According to this week’s issue of Famitsu, development on Resident Evil 8: Village is 60% complete. The game, revealed during Sony’s Future of Gaming stream, is scheduled to arrive sometime in 2021. RE8 will mark the franchise’s debut on next-gen consoles, and according to the info in Famitsu, it’ll use the new hardware to its advantage.
The interview in Famitsu, translated by Alex Aniel (@cvxfreak), contained a Q&A with Resident Evil 8 producers Tsuyoshi Kanda and Pete Fabiano. Their answers shed some light on the still-mysterious title.
Resident Evil: Village has been in development for three and a half years, meaning work was likely started immediately after RE7 released. Though the two didn’t go into detail, they did state that the first-person viewpoint has “greatly evolved” from RE7 to RE8. Load times are also now imperceptible with the SSDs next-gen consoles are equipped with.
Unfortunately, many questions that were asked couldn’t be expounded upon, and Capcom is still keeping the game tightly under wraps. We know that it’s a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7 and that it’ll conclude the story started in that game. We also know that Ethan saving Mia is the canon ending to RE7 and that their life together is shattered in the opening portion of RE8. Village is set to take place in Europe, and the subtitle was chosen (over “Resident Evil 8“) because the developers see the setting as another character in the game.
Chris Redfield will also play a part in RE8‘s story. From the reveal trailer, he seems like he may be taking an antagonistic role in the game. However, things are seldomly what they seem at first glance in the world of Resident Evil, so we won’t really know what Chris’s intentions are until we play the game.
According to a Japanese language post about the interview, the team will be presenting more information about Resident Evil: Village in August. This will hopefully give us a bit more info to ruminate on as we anticipate the release of Resident Evil: Village on PC, Xbox Series X, and PS5 in 2021.