Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 VR remake launches later this year

Facebook Reality Labs has offered more detail about a virtual reality remake of Resident Evil 4, following Capcom’s original announcement. The game will launch later this year exclusively on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset, although the exact date is still a mystery. As Capcom’s first trailer indicated, it’s a first-person VR adaptation of the 2005 third-person game, with a focus on making weapons and movement feel more natural with Oculus Touch motion controllers.

Resident Evil 4 for VR uses the game’s original levels and animations, revamped with remastered textures, and Oculus says cutscenes will be rendered “in their original format.” But developer Armature Studio has added VR-friendly locomotion options like the ability to teleport or walk around a room-scale environment, in addition to using Touch controller analog sticks. You physically pick up weapons and items from the environment, and you can equip different weapons for each hand. The game’s enemies will also attack in ways that are optimized around first-person combat.

These additions evoke features popular in other VR first-person shooters like Arizona Sunshine, whose creator Vertigo also released a new trailer for its upcoming cooperative game After the Fall today. The Resident Evil 4 remake is part of a larger slate of upcoming VR games, including a sequel to the original Oculus Rift title Lone Echo that’s launching this summer, as well as a horror stealth game called Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife, which will launch tomorrow on Oculus Quest and Rift.

Capcom previously made Resident Evil 7 playable on PlayStation VR, but this is the first full-length Resident Evil game designed for VR. Resident Evil 4 is also the first Quest 2 app that won’t be playable on the original Oculus Quest. Oculus required all launch titles for the Quest 2 to be compatible with its predecessor, but it left the door open for an exclusive game that required the extra power of a newer headset — and Resident Evil 4 is apparently that game.