Possibly the most impressive fan remaster of a video game to date?

Way back in February 2014, two RE4 superfans—Albert Marin and Cris Morales—officially began work on their ambitious RE4 re-texture project, making their first blog post about their intentions. It was originally meant to be purely an HD texture pack.

But in the course of eight years—in which Albert and Cris toiled away for more than 13,000 hours on the project and spent around $15,000 of their own money (this was later made up by around $16,000 worth of donations) for hardware, software, textures, programming support, and travel—the visual overhaul came to include not only textures, but 3D edits, lighting, UI, collision detection, cinematics, and fixes for long-standing bugs introduced into the game’s many ports. The final result is a stunning remaster of a classic game that touches every aspect of its visuals. If there is a more impressive fan-made remaster of a video game, I do not know it. Below is the official release trailer.

One thing that stood out about this project immediately was that Albert was determined to locate as many of the original source locations for the game’s textures as possible. He began doing research as early as 2008 into where Capcom had done their source photography. Luckily, about half of these locations ended up being in his home country of Spain (which is where the game itself is set), while most of the rest were in Wales. He would spend about $1,200 travelling to eight source locations in Europe.

But how he located all this stuff, I have no idea. He even found a random chunk of rock in Segovia that was used for one of the game’s mine sections:

Further, a lot of RE4’s textures actually came from multiple sources, such as this door, which borrowed elements from Seville, London, and Rome:

Or how about these doors from Seville and Toledo?

After Albert located all this source material and took his own photographs, it was time to start doing the actual modding. This included, of course, re-creating a lot of textures from scratch, in cases where the original was unknown or destroyed (Albert recalls seeing the destruction of a random wall used in the game in his home town of Barcelona).

Their first release came fairly quickly (less than a year later), on Christmas day 2014. It included a re-texturing of only the “Village” portions of the game, i.e., chapters 1 and 2. Even this early release was a massive improvement:

Little did these two intrepid modders know at the time that they would end up returning to this section years later and make it look even better!

Their next release of the “Castle” section (chapters 3 and 4) would not happen for more than two years, in late March 2017. Unlike the original Village release, this one included 3D, lighting, and effects enhancements, things that Albert had learned to do along the way. In an email exchange I had with him, Albert was keen to credit the help of some outside programmers:

I got the help of some programmers who created tools based on info I discovered when hex editing certain files. Without these tools I wouldn’t have been able to edit lights, effects and other files so easily. The programmers also found out how to edit some other files that I had no idea how to even locate (collision data, for example).

All of this led to an even more impressive visual upgrade than the previous one:

It was around this time that Cris was forced to stop active work on the project due to family and work commitments, though he remained administrator of the project’s website. Albert continued on alone.

About a year later, in July 2018, the project’s penultimate release was posted, which not only included the final “Island” section of the game (chapter 5), but further 3D and lighting tweaks to earlier releases (especially the early “Village” release), and also work on the “Separate Ways,” “Assignment Ada,” and “Mercenaries” modes of the game.

This release touched almost every visual aspect of the game, and for someone who is less of perfectionist than Albert is, this might have served quite well as the project’s final release after more than four long years of work. Albert, however, was not content. He knew he could make it look even better with things like edits to enemies and NPCs, further refinements to weapons and items, and fixes to bugs in the PC port.

And so over the next three-and-a-half years, Albert did another complete pass through the game, using everything he had learned during his previous years of work to make it all look as good as he possibly could while staying faithful to the feel of the original... including even remastering the 512×336 cinematics. And besides this, he hired other programmers to do things like fix a bug that removed transparency from the item pickup screen:

...restore depth-of-field effects that had appeared in the Gamecube and Wii versions, but had been removed from the other ports:

...and add support for ultrawide resolutions (I'm sure he was thinking of @rorie):

...plus many more improvements and fixes than is practical to list here.

And now the whole thing is out, and wow, let me tell you, it is pretty friggin’ great!

