Gore Effects in Resident Evil: Requiem

Resident Evil series really got my interest with the remake of RE2. It delivered a solid experience overall, but most importantly - it had a really interesting multi layer system which was not common at the time.

We're seeing it now in a whole bunch of indie games, but checking the Gore Reviews playlist, the RE2 remake was the 2nd game I reviewed to have this feature. A few issues aside, it delivered really good feedback and ever since I was following the series to see when they'll do the next big step forward in the aspect of gore.

The follow ups we've seen since then have not offered notable improvements (actually downgraded, more than anything), but a trailer for Requiem got my attention with a return of the multi layer damage and more focus on the spilling, which was a little lacking in RE2.

So, in this review we'll be checking out the state of the gore in Requiem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97mC-1Ekg9I

Body damage

As for dismemberment - arms will have 2 points of amputation, there's one for the legs, the heads can be destroyed fully or partially and characters can be cut in half.

As for the cutting in half, I almost missed this one out. You can't do that with the shotgun anymore, grenades don't seem to do it either (you can see the grenade response in the intro) and I've seen it happen only with that big explosive barrel. Maybe later in the game other things activate it too, but this response will be far less common than it was in the RE2 remake.

Anyway, the stumps are going to look nice and gory and you will have blood around the point of amputation. It's a part of the same response used for non dismembering hits so there's no sense of direction, as you have for example with Left 4 Dead 2.

What it does offer though is some dangly ligaments. You can see those clearly on characters with a severed arm who come at you (the arm is severed in advance, I haven't seen characters survive dismemberment, more on that later), or if you sever a leg.

And you will also see it on the partial head destruction. If you hit the jaw or the eye you will see those dangle around. Small detail, but it's beautiful.

Now as for some issues:

I have seen characters who can't be dismembered. In some testing I did (thank you infinite ammo cheat) where I dismembered every character I could with the Requiem gun, some characters would just not have their legs removed. And the reason for that is - they are the ones who will turn into the bullet spongy mutant, and the game REALLY doesn't want to nerf those in any way.

The second one is with the head damage, as far as I saw you can only have one variation on the head at the time. It will be an issue because characters will take multiple headshots before they go down and in this case, the dynamic multi layer response for the head specifically will be much weaker, compared to the RE2 remake. You will feel it when you hit a character 4 times in the head and there just won't be much of a response.

Now to the non dismembering damage - as I mentioned, the multi layer response is back, and as I'm mentioning in the video review - every aspect of it has been enhanced.

So the looks are going to be much better, particularly the tears in the clothes, you can have several layers of clothes and there will be blood splatter around the wound on the clothes or the skin layer (no more flesh overlay on jackets).

Another really cool touch is that if you hit the character at an interesting angle you may see something resembling the bullet scratch feature seen in Red Dead Redemption 2. Not nearly as fine of a line, but in this case it's dynamic, and I'll gladly take that trade off.

The reason for it not being a fine line is the technique used for it. There's a damage texture on every character and as you're shooting\stabbing\chainsawing them it paints on that texture where you hit and presumably how deep the hit was. And the resolution for those damage textures is usually not very high.

If you want to learn more about it, check out the interview I did with the developers of Half Sword, and there is a great tech talk by the developers of Dead Island 2 on this subject.

What was also "enhanced" are the issues. The multi layer system of the RE2 remake had some activation oddities, and here we have many more of those.

So you have multiple layers of clothes, a skin layer and a bottom layer of meat and bones. Now which one can be reached on any given shot? That greatly varies. On some hits you'll just have blood splatter on top of the clothes, while a hit right next to it will open up a hole to the bottom layer. On some characters a point blank shotgun blast to the guts will only take chunks of the shirt. The requiem gun seems to consistently activate only the blood overlay on clothes.

One of the things I was REALLY hoping for after playing the RE2 remake is to not have the oddities with the multi layer response, here we have more of them.

Environment

As I mentioned, blood spilling will be juicier in this game. You will have responses on the initial hit, meat chunks spawning on the fatal hit (on almost every kill), blood pools and bloody footprints.

Now the initial response is quite cool. You'll have a combination of decals and a blood painting feature for the environment. As for the latter - there's a blood overlay on seemingly all objects of the environment and when you're messing up characters you'll reveal parts of that overlay on the objects around your victim. The technique is quite similar to the damage painting we have for characters.

Something I realized just as I was writing this text review - the RE2 remake probably had that too. If you'll look at the response for pistol shots, you can see that some of the stains are faded. Since this feature is not massively detailed (as it was in Crisis Response, for example) what we have here is blood patterns and fading, and not the incredibly accurate blood spilling.

One of the additional decals you may see on top of the painted response is smearing. If a zombie moves on a stain an additional smeared stain may appear. All of that comes together into a really nice looking response when it comes to something like a pistol shot.

On the blood pools - as you can see, there's no reason not to have them (something that was discussed in the comment sections of my videos on the RE2 remake).

When a dead character mutates into the spongy thing and rises, he'll get up even if he was laying in a puddle of his blood. Even if that mutating wasn't a factor, as I mentioned in the RE2 remake review - you could still have characters reawaken in blood puddles. This feature doesn't have to be an indicator of completely killing the character.

As I mentioned - the feedback for pistol shots is going to be really nice here, but I can't quite say the same thing about dismemberment. Yes, the spilling will be juicy indeed, but in this case we're talking about multiple exploding ketchup bottles every time something comes off.

In a game like this the response can be excessive, but I think even with that in mind, what we have here is too much.

On the bright side, you're unlikely to see blood spray effects going through the ground.

The case where stain spam is appropriate is obliterations, and you will have a good amount of blood spawned for that. And do note - good amount of blood, not mess, as blood is all you'll have. There are no meat chunks, body parts, gibs or anything of this sort. They will spawn on the kill, but they'll go right through the ground.

As for the aftermaths - the immediate one will have it all. Every single stain, wound, body and body part will be there for you to behold.

But that won't be the case when you're playing as Grace and you're running around looking for items. What you'll have then is - the bodies will remain (and they'll morph from the ragdoll to a death pose), the blood will too (personally I was just expecting the blood painting patterns to remain, but decals are going to stay too), but the wounds and the severed limbs will vanish.

Not a huge deal, but it would be great to have a config for that. I really doubt that keeping the wounds would get your framerate down too much. Either way, as always, the key word here is config.

Animations

In this aspect the response is going to be pretty basic. Response and death animations for the zombies, a temporary stunned state if you hit the knee area, finishers and for the player there will be a wounded state.

The initial response seems to be a bit less awkward when it comes to interactions with the environment. Still no physics in it\IK stuff, but it will look better.

However, the feature of surviving dismemberment that we've seen in the RE2 remake is gone. I imagine that the reason for that is, once again, the spongy mutated characters. If you could make them into human serpents they wouldn't pose much of a threat so that feature seems to have been just axed.

That is a massive shame, the amount of detail put into it was VERY impressive and it made a notable difference in the gameplay. I can overlook some minor missing mechanics (and there are a few if you do some comparisons) but not this one.

Conclusion

It isn't the big step up from the RE2 remake that I was hoping to see, looks like I'll still be waiting for that. But looking at the big picture - no aspect was neglected and at times the response will be very cool. Particularly for the pistol, both in terms of the body damage and the blood spilling.

If you are a fan of the series and this type of gameplay you'll definitely appreciate the impactful moments this gore system can deliver in combat.

You can get the game on Steam.

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