Resident Evil 6 Reveal and Thoughts

As some of you may have heard, Resident Evil 6 has been officially announced. After months of false rumors, it's officially a reality. And Capcom gave us a trailer to go along with it. Here is that trailer along with my thoughts on it and other news about it below.

Now the trailer has shown us a few things: Leon still appears to be employed by the President and the living-dead zombies appear to be back. Chris Redfield will also be a playable character and still looks to be on steroids (what's he going to punch this time?). And I've also heard that there might be (or definitely will be) a third protagonist as well, with some even saying Steve Burnside from Code Veronica or Hunk.

It will be played from multiple perspectives with Leon fighting traditional zombies in America and Chris Redfield fighting the mutated aberrations from 4 and 5 in China.

As for the gameplay, I'm divided and I probably won't be able to make any kind of judgment until I see more. If they're going for an action-focus, I'm glad they're at least updating the controls and design, something that Resident Evil 5 DEFINITELY failed to do. 4 was a revolutionary game in terms of it's over-the-shoulder gameplay but five years later, it felt outdated with 5.

The key to making this game work will be more than that. In Resident Evil 4, you had to be very careful with ammo as the design was done to keep you from getting too much. Resident Evil 5 was pretty broken in that regard with you never feeling needy for ammo like in 4.

You can have an action game and have it be survival-horror at the same time. The idea that you can't have both is ridiculous. The key is in the design. Will this game be like Resident Evil 4 which forced you to keep an eye on your stock and ammunition and encourages some exploration as well, or will it be like Resident Evil 5 where you had more than enough to play through it a few times and could just blast your way through everything? The game needs to hit the design philosophy of 4 if it wants to succeed in the eyes of Resident Evil fans (well most of them, some will complain no matter what).

As for the game itself, a demo is scheduled to come out on September 5th. However, in the Xbox 360 version of Dragon's Dogma, you will find a code that will allow you to access the demo as early as July 3rd.

The game itself is expected to be released on November 20th for the Xbox 360 and PS3. There will be a PC version but that hasn't received a release date yet.



Stay tuned as I'll be posting a Mass Effect 3 video as well as an Aliens: Colonial Marines trailer later today.