The thing I particularly appreciate about the work done on this project is that Albert and Cris tried very hard to stay faithful to the feel of the original game with their upgrades. As Albert said previously in interviews:

One of the main goals of this project is to be faithful to the original. And here is where subjectivity plays an important role: Low resolution textures leave a lot to the imagination, and you know... every person’s imagination is different! Sometimes we receive complaints even when we use the exact same texture, but in HD resolutions, because the low-res textures looked like they were dirtier or muddy or something like that. But the HD re-creation looked too clean in comparison, depending on what the person interpreted when looking at the low-res surface. ... [So] we use our aesthetic judgment and try to avoid making anything stand out too much. We try to avoid evoking reactions of “Hey! This is new!”

As a result, playing this remaster makes me feel a bit like I’ve been transported back in time to 2005. I mean, I know in my head that the game has never looked this good. But in my heart, and through the rose-tinted glasses of my memory, I remember RE4 looking amazing back when it first released. And it did! But it was “amazing” for a letterboxed Gamecube game in 2005. This remaster retains all of the original’s feel while creating a whole new level of fidelity.

Thankfully, this project hasn’t run into the legal problems and cease-and-desist orders that some fan remasters experience. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that it isn’t a stand-alone product; you need to buy the Steam version of the game for it to work, so ultimately it’s just a massive mod, released for free. Given this, Capcom has given the project their official blessing, probably because they know that it can only help the game’s sales.

Maybe the one pity about this whole project is that it sounds unlikely that Capcom will integrate all these upgrades to future ports of the game. In an email exchange I had with Albert, he cited copyright issues as a major hurdle:

I’m afraid Capcom can’t integrate it because they’d need to be sure each and every texture source image has no copyright problems and this is almost impossible to track for them.

But even if I won’t ever be able to play this remastered version on my Playstation, having it on Steam is pretty good, especially considering that the upcoming Steam Deck should allow for a portable option (pending a compatibility check).

In the meantime, there continue to be persistent rumors about an official RE4 remake in the style of the recent, successful RE2 and RE3 remakes, though it remains unannounced. But Albert isn’t worried that a possible remake would steal the HD project’s thunder:

The remakes are really different games. Even now, the original Resident Evil 2 & 3 receive their own mods and visual improvements (Resident Evil 2 and 3 HD Seamless Project). They are different and complementary experiences. Just think about any Hollywood remake. Most of them don’t hurt the original movie, and they are alternative visions of the older title.

He’s right about that. The long-rumored remake may end up being a good game, but the original isn’t going anywhere. It is remembered too fondly by too many people, myself very much among them. In fact, I would be very surprised indeed if a remake could fully recapture the magic of the original. Some games are greater than the sum of their parts, and this game is surely one of them.

Resident Evil 4 has long held a special place in my heart. Playing it for the first time in 2005, when I was still in college, was practically a religious experience for me. It is easily one of my top five favorite games ever, and it still holds up: it’s one of the very few titles more than fifteen years old that I still go back and play regularly. As such, I’ve been anticipating playing the final version of this lovingly crafted remaster about as much as a brand spanking new triple-A title.

So far, it hasn’t disappointed.

With many thanks to Albert and Cris for their many years of hard work, there’s never been a better time to play Resident Evil 4. Download the completed mod here:

https://www.re4hd.com/?page_id=9303

Note: All images are courtesy of Albert Marin. My sources were the official project website, a 2018 interview with TooFarGone, a 2021 interview with The Verge, and personal email correspondence with Albert.

P.S. Given all his years of work on this, I’ll forgive Albert for preferring the Blacktail to the Red9, even though the Red9 is objectively the better gun. :-P

EDIT: See the 18th post in this thread for a tour through the new easter egg secret area that the modders added toward the end of the Village section!

I thought this was supposed to improve the game, but I see Ashley is still in it?

