It's Official: Resident Evil 3 Remake Announced for April 2020

As unstoppable as its eponymous villain, Resident Evil 3 is getting its remake. The announcement comes days before its expected reveal at this week's Game Awards and completes Capcom's efforts to make every numbered Resident Evil entry available on modern consoles.

A remake of Resident Evil 3 in Capcom's RE Engine rounds out the trilogy of Playstation-era classics. It trades heavily on the visual stylings of this year's Resident Evil 2 remake, a fact perhaps unsurprising given the short window between the two releases. But the trailer and press release provide details about the upcoming package. Namely, the 4v1 cooperative mode known as "Project Resistance" leaked earlier this year is an additional mode bundled with the Resident Evil 3 remake.

As for the game itself, I have a couple of straggling thoughts:

• A significant portion of the trailer takes place in first-person. While I think this is largely for dramatic effect, I wonder if it also showcases an opportunity for the game to offer options for both 1st-person and 3rd-person play perspectives. (The press release, to be clear, confirms the camera is "over-the-shoulder" by default.)
• Resident Evil 3 introduced a sort of "counter" attack the player could use to bat away or dodge close enemies with well-timed button inputs. Early details from Sony make direct mention of this mechanic in the original game but give no clear indication whether this mechanic will appear in some form in the remake.
• If the remake gets rid of the neon barsign reading "COOL BEER," I am fucking out on this game.

Thoughts?

I am very excited. Surprised and slightly worried by there being just a year between remakes...

I think that's fair. Though I'd be willing to bet they were developed more or less simultaneously. It isn't a coincidence that Capcom was unafraid to show Resident Evil 2 locations in this trailer—we're going to see a lot of familiar assets repurposed for Resident Evil 3, even though only a small portion takes place in the police department proper.

I still think it's weird that they basically lifted the Nemesis sequences out of RE3 and put them in the RE2 remake (for the worse imo) if they even had an inkling that they might also end up remaking 3.

RE2 was one of my favorite games of this year so yeah, I'm pretty happy to see another one of these coming out.

I hope remake Nemesis isn't just remake Mr. X reskinned. Everything else I'm immediately on board for (they could remake the entire series in this style and I'd be in... no joke, between RE7 and RE2Make, I've never been a bigger fan of the franchise than I am now), but please give Nemesis some nifty tricks to differentiate him.

The dev cycle doesn't worry me. Capcom likely knew they had a monster hit on their hands with 2, and I'm sure 3 was well on its way before we even knew 2 existed.

I'd go as far as to assume it might've been part of the pitch, if not at the very outset than at least early into the production of Resident Evil 2.

Picture it: "Resident Evil 2 is ramping up to be a sure-fire hit. We can produce an additional full-priced game leveraging the assets we're already building for our engine, and a modified version of the AI model that is already being implemented in our flagship game." It's kind of a no-brainer to do it now.

Far be it from me to call the team at Capcom lazy. That's the last thing I mean to say. Rather, it's probably the absolute best, most convenient time to both develop and release the Resident Evil 3 remake. All the tools are in their toolbox, all the fan excitement is higher than ever.

I did wonder about this when it was happening, thinking they would remake 3 next. It seems fine on paper to add that but you're taking away the cool thing about Nemesis.

Maybe they will go further though and do something crazy in the 3 remake.

@inevpatoria: Exactly. If I were Jim Capcom, I'd have done the exact same thing. Then I'd demand a gritty sequel to Captain Commando exploring the origins of Baby Commando, but that's why I don't work at Capcom.

Excited for this. I continue to love the revamped fashion sense in these REmakes. One thing I hope they adapt from the original game is having rewards tied to beating Nemesis. For that to work they'll need to make fighting him consistently interesting which will require a few game play tweaks to the current engine. Mr. X was a great menacing presence to have in RE2Redo but downing him gets you nothing and costs resources to do so, add to that he's ultimately not interesting to fight.

They made Jill look a bit like Gina Carano.

Thoughts? Yeah I'm excited. THOUGHTS? OH GOD YES I CAN'T WAIT! Nemesis looks so gross and something I never want to see walking towards me in the darkness. Jill redesign looks fine after seeing more images and her in action.

Surprisingly I'm ok with how they put Nemesis behavior into Mr. X into RE2. Mostly because Nemesis is a more aggressive pursuer than Mr. X given his rocket launcher and ability for Jill to dodge given the dodge action described above. I just can't wait to see that in action.

I'm just dreading seeing Hunter Gammas in modern graphics. Those things already creep me out to the high heavens.

I'd actually totally forgotten about this part of the original. There was a legitimate risk/reward element to facing off with Nemesis. What's more, the player often had to make split-second decisions, not only regarding the Nemesis but within situational puzzles as well.

Since Resident Evil 3 was the first game in the series that didn't have two separate character playthroughs, these moments of player choice could alter your critical path through the game, or affect how the game's events shook out overall.

I absolutely assume this will come back in major fashion. But, you're right about the combat. Something significant needs to differentiate Nemesis from Tyrant in confrontation.

Slightly off topic, but did people like the Mr. X stuff in RE2 Remake? I get the sense I'm an outlier, but I thought it sucked. I'm definitely an outlier in that I didn't really like that game anyway, but when Mr. X showed up and I realized what it was it almost made me quit the game completely (I did eventually end up finishing one play through).

I've just never thought that mechanic was fun in any game. It can be tense for sure, but not fun. I was bummed when it made its way into the Dead Space series too.

@bakoomerang: This is a really good question.

