Resident Evil 4 Remake is 'about the same' length as original, says Capcom

In an interview with PC Gamer on Tuesday, Resident Evil 4 Remake producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi said that players can expect the length of the remake to run "about the same" as the original RE4.

With a game as beloved as Resident Evil 2, Capcom succeeded in recreating it without screwing anything up; with RE3, it seemed to have missed an opportunity to improve and bulk out what was always a bit of an underbaked game. 2004's Resident Evil 4, meanwhile, is a long game by modern action standards: HowLongtoBeat has the main story pegged at 15 and a half hours, roughly double the length of an RE2 Remake campaign. Would this remake, too, be lopping off some chunks of the game to make the project more manageable?

Apparently not.

I asked Hirabayashi if the reviews and player feedback for Capcom's last two remakes had informed any decisions for Resident Evil 4 Remake, and he specifically brought up length as a factor.

"When we started production on RE4 we looked into what people thought was good [in the RE2 and RE3 remakes] and what could've been done better," Hirabayashi said. "One example is the play time for RE4 is about the same as the original game."

Hirabayashi's statement still leaves us with a lot of unknowns: There could be significant changes to some of RE4's environments even if the overall length remains roughly the same. The Remake may be jettisoning the Mercenaries minigame, or the "Separate Ways" mode that let you play as Ada Wong after finishing the campaign. But based on how closely the game's intro sticks to the original RE4, I think Capcom's treating this one with particular reverence.

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).