@humanity: Actually, in all seriousness, even though everyone hates escort missions in video games (including me), I thought Ashley was one of the least offensive escorts/followers that has ever been. She always sticks very close to you, and for the most part doesn't act like a moron.

@atheistpreacher: Likewise, maybe it's just because i've played it multiple times, but you can just chuck her in the bin or kill everyone :P.

Excellent write-up of a fabulous project, thrilled to see it's finally complete! RE4 is also one of my absolute favourites, and though I'm sure it's impossible to extricate completely from nostalgia, I feel like it still owns bones.

Plus, if you complete "Separate Ways" then you can get her in full plate mail so that she's immune to gunfire and can't be picked up. Doesn't help for a first-time player, but if you really find her that annoying, you only need to deal with it once! :-)

Hard agree. As I mentioned in the piece, I rarely go back and do full playthroughs of 15+ year old games, but with RE4 I do so rather frequently. The only other games like that for me are From Software's King's Field series, which I have an unholy attachment to and play every year or two. But there's just something great about RE4 that's hard to nail down. I sit down intending to mess around a bit and end up going through the whole game again. Definitely one of the greatest games ever in my book.

@atheistpreacher: I started playing it half an hour ago and was confronted with a decision, use my completed save from my last playthrough in 2015 with all the upgraded stuff, or start again and get the full experience, i chose to start a new save.
I think RE4's progression is critical to why it's so good, the satisfaction of using the money from all the treasures you've found to upgrade and buy new guns, i also want to see as much of the updated graphics as possible :P, so far it's wonderful, i love the F1 graphics options turning off film grain helped increase the brightness for those looking for a bit more.

For sure. In theory it's fun to use all your OP guns at the start and kill enemies with a single pistol bullet, but it gets old pretty fast. The difficulty is tuned so well (and has that dynamic difficulty adjustment) that it's way more fun to start again from scratch.

I'm definitely a hardcore ammo hoarder in that game... like, if you're not shooting enemies once in the head or legs to stagger them, then kicking them down, then knifing them to death, you're playing the game wrong! Gotta scrimp and sell as much as possible (including extra ammo / health / grenades) to get all those upgrades as early as you can. That's where a lot of the fun is (for me, anyway)... trying to do it with as few resources as possible. Also, this is maybe the one game ever in which I actually enjoy the inventory tetris.

FWIW the new expanded FOV option is wild. I don't think I'm actually going to use it because it changes the game too much, gives you way more situational awareness than you're supposed to have. But cool that it's there. Look at these comparison shots of the default FOV vs the optional fully increased FOV (it's on a slider from 0 to 50, the first shot is 0 and the second is 50):

It's so crazy, looks like you can see at least twice as much, maybe more.

I use the fov slider at 18 which feels more natural to me, RE4 and 5 were always too zoomed in for me, i got used to them at the time but now i can mod them i do.

I own RE4 on PS4/5 but I’ve never actually installed it because I worry how much I’d like it. I’m much more averse to horror than I was back then (haven’t played 7 or even 8 for example despite all the praise) and I worry the controls will feel weird at this point.

I should just use this lull before Horizon to install the REmake and RE4 and have a good time. This project it’s nuts, it’s a shame it can’t ever be official. In theory I understand the texture copyright worries but it feels overly cautious to me for some reason.

@cikame said:

I use the fov slider at 18 which feels more natural to me, RE4 and 5 were always too zoomed in for me, i got used to them at the time but now i can mod them i do.

To each their own. To me the fact that it's so zoomed-in seemed like an intentional design choice so that it was harder to tell if you were being surrounded... which goes a little more towards realism. You can't see someone sneaking up behind you IRL. For that reason I want to just stick to the original. Having it more zoomed out gives a very different feel.

