Resident Evil 4 for VR was announced last week, and is skipping Sony's PS VR headset to launch exclusively on Oculus Quest 2, bringing a stone-cold Resi classic into the world of virtual reality this year.
You can watch a very brief overview of the VR makeover for Resident Evil 4 below, but Oculus executive producer Ruth Bram delved into the finer details of the title in the Oculus Gaming Showcase livestream. The core systems of the game have been reworked for VR, making it arguably more suspenseful and spooky than the original.
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While Resident Evil 4 is by no means the scariest installment in the series, playing in VR is going to kick things up a notch to a possible pants-wetting level.
The blog post also fleshes out the mechanics of the game, which is played in first-person from Leon Kennedy's perspective. Players can control movement using the analog stick but Armature has overlaid a full upper-body rig on top of Leon "to combine his movement with the dual-handed interactivity achieved with Touch controllers." And if you're not a fan of using the analog stick to move around in VR, there's support for teleportation and room-scale movement, so you can explore the world in your preferred way.
Bram adds that the studio is also making sure that the game can be comfortably played sitting down, adding that there are a "ton of comfort options" for you to sit back and enjoy the experience.
VR is a hugely different medium to regular console games, and so the way in which the player interacts with the environment has had to be transformed. Weapons and items are now physical objects in the world that you can pick up and interact with. If you want to switch out your weapons, you'll need to grab them off your body — and you can even dual wield, with a weapon in each hand.
Aside from the gameplay changes, Resident Evil 4 for Oculus Quest 2 features remastered art, while character animations have been converted to Unreal Engine 4. Oculus noted that they "remain untouched from the original source material, and all cutscenes will be presented in their original format."
Other additions that look set to make it significantly more terrifying than the original game include spatial audio. Combine the cacophony of creepy voices, cackling crows, and suspicious creaks with the pressure of physically reloading and wielding weapons, and you'll probably be sweating buckets in no time.
If you've got time to watch the six-minute segment on the game from the showcase, it's worth a look. Resident Evil 4 VR is set to launch in 2021, with more details being released as we get closer to its release.
Check out our where to buy Oculus Quest 2 guide to get yourself the stellar VR headset. But of you're not interested VR then why not see what we know so far on Resident Evil Village.
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