Refresh: Capcom flirted with the co-op action approach for Resident Evil 9 before ultimately opting for Requiem's dual action survival

One of the keys to the current success of Resident Evil Requiem is how it masterfully combines the more traditional horror experience of RE2 (and the modern first-person reimagining of RE7) with the more cop/military-oriented approach of RE4, 5, and 6. The former with Grace, the latter with Leon, players enjoy the duality of their gameplay and the change of pace when they go from one to the other throughout the adventure. But what if the two protagonists played together in a fully cooperative, action-oriented setup?

• Don't miss: If you need more context for those references, check out The entire Resident Evil timeline explained in chronological order

This is precisely what Capcom not only considered, but even experimented with when prototyping the 10th main entry in the series. Game director Koshi Nakanishi admitted as much during his own "Creator's message" dev diary. Now, the video (below) was published both here at Gamereactor and on Capcom's official channels as long ago as June, shortly after the game's full reveal at SGF, but it's making the rounds and grabbing the community's attention now that players are experiencing the full game and can compare it to the "what if" scenario. Besides, most of those fans only got access to the 5-minute cut of the clip, which omitted the early concepts, whereas this full 8-minute version contains the mention:

"Resident Evil Requiem is a single-player offline game", began explaining producer Masachika Kawata. "We've managed to pack a lot into this game. We were even exploring many different systems early in development."

"You might have heard some of the rumours," Nakanishi then explained further in the extended video. "Things like an online Resident Evil, or an open-world Resident Evil, which we spent some time experimenting with. But in the end, although we had some interesting concepts, we realised that it wasn't what fans wanted to see or play. So we went back to the drawing board, and created what led to Resident Evil Requiem."

If you take a look around the 1:00 mark of the video, you can watch some gameplay from those early concepts. In the end, the thing closest to a 2-player action-packed experience fans will get for now is the new Resident Evil 2 Arcade light gun cabinet, which will also release this year as part of the franchise's 30th anniversary push.

Did you know about the online, open-world, and co-op initial approaches for Resident Evil Requiem?