When Resident Evil Village was unveiled last year, Capcom announced it as next-gen exclusive. At the time, it was one of very few upcoming games that wasn’t going to be cross-gen, but after a number of rumours, Capcom confirmed some time later that the game would indeed be releasing for PS4 and Xbox One as well. Of course, concerns about how older hardware will handle a game that was supposedly built for more powerful hardware are valid and have been raised quite often, so why exactly did Capcom made that decision?
When posed the question in an interview with IGN, Resident Evil Village Tsuyoshi Kanda said that though the game was designed with next-gen consoles in mind, Capcom only chose to launch it for PS4 and Xbox One because they were satisfied with the level of quality it was achieving on those consoles, and would not have done so otherwise.
“We developed Village as a game for next-gen hardware, but in order to make it accessible to more players, we went through a lot of trial and error to somehow provide a comparable experience on last-gen hardware,” he said. “In the end, we were able to deliver a high-quality product for last-gen hardware as well. That being said, if the quality hadn’t been sufficient, I don’t think we would have released it.”
Director Morimasa Sato added: “If there was a big difference in graphical quality or framerate, it would not have been something we could deliver to players, so we did our best to make sure it would be satisfying on any platform.”
Resident Evil Village is out in less than week, on May 7, for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Stadia. You can check out some PS4 Pro gameplay footage through here.