Game news “I’ve never seen so many bugs”: one of the best games of 2023, rated 93%, could have been released in deplorable condition

Game news “I have never seen so many bugs”: one of the best games of 2023, rated 93%, could have been released in deplorable condition

Spain, but with bugs

Last year, Capcom delighted its audience with Resident Evil 4, a remake of the 2005 anthology game: a real gem to devour again and again, to the great dismay of Léon and his painful journey to Spain to save the president’s daughter of the USA. To tell the truth, there was obviously something else to save: the very state of the game which, the month before release, was apparently calamitous.

As proof: the documentary “100 cameras” produced by NHK World Japan, whose principle is precisely to place around a hundred cameras in certain specific locations. The latest report plunges us into Capcom’s premises, with a focus on the design of Resident Evil 4, in the last weeks before release.

The least we can say is that the developers seem disappointed by the impressive number of bugs detected: for example, we can see the director of the game, Yasuhiro Anpo, encountering many problems like the camera which freezes for no reason all the time, Leon who suddenly crosses the map, visual bugs in a mess, the hands of certain characters which cannot be joined correctly…

Enough to pull your hair out? Totally. “At this rate, we will never be able to release the game on time”even says another developer after having noticed no less than 70 bugs in a single day of testing. The problems don’t stop: from an unnaturally sparkling puddle to some lighting issues, Resident Evil 4 is broken before it’s even born.

Big pressure

It goes without saying that in the upper echelons of Capcom, this observation worries… and even provokes confrontation. The Osaka firm’s quality assurance department is pushing hard, demanding to know why “the fixes are so sloppy”. Ito, the company’s head of quality assurance, takes Anpo aside to express his concern about the state of the game. “I’ve never seen bugs like this”he even says acidly.

But at Capcom, we like a job well done and the studio has obviously worked hard to ensure that all these problems are wiped off the map. We dare to imagine how many additional hours of work were necessary, but Resident Evil 4 was indeed released on time and in more than adequate condition: it still obtained the splendid average of 93% on Metacritic and can boast of being the fastest-selling game in the franchise’s history. As for the few bugs noticed by players, they were simply erased by subsequent updates.

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