Resident Evil 4 Remake is ditching QTEs and I couldn't be more upset
At least Ashley sounds like she'll be harder for the zombies to kill this time.
Details continue to trickle out ahead of Resident Evil 4 Remake's planned March release date, and I've got bad news for your knives. The remake of the 2005 classic is ditching some of the parts that might make the old game feel clunky and archaic in our space-age gaming era, like quick-time events, Ashley's health bar, and Leon's indefatigable, unbreakable knife. But take heart, Capcom is adding brand new sidequests to make up for it.
Game Informer reports that the RE4 Remake is adding one more headache to the original game's inventory tetris system, implementing a durability system for your knives that means you'll have to keep backups to hand if you want to get up-close and personal with enemies. Ashley—the NPC you spend most of the game leading around and protecting—has also had her old-fashioned health bar replaced with a kind of 'down but not out' system that will give you a chance to revive her before she finally bites the dust.
Capcom hasn't furnished us with much info on what's going on in those new sidequests, but I'm hoping for narrative content that gives me more facetime with RE4's ridiculous little lord boy Ramon Salazar. What the developer has been clear on, though, is that QTEs are gone. Vacated. Dead as a doornail and never to return. I'm outraged.
I know it's not a popular opinion, but I'm going to be bold, steely-eyed, and handsome enough to say it: Quick-time events are fine, actually. So long as they can be turned off or eased for accessibility reasons, they're a totally acceptable way to add a little bit of gameplay tension to a cutscene, and they've led to some of the most iconic moments in gaming.
Admittedly, old-school RE4's QTEs are a little busted on PC. One particular section on a mine-cart is nearly impossible at 60 frames per second, for example, but I'll be genuinely sad to see the back of them. The cutscene knife fights with Krauser just won't have the same spice to them if I'm not frantically mashing at the controller I absent-mindedly set down on the coffee table when the cutscene started.
If you're not so upset by the QTE thing that you're boycotting the game, you can keep track of everything we know about RE4 in the run-up to its release over on our boutique Resident Evil 4 Remake page.