Resident Evil Revelations Erasable saves and other lessons learned from Mercenaries 3D

Resident Evil Revelations was Capcom’s second RE game for Nintendo’s 3D system in less than a year and if you played RER and its predecessor The Mercenaries 3D, you’ll notice a big change in content and style. At GDC this week Masachika Kawata, a producer on both games, spoke about how Revelations benefited from being developed in the shadow of Mercenaries. One big lesson: Listen to player feedback, especially if they have a problem with non-erasable saves.

“By releasing Mercenaries 3D we were able to get some really great feedback from users, finding out what they were looking for in a title for the 3DS… Another thing we learned from Mercenaries 3D that it’s a good idea that users can delete their save data. So, we made sure to do that with Revelations. We definitely realized it was good to listen to player feedback in that respect.” It was nice way of the developers recognizing one of the biggest complaints about Mercenaries.

Mercenaries also taught them that with Revelations they wanted closer spaces and a slower pace to really take advantage of the 3DS. As the producer went through all the ways Mercenaries separates itself from Revelations, with Mercenaries bigger focus on action and wide-open battlefields, he talked about how transferring the dev team of Mercenaries to Revelations brought all those lessons with them. Makes us wonder what type of lessons they’ll bring on to the next game.

Sadly Masachika Kawata started the panel saying he wouldn’t be talking about Resident Evil 6 or the seemingly cancelled PSP Resident Evil, and he stayed true to that statement. However, the way he was talking about lessons learned by working with the 3DS leads us to believe Revelations is hardly the last portable Resident Evil we’ll see. Kawata did address one elephant in the room, after being asked for his thoughts on former Capcom boss Keiji Inafune’s recent statements about the future of Japanese games.

“As to whether or not the Japanese games industry is healthy, in Japan currently the social games market is doing very well. We’re still making money… In regards to what Inafune-san said yesterday… I would agree with portions of that. I think there are certain things that we can reevaluate.” Kawata then joked that he better agree since he didn’t want to upset his old boss, but continued saying that, “I think we should be researching more… This is something we’re constantly talking about within Capcom.”

Will this more global approach be reflected in future Resident Evils? We’re already seeing it in the upcoming western-developed Operation Raccoon City, and it seems we’ll only see it expand in Resident Evil 6. But for now at least we got a friendly and reasonable reply from Capcom to the concerns of Inafune.