In all the ways Capcom has tried to spin Resident Evil, none has been more beset with poor timing, failure, and outright disaster than its various attempts to take the fight against (and for) Umbrella online.
Yes, it dabbled in co-op fairly successfully in the mainline series, albeit in two of the weaker entries in it, but outside that it’s, at best, a case of ‘wrong place, wrong time’, and at worst, phenomenally miscalculated and executed.
Where the light gun spinoffs started off disastrously before completing a redemptive arc over the span of just nine years, Capcom has spent 17 years trying to capture multiplayer lightning in a bottle, and arguably came closest on the first attempt.
At a time before Xbox Live truly changed online console gaming forever, there were a handful of console games dabbling in the practice of online play. One of those was Resident Evil Outbreak.
In 2003, this online take on the classic Resi formula did things that online-based horror games have copied over and over in the years since. Shaky teamwork with strangers in a pressure situation, spontaneous moments of chaos and cheer, and players able to assume the role of one of the monsters, hunting down the rest. All familiar now, but truly a unique phenomenon at the time.
It’s a shame then that outside of Japan, getting a PlayStation 2 online in 2003 was a less pleasant experience than Nemesis applying a Covid test with its tentacle. For the majority of the world, online play was something that only really lived, and worked, on PCs, so Outbreak and its even better sequel ended up as cult classics that Capcom never quite captured the feel of again.
After showing up early and going home in sulk, Capcom was ultimately late to the online dance when it really kicked off. It was 2012 by the time it chose to dip its toes into another fully online Resident Evil game, and sensibly chose to use the backdrop of the Raccoon City outbreak as the template again, and an intriguing spin on that story where the players were the bad guys taking out all the do-gooders as the city crumbled.
That’s about as good as it got though, because that game was Operation: Racoon City.
This co-op shooter saw you play as a special Umbrella team of soldiers, sent in to clean up the mess during the outbreak in Raccoon City. That puts you in direct opposition to the likes of Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, which throws up a tantalizing ‘What If?’ scenario where you get to eliminate the heroes of the outbreak. Again, a great idea, but a game is more than an idea. It just so happens it needs to function as a video game too.
Operation: Raccoon City turned out to be a poorly thought out mess. A run and gun Resi with an excessive amount of hand-to-hand combat with the undead. Again, on paper that sounds like a fantastic idea for a weird spin on the franchise, but it was done in such a dull, uninspired manner.
But hey, co-op zombie-killing in Raccoon City? That’s gotta be fun, right? A common defense of the game is that it’s still fun in co-op with friends whatever its problems might be. This is somewhat true, but it’s also true of many terrible games you can play together. Aliens: Colonial Marines was also a festering boil of disappointment, and it still had a shred of joy in joining another human being in laughing at it whilst mindlessly mowing down hordes of Xenos that ragdolled in various ridiculous ways. This was no different.
It also came during a time where companies somehow started deciding that horror games were no longer in demand, and the whole Resident Evil series had begun spinning toward that lucrative action/online market. The Revelations spinoffs ended up being the closest we got to what you could call traditional Resident Evil (and ironically, a decent co-op experience to boot), all while games like Operation Raccoon City, Resident Evil 6, and Umbrella Corps came along to drive more nails into the coffin housing Resi’s identity.
Umbrella Corps had to have been the tipping point. While Operation Raccoon City may have been a duffer it did at least feel a little bit like it was connected to the Resident Evil universe. Umbrella Corp had zero personality and nothing interesting to say about the Resident Evil universe. Another online game with faceless grunts facing off against each other in tiny brown/beige arenas that just so happen to feature some zombies. By 2016, when the game came out, there were far better ways to play something like this elsewhere, and unsurprisingly, it was effectively dead on arrival.
If this action-heavy focus had continued to be the path Capcom went down, it’s safe to say we wouldn’t be as invested in what Resident Evil Village had to offer as we are now. Thankfully it did change tack, and ignored online play for a little while, instead delivering a successful reset for the mainline series, and the long-awaited remake of Resident Evil 2.
The company then pushed out a new multiplayer experience alongside the Resident Evil 3 remake in 2020, and it did show some promise.
Taking a leaf out of the book of asymmetric multiplayer horror games Friday the 13th and Dead By Daylight, Resident Evil Resistance saw four human-controlled players try to escape an Umbrella testing facility full of biohazards. Controlling the flow of these mutant nasties is a fifth player, acting as stage manager for the facility, shoving out undead, monsters, and even Tyrants.
The interesting wrinkle in this setup is in the director role. While the director can get a bit more hands on by taking over control of a monster, the action is generally a bit more distant for this player, setting up the gauntlet, order of creature appearance, and traps from the safety of a control room.
While being a significant step up from previous online efforts, Resistance has quietly been dying off in the year since release, with updates for it becoming eerily infrequent. It certainly felt damning when details of another online Resident Evil emerged at the start of 2021.
Resident Evil RE:Verse is set to launch alongside Resident Evil Village as the latest attempt to take Resi online, and first impressions aren’t all that promising. A 6 player PvP shooter where characters from the last few years of Resident Evil battle it out in familiar locales. So Resident Evil 7’s Jack Baker can do battle with Resident Evil 2 Remake’s Ada Wong.
While it’s looking underwhelming (and let’s be honest, Resident Evil history doesn’t favor its chances) it’s at least not taking itself too seriously, with daft things such as Leon transforming into Nemesis as a kind of power-up.
Whether it ultimately bombs or not, one thing is clear; Capcom will try to bring survival horror online again.