Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways (2023) – Part 3-1

We’re on the home stretch. Sadler has our prize. So to complete our contract, we will have to dispose of him.

While fighting the Regeneradors in this episode, we hit upon an interesting comparison of the classic Resident Evil 4 versus this version, highlighting a key difference in how games of their respective generations function.

In the original, once the player has the biosensor scope, it’s actually relatively easy to shoot the hearts of the creature to dispose of it. There’s very little mechanic skill involved in the act because of the simplistic way it moves and animates. By and large, it moves predictably, in a straight line towards you.

To sell the fluid and dynamic nature of the creature, the remake introduces a degree of bobbing and swaying that wasn’t present before. While this adds to the verisimilitude, it comes at the cost of making the hearts, even with the BioScope, more difficult to hit accurately. This may be an intended side-effect, but the push for higher-definition enemy designs and animations comes at the cost of functionality, similar to how we need yellow paint in modern games to tell us where to go since environments aren’t as legible as they used to be in older console generations.

It’s something I’m beginning to notice more and more as the graphical fidelity wars continue and I get older. Part of the magic of the older generation of games is that they were intensely legible at a glance, by design, and many games have begun to lose elements of that as they progress into the modern era.

Admittedly, this is only a minor example, but it is one that I will probably reference for years to come.