This has discussion about remake in it too. But it does address re rev and modern RE series
Had a giant debate about this with a friend today whilst playing the opening of remake HD on shareplay. He a tank controls/fixed camera hater, me a supporter. Him not really an action horror supporter, an important distinction.
He says tank controls and fixed camera are relics of an old era. And they do not enduce atmosphere and tension, but simply frustration, as if they are a cheap gameplay mechanic for easy deaths. He kept saying he wanted to open a door, scope the room and proceed accordingly. I said that would definitely remove all sense of horror. In addition to seeing enemies upon room entry, you would have a full camera to swing around as well. And then when getting into fights free aiming would allow for easy headshots and kneecapping and meleeing. I also pointed out that today's games are more open space whereas RE 1 and 2 are tight corridors, so again ots shoting would make it laughably easy and remove all sense of tension from survival and all scaryness from the horror.
He said something that was interesting. He said he wasn't advocating action horror, or loads more enemies etc. He wanted more intelligent enemies. Emergent Ai over scripting. He didn't want to either walk into a room. or have one enemy see him, and now all enemies magically know his position and beeline for him, like modern RE. Instead he wants games in general to take cues from tlou, having to stealth past clickers, or avoid runners. Or Metal Gear, where if he were playing a new Dino Crisis game and had to get from one safe compound area to another by traversing a jungle, instead of being balls to the wall shoot bang, he would have the option to press up against trees, crawl under a root, but if he accidentally stepped on a twig and snapped it, he would be fucked. I said that alien isolation uses sound like that through the controller speaker on ps4. But really, games like tlou, mgs and alien are something special that are only now starting to bring in things like that. Can't hold every modern game to those standards.
In the end we agreed to disagree. He saw what I meant about "survival horror" being dead, and how bringing ots shooting changes both the survival and horror aspects. And I saw what he meant about more intelligent Ai, or more emergent gameplay. I think we both said revelations' balance of downtime, puzzles and better enemy Ai as he wanted would be the best way forward for the modern RE, transplant that gameplay over to mainline games. This way the differences between mainline and revelations games would be story based as they'd play the same. Mainline would push narrative forward, revelations would fill in lore, flesh out backstories and revisit characters for dat nostalgia. And they should go full throttle with the remakes in traditional style to try to bring back what is Survival Horror. Modern RE gameplay, such as Re6's jumping around gameplay should be literally transplanted over to a new IP, or be the basis for a modern Dino Crisis game, where fast lizards mean you might 'need' to jump backwards onto your back to avoid a jumping throat slash, and fire up at the Dino from the 'last stand' position
