Tom Ivey Interview: Resident Evil 4 VR - The Mercenaries
After several months of teases, a new update to Resident Evil 4 for the Quest 2 reintroduces The Mercenaries, a fan-favorite time-attack mode that includes both classic and new content. In Resident Evil 4: The Mercenaries, players can land directly in the shoes of familiar characters like Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong, Jack Krauser, and Albert Wesker and face waves of advancing Ganados and attempt to achieve a high score and survive until a transport can come to the rescue. The Mercenaries was included in the original version of Resident Evil 4, and the game mode has been a series staple across multiple games. Mercenaries even makes an appearance in the latest release, Resident Evil Village.
While players will have the opportunity to revisit classic stages of Resident Evil 4's Mercenaries mode in virtual reality, they can also take on new stages developed by Armature Studios. These are considered Challenges, which play on the rules of Classic mode. Players can accept challenges to use only rocket launchers or the infamous Harpoon gun, or they can use a gun with a one-shot kill but can only make headshots or take damage themselves. They can also take on a horde of terrifying Regenerators or Iron Maidens if they are brave enough. Players will also earn rewards for completing stages in Mercenaries and earning high scores, like a series of golden skins for all main guns, the ability to play in black and white in Classic Horror mode, or a new Big Head mode that inflates the Ganados' heads for easier headshots.
The Mercenaries for Resident Evil 4 VR promises to include everything fans remember and love about the classic version and add new and interesting mechanics that should fit the theme of the original minigames while making use of the medium of VR. In the spirit of all Resident Evil games, it even includes new unlockables to reward speedrunners and collectors alike. Tom Ivey, Lead Producer for Resident Evil 4 VR, recently sat down with Screen Rant to discuss adapting the beloved third-person survival horror game and bringing The Mercenaries to virtual reality.
I happen to be a huge Resident Evil fan, and I saw all of the experience you've had prior to working with Armature. How did that transfer when you started working in the virtual reality sphere?
Tom Ivey: Yeah, I was a game designer for a very long time. I came in and started at Armature as a designer, then slowly started moving into production; just kind of a spreadsheets and people person.
That started on some of our port projects, and I had done a few of those. When Resident Evil started up, it was a bigger project than we had done for a while - our other VR projects, Fail Factory and Sports Scramble, are a bit smaller. They just asked for some help, so I came over to help them with scheduling and setting up the project and managing people. But I also helped out with little design things and give my opinion or whatever.
Coming on to VR, from a design perspective, this was my first VR game. Our company had done multiple VR games before, but there are some game tricks and things that you do and things you have to worry about that are universal to all games, in terms of your plot and your systems and your presentation. But VR definitely has, on top of that, comfort and accessibility concerns. Can people even stomach playing your game? And how can you make it more accessible in that way, as well as accessible to people with different body types and different expressions?
It's also just the sense of immersion, because usually when you're playing a game, you're abstracted by a controller by one step, right. So, everything you do goes through an abstracted interface. I move forward by pressing the stick forward; I jump by pressing A or whatever. VR and the controllers that they have there, in terms of the inside-out tracking, provides you some ways to get one step closer to being a direct match. I move my hand and the avatar moves his hand; I don't abstract that.
We're still in the day and age where a lot of stuff is still abstracted. We press buttons for some of our things, but we try and get as close as possible to as little abstraction as possible while not making it overly cumbersome. There's that trope of a lot of old VR experiences that are like, "I'm going to go manage my files," and you're going to a file folder. It's like, "Well, that's not better in any way." We made computers to get away from that. What we try and do is find that balance. What are the things that feel better when they are made into a physical presence, and what are the things that still remain better as an abstraction in some way?
That's kind of the major focal challenge of working on VR, for whatever presentation you're gonna do - a puzzle game, or whatever. While each game has its own things, and all games universally have things with timing and staging and stuff like that, it's about committing to that presence for VR. And I think our team has learned a lot of lessons over time through the games that they've created; moving from stationary games to room scale games to now an immersive world game where you're moving through large environments. We're figuring out how teleport movement versus FPS movement works.
