Resident Evil Resistance director shares thoughts on writing a gay character into the multiplayer game

Resident Evil Resistance director Al Yang has taken to Twitter to reveal that one of the game's characters, Tyrone, is gay. 

Resident Evil Resistance is an asymmetrical multiplayer game that pits four survivors against one player that is trying to stop the team from reaching their goals. It came bundled with the Resident Evil 3 remake, and thus has a huge potential player base based on that game’s successes.

To celebrate the start of Pride month, the director of the game Al Yang took to Twitter to discuss how he approached characterising Tyrone. The director reveals that the character is gay, but also why many players may not have picked up on that.

“It's basically impossible to tell, but the character setting for Tyrone is that he is gay, but the goal was to write this without it becoming the sole basis of his character. The nature of PvP only games makes revealing this kind of info sometimes feel pretty abrupt.”

He added later in the thread: “For me, it's not about writing a gay character, it's about a character that is also gay.”

Yang explains that a lot of details about all the characters are established by the team behind the scenes, such as “place of birth, childhood, hobbies, pet peeves, mannerisms”. These details may not be relevant to players, but it helps the developer define who these characters are and write more effectively. 

Yang says it was hard to organically surface these aspects as Resident Evil Resistance doesn’t have the supportive story-telling mediums of other multiplayer-focused games. Thus this characterisation of Tyrone is rarely touched on in game as it wouldn’t feel natural to his dialogue. 

“We don't have the luxury of having constant transmedia lore drops outside the game like Overwatch [or] League of Legends does, so in the end even though we wrote a bunch of lines reflecting this for Tyrone, they stood out and didn't feel natural as part of his dialogue rotation.”

Yang goes on to say: “It's always important to solicit feedback from the group you're writing for if you're not a part of that group yourself or even if you are, extra viewpoints and feedback are always always welcome and helpful.”

If you’d like to find more horror games that might scare you silly, why not take a look at our Best Horror Games list.