Resident Evil Requiem's producer, Masato Kumazawa, has revealed that certain “elements” from its original multiplayer iteration have stuck in the final game, while revealing why it changed focus.
The road to Resident Evil 9 was very long. After the release of Village and the various Resident Evil remakes, there were plenty of rumors and leaks about what the next big game in the series would be. One of those rumors suggested that Resident Evil 9 would be an open-world multiplayer game starring Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine.
When Requiem was finally revealed, it was easy to dismiss these rumors, but Capcom themselves actually confirmed that was the original plan for the game. While Requiem is clearly very different from the brief glimpse we got of the multiplayer version of Resident Evil 9, it apparently retains some of the things that made that iteration “fun.”
Resident Evil Requiem hasn't completely abandoned its multiplayer origins
What was retained remains to be seen, but it is surely Leon
As pointed out by VGC, Resident Evil Requiem producer Masato Kumazawa recently chatted with Press Start Australia about the game and its development. At one point, Kumazawa is asked about the original multiplayer version of Requiem, and if there is any of that stuck in the final game.
Kumazawa responded by confirming that there are “some elements left over” from the scrapped multiplayer version of RE9, but that the team cannot reveal them yet. While my thoughts immediately go to Leon Kennedy, Kumazawa noted that the multiplayer build was “fun to play” and that the team added some of those elements to the current version of Requiem.
That's not all though, as Kumazawa also dove into why the multiplayer version of Resident Evil 9 was scrapped in the first place. The producer noted that the horror was “very mild” and the team watched it and realized that fans wouldn't “really like” it. These two factors were enough to make Capcom shift gears and put the focus back on single-player horror.
But in that build we made a game that was fun to play. But we looked deep into this game and wondered if a fan of the franchise would really like this, so we thought they probably wouldn't enjoy it that much. That's why we made it back to single player. – Masato Kumazawa
We currently have no idea what Capcom kept from the original version of Resident Evil 9 because we know so little about what the multiplayer version would look like. If the rumors about the Leon and Jill thing were true, chances are one of the things it can't talk about is the poorly kept secret that Leon is really in the game.