I don't think the Mr. X stuff itself was bad, but in my experience it pointed a serious floodlamp at the other parts of the Resident Evil 2 remake I didn't like at all. Things like:

• Dynamic health values between like enemies. Sometimes zombies took two shots to down. Sometimes more than ten. It always felt to me like the game reacting artificially to my playstyle. If I had bullets to spare from evasive play, zombies were much, much more resilient. And in the midst of being chased by an unkillable juggernaut, that mechanic made the experience really tiring.
• The HUGE"hitbox" zombies have. Like, holy shit, they can grab you from miles away. Again, when sprinting away from a killing machine, feeling like the other enemies were unavoidable made things more frustrating than they probably should've been.

So, I don't know. There was legitimate pushback against the way Mr. X was used. And while I had problems with it, I didn't ultimately feel like it was overwhelming. He operated under a pretty limiting ruleset, despite how pervasive he seemed, and Capcom sprinkled just enough Mr. X into the game without going completely overboard.

Truth be told, my memory of the original Resident Evil 3 is kind of the same. Nemesis is the main antagonist, sure. But he's not in the entire game chasing you at all times. There are large, large bits of the game where he's just not present.

Holy crap that’s SOON

@bakoomerang: I was a bit torn on it. Conceptually I think the idea is great. But because he always knows where you are, it made the rest of the game feel like it was operating on a hidden timer. I didn’t always like feeling rushed.

Yeah, I'm very into this. Inject this shit into my veins. Resident Evil 3 isn't necessarily my favorite game in the series, but I think there's a lot of potential. Not to mention, after RE7 and this year's remake of RE2, I'm more than willing to give Capcom the green light. Nemesis is going to be scary as shit.

So, based entirely off of hearsay (i.e. a moderator on ResetERA who said this game was in development all the way back when the RE2 remake came out and seems fairly legit, but grain of salt and all that) it sounds like this was more-or-less in simultaneous development with Resident Evil 2 and is mostly being led by a new team of mostly veteran Capcom devs (including some former Platinum folks) with the RE 2 remake team taking more of a supervisory role.

The most interesting thing I've heard is the opening areas of the game are a little more open and nonlinear than RE2's tightly-constructed Police Station layout. Hopefully that means it'll be easier to evade Nemesis than the Mr X Tyrant.

That checks out, honestly. The original was more or less the same way. Jill had a much larger spread of Raccoon City than Leon and Claire did. There was one part, if I remember, where you essentially had three separate locations within the city sprawl to explore and could visit them in any order.

3 was definitely one of my least favorite of the series, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing them improve upon it with this remake.

After the 5/6 era or RE, I had been getting close to writing off the franchise altogether; it's great to see the series doing so well again. I hope that returning to these older games helps direct them towards making better new games.

But here's the question: what's next? Do we see a new Code: Veronica, a new RE4? Do they make RE8 in the style of these remakes, or do they revert to RE7's style? Exciting time to be a fan of these games.

@relkin: I played through most of the series this year for the first time and came away from RE4 wanting them to give it the remake treatment that 2 and now 3 are getting. I was amazed at how playable the game is today but I would absolutely love to see it in a modern engine.

@nateandrews: Same! But if they were to do it, I guess I'd like to see them try and really improve upon the original. Not consider any aspect of that game to be sacrosanct, you know? As much as I would probably enjoy a shot-for-shot remake in a better engine (whilst being able to both move and shoot), I feel like that might be a wasted opportunity.

@nateandrews: @bakoomerang: I'm kind of in the same camp. I didn't hate it, but didn't love it. I think that it has potential, but as used in RE2, it wasn't fully realized IMO. I hope if they keep a similar format with Nemesis that they find a way to make it that you can hide from him long enough and reset the timer for an extended period of time. The parts of the game where Mr. X was GOING to chase you no matter what while you tried to do other things, while certainly tense, was kind of tense (to me) for the wrong reasons. I was just tense because I wanted to get the shit that I needed done over with after the initial scariness of Mr. X died down. It just became kind of an annoyance since he can always find you.

I didn't love RE3, but I'm very curious to see what they do here. I will definitely be disappointed if it feels like a re-skin of RE2R similar to how RE3 felt like a re-skin of RE2 back in the day. I hope that they find a way to change things up at least a little bit, especially because at least the jump from RE2 Mr. X to RE3 Nemesis felt kind of crazy, despite reused assets. Since Mr. X is kind of like Nemesis but in RE2R, I would hate to just see that again.

As unpopular as this may be, I have to say that the MR X stuff from 2 (which I just finished) is definitely my least liked aspect of that game. Conceptually, it's a cool idea to have the player never feel safe and always be on edge, but in reality it just meant that I had to run around in circles a bunch and very slowly, and tediously, progress through that part of the game. I don't know anything about 3, but if it's like Mr X I might skip this one.

However, I played through Claire A and Leon B, so it's safe to say that I did really like Resi 2 Remake. It might actually be my GOTY.

Feel pretty spoilt with this and CyberPunk coming in the same month... might have to take some leave from work so I can properly play both.

Is Nemesis really that similar to RE2make's Mr. X? I never got more than an hour into 3, but I was under the impression that the Nemesis fights were more scripted/boss moments that you could run from. Mr. X was a persistent threat at parts of RE2make.

And yeah, seconding the idea of being able to hide and maybe reset his timer. Using the environment and having him look around for you could be super tense.

The first, like, two encounters with Nemesis in the police station are scripted. After that he could more or less appear at random in any space. (EDIT: In fact, it wasn't random at all. He would actively chase after you.) You could run between areas (which were separated by those door-opening loading screens, you may remember), but he'd follow you after a few seconds.

Someone mentioned it earlier, but you could "kill" the Nemesis in those early encounters if you had the firepower. Doing so would remove his presence until the next scripted fight, after which he could follow you again.

The original Resident Evil 3 was basically a proto-Alien Isolation. It was fucking wild at the time.