake was set to release, but the game was reportedly riddled with a "storm" of issues. These included game freezes, visual glitches such as characters' hands not connecting when they are meant to be holding on to each other, and Leon getting sent to "another dimension" as he falls through the floor. One tester said they had found "around 70" new bugs in one day. Things were once so bad, Resident Evil 4 Remake director Yasuhiro Anpo admitted: "At this rate, we won't make the release".
The QA leader, who collates all of the bugs and requests debugging, remarked at one point that the Resident Evil 4 Remake fixes were "sloppy". "If they're gonna do it, they should do it right," the leader said of the programming team. This all ultimately led to the QA team calling a meeting with Anpo, with the leader stating he had "never seen bugs like this" before. "I am very concerned," he told management.
One of the major issues was the fact new additions were still being added to the game, even during the final stages of development. This in turn caused new bugs to appear, meaning more work for the QA team. "That's not normal at this stage," the leader said to Anpo. Meanwhile, a producer was unhappy with the lighting in certain areas, wanting the game to be darker to create a better atmosphere, but not so dark it could not be played. Again, this is all with one month to go before the game was due to release.
In the end though, as we know, it all ultimately worked out, but not without a lot of stress and anxiety in the background. "We asked for a lot of adjustments, but this is great work", Anpo said.
If you are yet to play through Resident Evil 4 for yourself, be sure to check out our review, in which Aoife said the game is "about as good as remakes get".
"Resident Evil 4 Remake... [displays] a confidence in both the original game's strengths and its own innovations to deliver something that feels at once intimately familiar to old fans and excitingly fresh for newcomers," she said in Eurogamer's Resident Evil 4 Remake review.