The Spooky Bois Play – Resident Evil 3 – Resistance

June 14, 2020

Let's Play/ multiplayer/ Resident Evil 3/ The Spooky Bois/ Twitch/ VOD

Since we wrapped up Resident Evil 3’s campaign last week, David and I thought it might be fun to play the other game that came packaged in with it: A co-op multiplayer game titled “Resident Evil: Resistance”.

It was certainly… an experience.

It’s genuinely hard to access a multiplayer game, partly because the community is such a large aspect of what can make or break it. It’s entirely possible that if I had played on Day 1, then I would have a much different experience than the one on display here.

This problem is compounded by the fact that this is undoubtedly going to be a niche game mode. Most people who purchased Resident Evil 3 likely went through the same though process as David and I. “I’m here for Resident Evil 3. This other game is cool, but I’m not interested in it.”

Only a handful of users are even going to launch it, and an even smaller percentage will enjoy it. Among that already minuscule group, an even lower percentage will stay past the first few weeks before moving on to something else. Those that remain will either fall into the category of new or die-hard players, with very few people in between.

And since they appears to be a progression tree, where players unlock new skills, equipment, and abilities as they complete matches, players who are just starting out, like me, don’t have the same baseline set of tools that other players do. Factoring in lack of actual player skill and map knowledge, they become an obvious load for an veteran player to carry.

Honestly, including progression in something like this was probably a mistake, because it severely caps the player base. After the game has been out for a sufficient length of time, newbies aren’t going to want to stick with it, case in point, because the other players simply outclass them before they’ve ever had a chance to start improving their own skill.

Which exacerbates the problem we experienced at the end of this video: Wait times. The sad truth, as Lawbreakers found out, is that a multiplayer game can be good on its own merits, and still completely fail if the player base isn’t there to support it. Low retention numbers mean that wait times are long, so less people play, and the vicious cycle continues.

I doubt Capcom cared too much about that with RE: Resistance, since it was packaged in with Resident Evil 3, but it’s a lesson to consider for future projects. Shame, because I like the premise here of a Left 4 Dead-style game with another player directing the enemy forces in an asymmetrical combat. I just arrived too late to join in on what fun there could have been.

The Spooky Bois Play – Resident Evil 3 – Part 1

May 17, 2020

Let's Play/ Resident Evil 3/ The Spooky Bois/ Twitch/ VOD

After my wildly successful run of Resident Evil 2’s remake back in early 2019, I couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to go do a similar playthrough for Resident Evil 3.

Thankfully, my friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet were in agreement, and together The Spooky Bois are back in town.

Special thanks to Sam Callahan for working on this thumbnail for me as well.

Before we proceed, I should make it clear that unlike the Resident Evil 2 playthrough, this is not a blind run. I had intended to make it a blind run, but eventually curiosity as I kept eyeing the copy I purchased for this Let’s Play. Not to mention that I was between games at the time, waiting for the Final Fantasy 7 remake to come out.

The thing that immediately stands out to me in this game, compared to the Resident Evil 2 remake, is just how much less scary it is overall. It’s difficult to parse exactly how much of it is improved controls/responsiveness versus my retaining skill from the last time I played a Resident Evil game (which was that RE2 Let’s Play), but I rarely felt like I was in any genuine danger even at my least powerful.

You might even to start to notice that in the way I play. Resident Evil 2 had me making tactical choices over which zombies I would even bother trying to kill rather than just leave them knowing I could easily juke them. Here, I assassinate pretty much every infected and/or undead thing that I am capable of, barely ever running low on bullets or healing items (even if I forget to take them out of the item box). By the time I had wrapped up that first section, I could have sprinted across the zone because all of the zombies were just dead.

This also extends to the Nemesis. Unlike Mr. X, who was a constant looming presence over everything we did in the Raccoon City police station, Nemesis feels like he’s barely around for most of the game. When he does deign to make an appearance, it’s usually short and heavily scripted, making him feel more like a quick-time event than an organic threat. While he’s still a persistent pursuer in the game’s story, we don’t get the same impression of him mechanically. In terms of gameplay, he punctuates individual sections, serving more as a marker of progress than a threat to be feared.

While I don’t have the window into what the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was like, David has played that version of the game, and I find his commentary on the way the remake handles translating it into a modern day game fascinating. Sounds like a ton of work went into adapting the beats of the story into something a modern presentation, especially in how they removed the elements of choice affecting the campaign and adapted characters like Carlos to be less stereotypical than they were in their original incarnations.

Hopefully, I remember to keep picking his brain about that as we proceed.

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