The cabin fight in is one of the greatest horror sequences of all time. I’m sure when I mentioned the cabin you instantly remembered barricading the doors and windows and fighting off a seemingly never-ending horde of undead with Luis and Ashley. It’s the scariest scene in the game, inspiring almost every action-horror game and horde mode that came after it, including, of course, Call of Duty: Zombies. I’ve been thinking a lot about the cabin fight ever since the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:VR remake of RE4 was announced this summer, and while it's definitely the part of the game I’m most excited to experience in virtual reality, it’s also an extraordinarily difficult scene to pull off. The cabin barricade could easily succumb to VR’s biggest limitations, but if developer Armature Studio has found smart ways to work around them, it could also be one of VR’s greatest triumphs.
A few hours into Resident Evil 4, Leon and Ashley cross a bridge and find themselves surrounded by Ganados - RE4’s neopagan Spanish villagers who’ve willingly given their bodies to the Plagas parasite. They retreat into a small cabin where Luis is waiting for them. What follows is a claustrophobic survival sequence that lasts only five minutes, but feels like five years. The Ganados come pouring into the tiny cabin from every direction and you’re given precious few resources to fight them off. It’s a terrifying encounter that works because it feels impossible until the very end, but it's also mechanically complex in a way that VR isn’t exactly equipped to handle.
When you first enter the cabin, you have only a few seconds to get prepared. There’s some herbs, ammo, and grenades to scavenge from the first and second floor, as well as windows that need to be barricaded with bookshelves. Both of these actions - looting and manipulating physical objects - are particularly challenging in VR. It can quickly become immersion breaking when a game makes you reach out and grab objects that aren’t really there, and it can be hard to reach objects on the floor or up high if you don’t have the proper range of motion. VR developers are sometimes forced to find work arounds for this. In 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Half-Life: Alyx and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wraith: Oblivion, you can point at an object and flick your wrist to send it flying into your open hand. In the I Expect You To Die series, you can grab distant objects and use the analog stick to freely move them around in the air. Other games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners require you to actually reach out and grab objects, but as long as yo🔜u’re relatively close, the item will be magnetically attracted to your hand.
All of these are possible solutions, but Armature Studio may have found a different option that fits RE4’s gameplay better. Whatever the mechanic is, it needs to be conꦺsistent and intuitive. The cabin fight is an intense, high-pressure sequence, and fussing with items that should be easily collectible with the tap of a button will kill the experience. Part of the stress of this fight comes from the limited resources Leon has. By the midway point, most players start picking up whatever ammo or weapons drop from the dead Ganados💃 to use against them. I really don’t want to be scrambling around on the floor trying to grab grenades as the room fills up with monsters.
The other major concern is the aforementioned interaction with bookshelves. Once again, the original version of the game allowed you to push the shelves with a single press of a button, but in VR, we’d expect the game to require a real-life physical action. How will we push a bookshelf without accidentally moving our arms right through the solid objects? Is there a way to easily move these shelves without breaking immersion? Just lining yourself up ♓in that corner between the wall and the edge of the shelf can be a real challenge with VR controllers, and it’s important to be able to do this action quickly so you can focus on fighting and looting.
Once the fight moves upstairs, the Ganados start leaning ladders against the house and climbing up into the second-flo𒈔or windows. In between headshots, you have to run around the room pushing the ladders over to stop the enemies from climbing in. Again, this has to feel fast, fluid, and reliable, or we’ll end up awkwardly throwing our hands at a ladder while zombies stab us in the back. In the original game, this is done by simply walking up to the window and pressing the interact button, but I’ve never played a VR game that uses an interact button before, and it sounds like it would be incredibly immersion-breaking.
There are ♛other concerns too. Walking up and downstairs is disorienting in VR because your body can’t feel the change in elevation, but this fight is centered around a staircase. Menu navigation is also a tricky thing to manage in VR, and Resident Evil 4’s inventory is a messy Tetris game that’s almost a game mode unto itself. This fight required frequent pausing in the original so that you could switch weapons and consume healing items, but those kinds of interruptions are typically a no-no for VR. The change in perspective from third to first-person will also change the way this encounter feels. Simply being able to look out the window and aim at the ground will change this fight dramaticall💯y. You might be able to stand on the second floor and pick off all the enemies down below, which would diffuse so much of the tension from this battle and likely ruin it.
These are the things that keep me up at night. Resident Evil 4 is the Beethoven of horror games,✤ and the cabin fight is its Moonlight Sonata. It is absolutely essential that RE4 VR gets this scene right no matter what. I want that feeling of being drowned in corpses, frantically trying to make every bullet count, and desperately fleeing to higher ground only to find that the threat there is even greater. I don’t want to wave my arms at herbs that are just out of reach and watch my hands clip through solid objects as I try to push them. I hope the cabin fight will become the ultimate dem🐎o for VR that I can show off to all my friends, but I’m afraid of it becoming yet another example of virtual reality’s limitations.