Random question for you: do you, or do you not, use the TMP? I feel like this is a big bone of contention among RE4 fans, even more than Red9 vs. Blacktail. Some seem to think it's the best gun in the game and you'd be crazy not to use it. For my part, for every playthrough after my first one, I have never taken the TMP and simply sell all ammo for it that I come across. It strikes me as a jack-of-all-trades gun that might be the most flexible gun in the game, good in almost all situations... but master of none. For that reason I prefer to save both my inventory space and the money I'd spend on upgrading it for other things, like more ammo and upgrades for my others guns.

FWIW I feel like RE4 in particular isn't really a horror game, it's an action game with a horror setting. Besides the odd jump scare, it's not really trying all that hard to be "horrifying," you're just gunning down monsters... a lot of whom just look like people.

It does have the classic "tank controls," no strafing or anything like that. You can only move forward, or backward (very slowly), and turn (slowly, unless you do a quick 180). It can definitely feel clunky, especially if you've not played games with controls like that before or recently. But I will say that the game knows you're using tank controls, and is balanced around them. It gives you all the tools to handle every situation it puts you in. I'm probably biased since I've played this game all the way through about ten times over the years, but I feel like the controls mesh quite well with the whole experience.

While I'm thinking of it, I still get a kick out of Greg Kasavin's review of the original Gamecube version in 2005. It's a trip. For those interested:

@atheistpreacher: Oh I should be clear, I was a huge RE guy as a teen. Wrote fanfic on the IGN board, played RE2 and RE4 like it was a job, owned a GameCube just because RE0 and REmake were coming to it exclusively. I’m super familiar with how not scary RE4 is, I’ve just become such an anxious wimp as an adult it’s silly.

@atheistpreacher: I do use the TMP, it's as you say a jack of all trades master of non, if there's a lot of enemies near you and your shotgun's empty it's good for giving you some breathing room, sometimes it's easier to pepper a parasite head whipping around with it than carefully using a pistol, it probably destroys enemy shields later on in an emergency, you can use it to kill regenerators pretty well, with capacity upgrades it can hold 250 rounds freeing up your inventory and it doesn't take up much space at 6 blocks (you don't need the stock), with that much ammo it kills harder enemies and bosses too.

Not using it is a very valid way to play, because the game favours giving you ammo for guns you have, so you'll be getting more pistol and shotgun ammo.

@cikame: It sort of depends with the stock. If you're planning to use the TMP to basically replace your pistol's main task of getting head/leg shots to set up kicks, then your probably want the stock to steady your aim for those precise single shots. But if you're using it mostly on full auto in fairly close quarters for crowds/bosses, it probably doesn't matter.

For me it always seemed like a superfluous gun in either case. Like, if I've completely run out of shotgun ammo for a situation when I really need it, then I tend to think I've just been using the shotgun too much. In practice, with the way I play, I end up selling a fair bit of ammo throughout the game as my inventory fills up and I have nowhere to put it all, even playing on Pro.

But speaking of attachments, is it just me or are the truly useless ones the rifle scopes? The rifles already have built-in variable zoom, all the scopes do is let you zoom more, which in my experience is really never needed. The only attachment I care a lot about is the stock for the Red9.

@atheistpreacher: I prefer pistols for more predictable stuns and the occasional headshot crit, reloading is where i take most of my damage so having the TMP as another option suits me.
I don't use attachments my aim is superb :P, just the thermal.

@cikame: I find the stocks help a lot for precision shots. The Red9 and TMP have even less steady aim than the other pistols by default; obviously I don't use the TMP at all, but I wouldn't want to use the Red9 without it. Annoying to waste ammo because your aim suddenly jumped away.

The bummer about the thermal is that when you play on Pro, the regenerators get a parasite on their backs which can't be seen from the front even with the thermal. And since trying to get behind them to take it out is usually a fool's errand, I end up just having to dump ammo into them regardless. That's perhaps the one part of the Pro difficulty that I find annoying.

What a big project. A lot of legwork! Hopefully Capcom gives them more recognition around the time of the remake.

