You are joking right...?
The Resident Evil series has one of the worst & most divisive fanbases around(of which I am a major part of from day 1.)
REmake is best
RE4 "is the best game ever made"
Both games are great, and I don't see much dispute about that in the fanbase. Some people will say that RE4 isn't good as a
Resident Evil game, but hardly anyone will say it's not a great game in its own right (and if they do, they're going way out on a limb). If anything, RE4 mainly gets flak for the path that the series took after it. Most fans I see respect that both are great entries in different ways.
Fanbase will bitch about something in 5, turn around praise 4 as the greatest game ever when 4 started that same exact thing they bitch about(action focus, and zombie with guns for example).
Some tell Capcom to go classic style then shout from the rooftops about 4.
People say do more like 4, we get two Rev games that are more horror focused than 4 yet people bitch about those.
People say 4 was more horror than 5 & 6 yet you get Leon cracking jokes every 5 seconds, 5 they have Chris having a fitting mood for that game but then people bitch about wanting Leon back.
All the while the 4/5 style absolutely crushes the originals in sells, so Capcom continues to make it.
First of all,
people liked Rev2 quite a bit.
RE4
was a more horror/atmosphere based game than 5 or 6. Leon can crack jokes in the cutscenes without dampening the feel of the gameplay, and honestly, the dialog even in a serious RE game is often just as ridiculous (unintentionally). The dialog isn't what made these games scary.
The village, castle, and to a lesser extent the island were all creepy and atmospheric places to explore. Even when enemies used projectiles, like the cultists with crossbows, it made sense in the context of the action and made the enemies seem even more isolated and archaic. It enhanced their creepiness instead of diminishing it.
RE5 made no effort to be frightening in its environments or enemies at all. You were running around a bright and sunny African savanna fighting enemies that had become so human-like they may as well have just been normal people with sticks- they were so unintimidating I often even felt bad for shooting them. The worst part came at the end when zombies started wielding AK47's and ducking behind cover- that shooter audience pandering crossed way over the line. RE6 only started aping the FPS trend even worse from there.
RE4 got away with what it did because it was still a horror game. It was action horror instead of survival horror, but it worked. It walked the line, but didn't cross it. RE5 is just action with some monster enemies thrown in. There's a pretty clear loss of the fear element, even if it's a matter of degrees that makes the difference, and the game is a lot less impacting and memorable for it. That's why one is loved and the other isn't, even if they're very similar in the core gameplay.
You are joking right...?
We get 6 with amazing mechanics(the best of the series) which only get to shine in Chris campaign but people throw a fit about his campaign(despite being 6's best).
A lot of people like RE6's control mechanics (I'm one of them), but they don't make any sense in the context of horror. You can't say they're "the best in the series" because they're not at all appropriate for the series. If you were to put these controls in the past games, it wouldn't make them better. It would
absolutely ruin them. It's hard to instill fear in the player and develop a tense survival atmosphere when you can slide across the ground with two pistols blazing at once. That's why there are so many rushes of massive enemies in the new games- individual zombies are never a threat. They're just bullet fodder.
The RE6 controls are only the "best" in the context of a purely action driver shooter, which Capcom should have created a new series for if they were so interested in it. OR- they could have experimented with the action style in spinoffs like this while keeping the main series horror focused. I would not be complaining about spinoffs like this
one bit if that were the scenario.
As for Rev1 and 2, they were both smaller scale spinoffs that had much lower budgets. Those limitations were the main source of criticism, not the general horror direction of the games themselves. Rev1 was criticized mainly for having an awkwardly segmented and aimless progression- elements due to being on a handheld and completely unrelated to how well it approximated the classic horror feel (which fans actually liked). Rev2 was also not criticized for it's horror at all that I'm aware of, just it's cheap and limited production values.
They start making REmake 2 for classic fans, Rev 2 for middle ground and make a half priced shooter using 6's great mechanics and reused assets...
and yet people still complaining like crazy like this somehow replaces RE7 or REmake 2.
People keep saying that Capcom can keep the series compartmentalized and deliver different experiences to everyone at once. They can't. RE6 was designed to do
exactly that, and it failed miserably. There's always overlap. Things the developers learned in one game will naturally carry over to another.
Revelations 2 is the only game we've gotten that suggests that they can leave the action behind once in a while, but even that game had a lot of "horde" type segments with rushes of tons of enemies. Large waves of enemies is the inevitable end point in every over the shoulder RE game. The combat just isn't challenging enough otherwise.
I'm not saying that game was bad. Just that it still wasn't quite classic RE.
REmaster and 0 HD leave Capcom with no choice but to keep the gameplay untouched. They're very low budget ports with some enhancements. For an all new remake of RE2, they could easily go with over the shoulder and make it much more action oriented if they feel like that style of play is popular and successful enough. I can easily imagine REmake 2 turning out just like the start of Leon's RE6 campaign, which would be a big disservice to the original game.
I didn't need to type this wall of text. All that a lot of fans want is a RE game that captures the intense horror and fun of the originals, which we haven't gotten since
2002. We've had plenty of shooters. We've had action based RE games out the ass. As someone posted above, there have been more action RE games than survival horror entries at this point. It's irritating as a fan of the older games to see that style of play keep getting shafted while these COD/GOW wannabe titles keep getting pumped out regardless of how badly the critical and community reception flops.
