Many years ago Capcom dabbled with the idea of a multi-player Resident Evil game. And we're not just talking two player co-op but a full fledged online multi-player experience. This is before online gaming had taken off on the console market and exploded like it has over the last couple years. The result was the Resident Evil: Outbreak series.on the Playstation 2. Needless to say the technology back then couldn't handle the task Capcom had set before themselves. While the main series had moved onto Resident Evil: Code Veronica and was nearing Resident Evil 4, Outbreak returned gamers to the initial spread of the T-Virus in Raccoon City. Playing as one of several survivors of the zombie outbreak, you were tasked with partnering with three other players to complete several scenarios in which our survivors escaped the city before it became a smoking crater to contain the T-Virus.
While the game's premise was great, the execution left a little to be desired. As I look at some of the titles that people are playing today though it could be that Outbreak was just a little ahead of its time. The Playstation 2 was never really intended to be an online gaming console and so connections were slow and very unstable. It was very hard to find a game where people's connections didn't drop 10 minutes into a scenario. This unfortunate fact made it hard to ever complete a scenario with players online. This fact was only compounded by Capcom's design choice to not allow voice chat but instead opting for pre-set voice commands mapped to buttons on the controller such as calling out another character's name or yelling "Help!". Fair enough to say it was very basic but it sure did ramp up the suspense when playing. Especially when you saw that when starting a game more often than not you were separated from the rest group. Much like the other games, Capcom saw fit to minimize the amount of guns and ammo you could find. Luckily they also included rudimentary weapons such as lead pipes and broom handles that characters could use to fend off the onslaught of the undead. So very much of this game was spent walking around alone, searching for your teammates with a broom handle that could break at any minute. Tense? Yes. Fun? Sometimes. Again it was ahead of its time and just not something that could do the concept justice given the hardware.
Fast forward to 2011 and it seems Capcom might be going back to that well with a new game called Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. As part of their new initiative of partnering with western developers, Capcom has partnered with Slant Six Games; who previously worked on the Socom series for the Playstation. Together, they plan to revisit the Raccoon City incident and bring a whole new style of game-play to the Resident Evil series. Much like Socom, the game will be a squad-based third person shooter in which you play as Umbrella operatives during the Raccoon City outbreak which took place during Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Along (with a CPU team) or in co-op, you and your team will clash with the legions of the undead, cross paths with memorable Resident Evil characters, and battle United States agents hell bent on finding evidence of Umbrella's involvement in the outbreak. Slant Six and Capcom plan to deliver this title in the Fall/Winter of 2011 so expect more news and coverage to follow on this title in the coming months. Also check out the press release from Capcom after the break. In the meantime I'm going to get my zombie survival kit ready.
