Resident Evil Village has been a huge success, with a record-breaking launch for the franchise, huge viewer numbers of Twitch and other streaming platforms, and a vast array of user-created content surrounding its characters. This might not have been the case though had the game not gone through some rigorous quality assurance, according to a new mini-documentary that goes behind the scenes of the rocky development of Resident Evil Village.

Developing a video game is always a series of challenges, even for experienced developers like Capcom, and stringent testing policies are an important way to weed out early bugs. The mini-documentary gives a great insight into Resident Evil Village's development, as well as showing the importance of quality assurance and the collaboration of different teams during the making of a AAA title.

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One of the main obstacles for Resident Evil Village was the COVID-19 pandemic, which, according to Director Morimasa Sato, forced development of the game to come "to a complete stop." The game was in need of some serious work at this stage, and after initial testing with a focus group showed that players "didn't need to think too hard" while playing the game, the developers handed the game to quality assurance. Capcom's QA Manager, Shutaro Kobayashi, had "a really strong negative reaction" to the game when he first played it.

The main takeaway from the testing was that Resident Evil Village's enemies were highly aggressive and very numerous, and due to the game's low ammo count, Kobayashi deemed the combat "frustrating and boring." Despite the critical feedback being received unfavorably initially, the development team quickly refocused the game to focus on paranoia over facing monsters, rather than constant encounters with mobs of aggressive enemies. Resident Evil Village's producer, Tsuyoshi Kanda, credits much of the game's success to the QA team's feedback, calling it an "essential part of the process."

The mini-documentary is an incredibly interesting look at Capcom's development process, and it is wonderful to see the development team's passion for Resident Evil Village. It is also great to see that while there were large issues with the game as it was being made, the team were able to accept the criticisms of the combat put forward by Kobayashi and his team in order to put out a game more in-keeping with the survival horror gameplay Resident Evil is known for. On top of that, it makes the games incredible success even more impressive, as the game was in a state of internal struggle reasonably close to its release deadline.

Resident Evil Village is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

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