They've done a lot of lessons and worked with Oculus very closely on this, because they have a lot of experience in terms of how to present that in the best way - where you feel very engaged and like you can do anything, but we're not overloading you with too much sensory input or the wrong sensory input.
It is that abstraction; figuring out where the abstraction stays, where it's gone, and how to make the player feel immersed. It's the quality of that immersion without overwhelming them, or making it more trouble than it's worth in order to try and interact with your game.
You mentioned motion sickness and the different body types. I think we had a conversation in one of our articles when the game first came out about shorter women having a hard time with the knife placement. Knowing what you guys went through to try and account for different heights, I cannot imagine that's easy.
Tom Ivey: It's interesting because we have a lot of different shapes and sizes at our company as well as the QA department that we use, and the people at Oculus. We have very short men and women; large and tall too. And even then, with all these people playing, we still didn't have enough options at the end of the day.
We added a robust set of options, but one of the first things in terms of the release was seeing that [we needed more] even with those zones that we did. We placed the stuff outside of your body, and then we give you big zones, so you don't have to grab very specifically on a grenade; you can grab from a foot away. And even that wasn't enough for some people. And some of our cases where we had people testing, they were sitting down versus standing, so some of our data was like, "Maybe this person wasn't standing when they did it."
One of the first things we did was get the feedback from all these now tons and tons of players, compared to how many people we had - in the hundreds or whatever - playing it before that. Now we had all this information, and it was like, "Let's just make this as moddable as possible." We thought we did a great job and had all these voices being part of that inclusion, but we're still learning there's more.
The good news is, for us, it just means that we can build on every next game. We have more and more learnings. And Oculus is doing that at the system level as well; they're expanding what comes at the system level with accessibility. It's what you can just have and not even have to develop as a game developer, but it just comes with the system - whether that's color correction, or changing your height in all applications and things like that.
Going forward, it's options, but it's also just how you structurally build the game in terms of what's possible for people to do. As we move forward and try and figure out novel solutions for making movement or walking more natural, does that leave a group behind? We still need to think about a group where that's not a natural movement in the real world. So, even as we advance and make VR track more things and be able to do more things, we have to always think in terms of how we're not the standard body type for everybody.
Even when you do a lot of work to do it, you're still going to miss out. And the best thing to do is just open your ears and listen to what people are saying, and try and do your best. That sometimes means a lot of work. Sometimes it just means we forgot a number that we just need to add. It really depends, and that's what you'll get. Sometimes the developer might take 18 hours, and a whole bunch of testing has to be done each time. And sometimes it's very easy, but both ways have to be open to that type of feedback. Because it means more people are able to play your game, and more people are able to experience it. And that's only a good thing, obviously.
Another long answer, I'm sorry. It's a very important topic for me, and I'm still learning a lot about it. And I think the studio is as well, so we're looking forward to learning more about it as we move forward.
VR is still arguably in its infancy as far as gaming would go, so there's plenty of time to develop those things. It's really nice to hear that's on your mind as a developer as well.
Tom Ivey: Yeah, I hope it's on the mind of more and more developers. And then, as we get the tools for making games in the hands of more and more people, we will see those things naturally develop, because we'll have more voices in terms of the development community. Whether that's on AAA level, AA level, indies of all sizes, or just one person putting their game out and saying, "Hey, this is a different way of moving; this is a different way of doing VR."
I'm very interested because, like you said, it's very early stages still in VR.
What was it like trying to adapt such a beloved horror game in a way that was faithful to the original while using VR?
Tom Ivey: It was definitely an honor. It sounds corny or whatever, but you're working on something that was an important franchise to you. In my case, I've been in the industry a long time, but I remember playing Resident Evil 4 as a player for the first time, and the experience of playing it. I still remember those moments very viscerally, and I remember what it did for the industry in terms.
On one hand, you're like, "Boy, we've got to do this right. We have to pay very close attention." And you're not going to please everybody with every change that you make. You have to make certain changes for VR, and you're going to do certain things, but the idea was working closely with Capcom. Saying, "What are the things that are important about this franchise?" And then what are the things that we know we're going to have to slightly change for VR - how you can hold two weapons, or you can move while strafing or whatever - that makes it feel more immersive? Are those okay changes?
