Resident Evil Requiem director, Koshi Nakanishi, says that development on the ninth entry in the survival horror series started around six years ago, but that the version available to play via the demo, and therefore the final release, only really "came to be" about three years ago.
In a PlayStation Japan Blog that's been translated by GamesRadar+, Nakanishi describes how the style of development on Requiem shifted halfway through to become what you can play today. "Development started on a small scale six years ago," he says. "However, the current form that everyone has now played came to be about three years ago."
This means that development started around 2020, though the last entry in the series wasn't released until 2021. "We started development after the apparent conclusion of Ethan's story with Resident Evil 7, and what would be the eighth numbered title, Resident Evil Village," he says.
The Resident Evil series is often broken up into trilogies, but Nakanishi warns that despite Requiem being the ninth entry, the story doesn't fit in with the seventh and eighth games, but rather returns to the story established in the series' first six games.
"We're thankful that Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 8 received high praise, but they were written to be somewhat disconnected from the story up through Resident Evil 6," Nakanishi explains. "Because of this, we began work on this project as we thought it was about time to get back to that story."
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