The master of survival horror believes now is a great time to reenter the genre too, because next-gen technologies offer much higher graphical fidelity, which makes the game "a lot scarier." That's "a big advantage over the previous generations," he said. He wouldn't get into details, saying "I'm not allowed to say bad things," but he noted that Capcom "started going in a different direction with Resident Evil" and so he got the itch to come back and create "true" survival horror. Mikami told us that he lacked "motivation" in the survival horror genre after working on similar games for a long time, but in the years since he stopped working on the genre he's seen a lot of concepts that he's strongly disagreed with. That's certainly an advantage for Tango as it works on The Evil Within, as the studio is leveraging id Software's proprietary id Tech 5 engine, which he said is easier for Tango to customize than something off-the-shelf like Unreal. "As for the organizational structure of companies, I think it would be good if companies would be more flexible about incorporating foreign technologies," he said. Mikami is no doubt happy to be a part of a Western game company but he emphasized that "there are still a lot of good companies." Even so, he'd like to see more Japanese developers utilize Western tech when it can help. Mikami noted that Western developers seem to be "working harder" but "if we can invest $30 million into a game, we can win." Of course, Bethesda Softworks wasn't about to disclose what the development and marketing budget is for The Evil Within, but if we had to guess it's likely over $30 million. In the past, what the Capcom president told me was that game development is becoming more and more expensive and many Japanese publishers won't be investing $30 million or more in a game," he said. Japanese companies don't take those kinds of risks like Western developers do.
"Games have become big projects, requiring a lot of resources both to create and market. GamesIndustry International caught up with Mikami during E3 to chat about his game and why Western developers seem to be ahead of Japanese studios.įor Mikami, the difference between the East and West was apparent for him even while he was still employed by Capcom. The Evil Within is planned for PC, current-gen and next-gen consoles next year. After working on startups like Clover Studio and Seeds Inc (which effectively became Platinum Games), Mikami is finally ready to tackle the survival horror genre once again at his new company Tango Gameworks (which was acquired by Bethesda). Shinji Mikami, the creator of Resident Evil, hasn't made a survival horror game since 2005, when he took over directorial duties for Resident Evil 4.
0 kommentar(er)