And we've said this a lot, but from Capcom, the question was like, "Is it fun? Okay." As long as it doesn't break the rules, because there are rules of an established world of Resident Evil: Leon doesn't do this, herbs work like this, or whatever. But in terms of those friction points of the gameplay, they were very open.
One aspect of what it's like to make RE4 is that you're very worried. "Are we doing this right?" The other is that you're ecstatic, because you're in a world that is very important to you. It's just a fun, engaging game. And you're hopefully magnifying those aspects, if you do your job right. You're just making the version for VR, and you're doing everything you can to make it as good and equal as all the other versions, and give it its own unique take. So, it's exciting and nerve-wracking. When it released and people seemed to like it, we were like, "Okay, we did the scary part. Now we just get to enjoy playing the game."
But playing it in VR for the first time when we set it up? It was awesome to be inside the place that you remember so fondly, playing on the GameCube in your room. So, yeah, it was a mix.
I take it you were a Resident Evil fan before you worked on this series.
Tom Ivey: Yeah, for sure. And a lot of people have very close memories. I actually came in and got more into it with RE4. I think my first game was 2, really, and then I kind of went off. Then RE4 came out, I played it and was like, "Oh man, I love this game." It was definitely a tonal shift from the other ones, and that made me go back to the beginning and play through all of them; everything that came out before and the remakes and everything.
It's funny, I think a lot of people came into Resident Evil through RE4 and then got the whole experience. It broadened the franchise a lot for people.
It changed a lot of the ways that we think about third-person survival and shooters. And you had to move it to first-person, which cannot have been an easy task.
Tom Ivey: Yeah. Some things remain the same, like your maximum movement speed - I think this is correct - is Leon's movement speed. We thought, "Maybe we're gonna have to slow it down, or we're gonna have to speed it up, to make it feel not too nauseating." But my memory, at least, is that it's the same movement speed as before. And so certain things, like how he carries over, was just about making it feel natural to be in that body and your expectations of how you should be able to move as a person rather than the presentation it had.
That part was more about how the AI respond to that a little bit; they know your position, and can they be a bit more aggressive in certain ways? Little things, like how does Ashley follow you now? Because she used to set a certain distance that was all about framing her well for third-person camera, but should she be closer so she's safer more often? And things like that.
For the basic movement package, we definitely did a lot of experiments. It wasn't always first-person immediately; there was hybrid mixes, and there was a lot of different stuff that we tried. But eventually, it was like, "No, you want to be in this world. You want to be in the total middle of it and feel like you are Leon doing cool things as much as possible." So, we really heavily shifted toward that.
I hate to make you choose, but I was wondering what your favorite part of the game was to rework for VR.
Tom Ivey: For me, I'm the producer; I'm scheduling the things or whatever. But in terms of production, for me, it really was that first moment of being inside the village. The second room in the game that you encounter, where you have the first big fight, I remember that experience so clearly. Running up the stairs; the noise of it all... To be in that again was the peak of it. There was some other stuff later, like seeing Salazar and remembering all his lines and everything as just a character that is always burned in your brain. But it really was that first moment.
And then when we started on Mercenaries, we really had a polished movement and gun package, and we've seen what all the players have been able to do with that, and all these cool videos they're doing. Then when we started on Mercenaries, I was like, "Boy, I really can't wait to see what Mercenaries is like," in terms of using our more responsive package inside the chaos of Mercenaries, and what we can add to it with challenges and all this other stuff that we've added. That was kind of a second hit.
After we finished the game, getting into Mercenaries for the first time was like, "Oh, this kind of works!" Remembering the scoring system and feeling a little bit rusty, even in our VR environment. Like, "I'm not getting great scores, what were all the strategies?" That was the second here. The first one, definitely, was just being in the village for the first time. And when it was polished, and all the art got dropped in and everything, I was like, "Wow, this is this is gonna be good."
That actually is a great segue into my more Mercenaries-specific questions. It's a pretty well-loved staple of the series. Did you always plan to add it, or is that something that you guys came up with later? And what can players expect from it?