@blatantsavescum: I think that this would actually just be bad marketing. If you're putting out a full remake, it seems like the last thing you'd want to do is highlight a fan remaster of the original. You're liable to both confuse your potential customers ("Wait, one is a remaster and the other is a remake? What's the difference again?"), and also get them asking "Why is a remake needed when there's this cool fan project anyway?"

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it if Capcom could roll all this fan work into console releases of the original game, and/or include it bundled together with the rumored forthcoming remake. But it sadly seems very unlikely.

Well, this was a fun and unexpected discovery.

I was making my way through RE4 again, as of course I was going to now that this project is complete, and ran into a secret room that the modders added!

Here's how to get to it. Right after the big fight at night in the house across the bridge, you'll run into a lever that opens the path either left or right. Choose left.

In this area you'll run into a boatload of ganados to fight, along with the two Chainsaw Sisters, one of whom will drop a key that opens the door forward. Immediately after using the key, look right and you'll see this door:

Go through the door, jump down into the hole, and you'll find this partly-boarded up doorway that you can jump over and head into. This is the new secret room. This doorway was simply blocked before, and you couldn't interact with it.

When you head in and jump down, you'll find yourself in a cave with a wooden pier that loops around, with yellow torches around you.

FWIW I tried opening the map from here to see if I could get the area to display... but there's nothing there.

Anyway, you can head either left or right from here, but I headed right first. Soon enough I came to a house with blue torches around it.

Going inside revealed walls with Spanish writing on them, along with a silencer--an item that exists in the game's code and that Wesker uses in the "Mercenaries" mode, but that cannot normally be obtained by Leon. It fits on any handgun except the Matilda and Red9 (EDIT: apparently doesn't work for the Blacktail either?).

FWIW the silencer actually showed up as invisible in my inventory... judging by the latest post on the official website, it sounds like this is a known problem and will be fixed.

Anyway, the fact that the text on the walls is in Spanish makes sense, both because the game takes place in Spain, and Albert--the HD project's primary modder--lives in Spain himself. Here's the text in this first house, along with translations (Google translated... if you actually know Spanish and have corrections, let me know and I'll fix them).

A little more counter-clockwise running took me to another house, this one with pink torches surrounding it.

This may be the house that had gold bars worth 5,000 in it... not sure since I grabbed them and then came back later. But there was more Spanish on the walls:

Directly across from this house is a walkway that you can jump onto:

Go inside and you'll find a large chamber with this big statue in the center, suspended from chains:

If you look around the room, you'll notice that there are some shiny objects to pick up along the walls:

There are six of these: two Spinels (worth 1,000 each), two Velvet Blues (worth 2,500 each), and two Emeralds (worth 3,000 each).

Finally, after heading back and continuing along the path counter-clockwise, I ran into a final house with green torches around it:

This room is probably the most fun one. Here's the text on the left wall:

And check this out:

There appears to be one mark for each day since the project began. If I've counted correctly (and it's entirely possible that I'm off by a bit), then the marks represent 2,892 days... or about 7 years, 11 months. That's about right, since the first post on the official site was made on 14 February 2014, and release was on 2 February 2022. There were also two leap years in there FWIW.

There are also pictures strewn about the desk and floor, which appear to be the new source texture images Albert was integrating into the game:

Neat, huh? It tickled me that I found this on my own, I had no idea it was there.

That's awesome, i knew there was going to be at least one new small area they were adding to better logically connect two areas in the game but this is quite involved, and a great use of a previously locked door.

@cikame: And FWIW, I emailed Albert and asked if he wanted to comment. To my delight, he talked about this added area in some detail!

Hahaha good job on finding it.

Just one small detail [you missed]

Look on the right side of the image. The picture on the locker. It's the guy (AI upscaled) that the Japanese developers put on purpose in the room where Leon tries to kill Ada:

Since nobody knows who is this guy, I put that "wanted" poster XD

Other than that, you found everything. And no more secret rooms.

