This article was written a few years ago as a personal collection of notes. Thus it is incomplete, but maybe someday i will finish it. Also, forgive me for the shortness and the bad overall quality of this analysis.
[Original article in italian by monokoma, english translation by yota]
The Eternal Darkness project was born on the Nintendo 64. This version had already many of the features and locations of the future Gamecube version.
Peter Jacob in the Cathedral.
Article by yota
Resident Evil 5 was officially announced on June 2005, but it was shown for the first time to the public only two months later in a CG trailer. This video was essentially one of the concepts that the developers were working on since the release of Resident Evil 4: in what at time seemed to be the Middle East or Africa, we saw Chris exploring the alleys of a city and then being attacked by a group of enemies.
The graphics style and the general mood were already much similar to the released game, even if Chris looked somewhat younger and less bulky.It is interesting to note that producer of the game said, in an old interview, that originally the time of the day and the weather were supposed to have a major impact on the gameplay and affect the main characters abilities. Also, Resident Evil 5 was intended to be single player. Sheva was originally a NPC and a member of a local militia.She would have meet Chris only later in the game.
Anyway, Capcom created another trailer for Resident Evil 5 in 2007. The beginning of this video was not that different from the final game: Chris walked for a bit in the village and then suddenly all the natives seemed to vanish. There were, however, many important differences: Sheva and the dealer were nowhere to be found, Chris didn’t have his safari dress, cutscenes and dialogues were shorter, the location where we fought for the first time was completely removed, enemies had some attacks that can’t be found in the released game, such as the headbutt, and so on.
Even in the last year of the development Capcom was still moving things around. For example, the crash site of the helicopter was originally a fully playable section, not a series of QTE’s.
2004 Beta artworks
The merchant from Re 4 was supposed to return in Resident Evil 5. There were many shops around the town and you could even stole weapons and ammo.
Here is a list with informations and comparisons about those Killer 7 characters that were changed or removed though the development of the game.
Beta Matsuken / Dimitri?
This man was in one of the early K7 trailers and in a couple of beta screenshots, but he’s not in the final game.. or at least he does not look like this anymore. Could this be an early design of Kenjiro Matsuoka (Matsuken, the new leader of the United Nations Party)? Or maybe Dimitri Nightmare (the man sitting beside young Harman in one of the latest cutscenes in Target 05: Smile)? Why was he shown in “black & white” shades?
In the Killer 7 Images Gallery on IGN we can find this interesting screenshot that looks like a puzzle from the game, but in the final game there is not a single puzzle that looks like this one. Was it removed? Probably, but at the same time it’s weird that this screenshot can be found ONLY at IGN: it could even be possibile that this image is from another game and it was added in the Killer 7 Gallery just for a mystake. Do you recognize this from another game? Was this puzzle really in the K7 beta? We are not sure…
Update: Thanks to Sean we have the confirmation that the bird puzzle was indeed in the beta version of Killer 7! As seen in the official Killer 7 website
Through the development of Killer 7 even the HUD was changed many times, probably because of aesthetic reasons. The original crossair was bigger than the final one and it seems that in the beta version there were as many crossairs as the number of weapons used by the character.