Tom Ivey: To the first point, we were definitely focused on Story Mode exclusively when we were starting up the project. We were like, "We've got to concentrate. We have to look at just one part and make sure we do it absolutely correct." Because it's so revered, we're going to need time to do it. It's going to take time to do it right. It's a fairly large game; it's 8 to 14 to 16 hours, depending on how you play it. It has multiple contents and all these different ways of playing, in terms of all the weapons, so we just focused hyper specifically on Story Mode and making sure we can do it as much as possible.
At the time, we were like, "We'd love to be able to do Mercenaries. But let's focus on this and make sure we're not splitting resources." As soon as we felt like the game was coming together and felt good, there were always these inklings of, "We should move onto Mercenaries next. It definitely feels like something." And then when we were wrapping the project, we talked to everybody and were like, "Yeah, okay, Mercenaries it is." So, it kind of developed over time. It was always something that we wanted to do, but our focus was on the story.
In terms of what we're adding to it? We're adding a ton. Everything from the original game, we put in a container called Classic mode. So, we have basics, which is a training thing. It's just a one-shot to take you through the rules a little bit more because it kind of dumped you in during the original game. It had some text, and you're like, "Go!" So, we give you some context, and we have more complicated controls in some way.
You can go through that, and then you have Classic mode, which is all the stages and all the characters; all four stages and all five characters that you could play with the same weapons. That includes all the guns; it has Krauser's Bow, so now you'll have a bow weapon that you'll be using; it has Krauser's special ability. So, everything in Classic mode is there, and you can play that and earn the hand cannon for the main game - similarly to how you did before.
We got all that, and we were like, "This is feeling good. We're getting it going." Then we're like, "So, what are we going to add on to it?" Because we definitely wanted to add and make it a more robust package, since it was coming as a separate thing. And we thought, "Hey, just like with the regular game, what can we do to add some content and have some different tweaks to it?"
We came up with the idea of challenges, which are basically tweaks to the ruleset of Classic modes. That can be everything from playing with a weapon you didn't play with before - like, there's a rocket launcher challenge, so here's the chaos of this with a rocket launcher. You're just getting really big scores and really big combos, but you're kind of worrying about damaging yourself. It changes quite a bit, just with a weapon change like that.
And we also have hybrids like that - like, one of the new weapons is the harpoon gun. If it was just another gun, maybe that's not enough, because, unlike the rocket launcher that's very different, you're just shooting it. We made it that the harpoon pierces, so why don't we give you bonus points for hitting multiple enemies at once? When you're playing the Harpoon challenge, you're really trying to get a high score by making sure you're lining up guys. Again, you're loading the harpoon and doing all this stuff. So, there's those kinds of weapons challenges.
And then there's different ones. There's new enemies - like, we have the Regenerators and the Iron Maidens, with a challenge centered around them. As well as changing the map in that case, in terms of the village being like a dark version or a night version.
And then we have larger scale rule changes. For example, in the normal Mercenaries mode, it's a set amount of time. There's a certain number of timers around the world in the stage that you're playing, and you can collect them and get more time, but there's a limit on your time. It's just based off of those, and they're always in the same location, so you're getting a strategy of how best to play that map.
We have a challenge called Time Rush, where we basically drop you in a map and spawn two of the timers in random locations. It's on a map where you have big sightlines on the dock side, as we call it - it used to be called Waterworld or island - and you can see a lot of locations. You see it, and you're like, "I gotta get over there, and I have a very limited time to start." You start with 30 seconds, I think, and each timer you get only adds a very small amount of time.
So, you're running around like crazy. But you also have to be shooting guys to keep up your score and your combo meter. You pick up that timer, and now it chooses two new random locations to spawn timers. And each time you're getting is giving a little less time, so it's getting more and more frantic. So, it totally changes the strategy that you use for the Mercenaries mode, while still being kind of structured inside that same scoring system.
We have another one called Kill Rush, which is a little bit similar, in that you start with a very little amount of time. But the only way you get time is by killing enemies. If you kill them with a headshot, then you earn more time than if you kill them with a body shot. You have to be rushing, but you want to be accurate. And you're always at the edge of not having enough time. Again, it's another rule change.