FYI, the huge Plaga statue is the model of the parasite inside Leon's body, I just change its pose to this one that resembles the Iluminados emblem

All those numbers are references to the code of the game, so only modders will understand the real meaning.

One code is the broken water effect, the other is the terrible original film grain effect, the other is a broken effect that made almost the entire game to look reddish, the circular lines represent the RTP files which describes the enemy and Ashley stage paths. In this case, it's the RTP of this same easter egg room. It looks like a map, but it's the path Ashley takes if you leave her at the beginning of the area and, for example, you call her when you are in the central part of the stage. Without this data, Ashley tries to go through the walls to reach you and she gets stuck.

The invisible walls is a reference to the collision data.

And the pieces of the world falling apart is a reference to how the stage models are done. Some stages are made of huge pieces, while some others are hundreds of small pieces (it's all because of technical reasons). But even if you remove them all you can walk/float in an empty room.

XDD It's all crazy nonsense stuff haha

The pictures on the table are ALL the "Look familiar" tweets I did :)

The invisible silencer is a random bug some people have for unknown reasons, but my coder colleagues already found out the solution :D

I think I didn't forget anything.

I hope you liked this easter egg area :P

Hasta luego!

Albert

Again, very cool! I never expected an easter egg this elaborate!

@atheistpreacher: I just found this room too! I rushed to the internet to see if anyone else had seen it. Part of me wondered if it had been there all along but I knew that couldn't be possible. I searched Resi 4 "green torches" and found your screenshots, otherwise I would've been very surprised nobody else was talking about it! So thanks for taking the time to take screenshots and write up about it. One minor addition, silencer doesn't fit the Blacktail either unfortunately! So cool to find this detail though. The HD Project is such a labour of love and it's come together so well, reignited my interest in a game I played 100 times when it was new.

@soap_box: Ah, good to know about the silencer, I had been going off the info in the wiki, but I guess this silencer is not the same or has changed or something?

Ah well. I always use the Red9 anyway! ;-P

I was waiting to see a good video about the mod and i just came across one that went up yesterday.

If you already know the story behind the mod you won't learn anything new, but there's some great comparisons and hearing impressions from a modder who has done similar work on Majora's Mask is very cool, he also shows off some other Resident Evil related mods in the works.

Gamespot also covered the mod with a graphics comparison video... it is unfortunately one of the worst graphics comparison videos i've ever seen.

@cikame: Definitely a nice video. It was a little disappointing that the final official project trailer didn't actual have any comparison shots, which is what we really want to see. This shows off some nice ones for sure.

Bumping this just to inform people that the RE4 HD Project version 1.1 dropped today, six months after the initial release. My understanding is that this should be the really final update, though I guess only the modder knows for sure.

The full download is 34.2 GB, but if you've already installed the 1.0 version of the mod--and haven't installed any other mods in the meantime--then you can download and install the 10.6 GB version 1.1 patch instead.

Enjoy RE4-ing!

I just recently played through this game again on PC and made me think about this thread and mod again. Jesus Christ the base game has some ugly as fuck textures that are just super muddy and really indicative of that era of console. Seeing all that muddiness definitely made me want to install this mod but hearing that it brings it installation up to 35 gigs is definitely a huge bummer. Maybe some time in the future I might consider installing this but I hope they maybe put out a less-HD HD mod that maybe compresses the textures just a little bit so the size stays manageable?

@bicycleham:FWIW I doubt that will ever happen. It's a fan-made mod and I've seen no indication that there's demand for reduced file-size, or any interest by the original modder in doing it. Also, the 37.6 GB full install is bigger than the original 13 GB install, sure, but it's really not that large by modern standards. Just looking at my list of Steam games I've played in the past year, Vermintide 2 is over 100 GB, and Elden Ring and Divinity: Original Sin 2 are both around 60 GB.