And then we have rule changes like one called Dead Shot, which is if you don't get a head shot, you take damage. You have a gun, and one shot kills anything. But if you don't hit them in the head, then you take damage. So you're very powerful, but you have to be really close, aiming at the guy's head very carefully, and not shaking. It's a completely different type of tension from the other one, where normally you're blasting away and just trying to hit as many things as you can as fast as you can.
We have about 20 challenges. They all have different rules and things like that. They all have their own scoreboards because each one of them has a very wide range of scores you can get, and some of them are very empowering. But they add a ton of stuff to it. You can earn medals by doing those challenges, and then you have all these unlockables that we've added.
Again, lots of answers. But that's what we've added, in terms of new game modes, and then we've added all these unlockables that you can get from them. If you like mercenaries before, I think you'll get a blast out of the new challenges, for sure. Because they still are in that zone but have a lot of additions for people.
It feels like Mercenaries coming to RE4 VR is a really nice bonus surprise. But are there other post-launch plans for the game following this? Do you have a timeline? Is anything specific set in stone?
Tom Ivey: We don't have any additional things to announce right now. It's all focused on Mercenaries at the moment, so that's what we have announced right now or will have at the showcase.
Because we know that when it releases, there's gonna be so many more people playing it that we have to pay attention to and make sure everything goes right. Or if somebody points out some options that we missed, or say that it would be really nice to do this, then we want to be receptive to that. But that's all our plans right now.
Were there features or other ideas for RE4 VR that you wanted to add or explore, but that proved a little too complex for where VR is right now?
Tom Ivey: I think we hit all this stuff for RE4's main campaign.
Originally, we had a list of like, "Maybe we're only going to be able to do so many interactions. We'll do the puzzles and the main ones, and doors because they're so ubiquitous. But maybe this button and these things won't [make it]." But we had the whole list of everything, and by the end of the project, we got every one of them. Everything that we wanted to convert, we converted.
For Mercenaries mode, we were talking about what challenges we should we add, and we had a big list. We were like, "Well, we only have time to do a certain amount," and some of them were just too crazy and too big. We're not going to have you on the boat, we're not going to do all that. It's still Mercenaries, right? So, I think there's some of those.
But to be honest with you, the more medals you earn by getting high scores in challenges, you'll unlock stuff. It's like costumes or extra weapons. And then we have these things called enhancements. So, we have a classic horror mode, where greyscale brings in the fog and adds film grain to your view. And then we have fast-forward mode, which lets you play the whole entire story mode at fast speed. You're going much faster, and everything plays out faster. And then we have Golden Guns, which is a classic thing. Our big unlock is that you get all these cool guns.
But then we have one, which I'm a super big fan of, which is Big Head mode. Somebody reminded me of Goldeneye or NBA Jam. To me, that's all I wanted to make sure [we had]. We were talking about how we need some unlocks, and I was like, "We should do Big Head mode." And then somebody was like, "It might have issues, because you're grappling. How big can your head be while you go through everywhere?" And I was like, "We need to add Big Head mode, guys." I was super happy that we were able to get it in, so for me, I have nothing else that I want to get added. [laughs]
And the thing is you can also combine all those. You can have classic horror, big head mode, and fast speed all at once. I'm very interested in the speedrunners. Are we gonna have these new speed run categories of big head mode, fast speed, blah, blah, blah?
But speaking of VR for the future, I'm very curious to see what the next version of VR tech will be, in terms of mobility and haptics and other feedback sources. I don't know for this game if we were up for it, but I'm very excited about what we might be able to do in the next game. In this game, the story and the game and what you can do in the environment were very set for us. This is the story, this is where you go, etc.
In whatever we do next, I think we're just going to look at more levels of interacting with the environment. Making it more touchable and interactable, and make it feel as immersive as possible in everything that we do. That'll be our goal, and then how that expresses itself - who knows the future? It's exciting, though. Again, it's very early hardware. Even though it's been years now, it's still very early in the cycle.
Resident Evil 4 VR with The Mercenaries update is available for Quest 2.