Resident Evil 2's gore will "really scare the pants off you"

If you happened to watch the Resident Evil 2 Remake gameplay from E3 (which you can see below), you'll have noticed that the level of gore and violence this time around is huge, something we asked developers Yoshiaki Hirabayashi and Tsuyoshi Kanda about when we spoke to the pair at E3.

"We do want to scare you with this game - we've seen people be scared and tense and screaming when they play the game and this is kind of proof that they're enjoying it to us, but it doesn't mean that you can just go completely over-the-top," Harabayashi explained. "We're having conversations every day as we proceed with development about how far to go, how far is too far? But also how far will be not enough? And it's a fine tuning balance act, but we're working to bring something that's going to be really exciting and really scare the pants off you."

"In terms of gore and violence, we like to challenge ourselves to see what we can pull off and what we can create in the game, but we also know that the game world and game setting exists, and you wouldn't want to do something that wouldn't match that, and you have to feel like it fits in the game world you're actually playing in," Kanda continued. "But in saying that it's definitely still a fun process to come up with this stuff."

Sticking with the visual side of things, we also asked about the approach to how the game looks, especially in terms of the impressive lighting we've seen so far, to which Harabayashi said:

"Two of the keywords for the project in terms of graphics were wetness and darkness, so as you can tell from the trailer you can see not just wet gore effects - whether it's a character standing on the rain and the wetness of their clothes - but also light and dark, and their interplay is something that has been a big focus and has really been a big part of presenting you this entertaining horror spectacle, so those are really important factors for us, graphically-speaking."

"Speaking of graphics, with the current generation of technology being so powerful, we can take things like great lighting effects like you spoke about but also in terms of enemy AI and enemy actual animations and how they feel really 3D and real to you inside the game - even on just a technological level things like 4K resolution output and HDR: all of these things are going to interact really well on the current generation and these creatures are going to seem more horrific and feel like they're just leaping out of the screen at you, unlike any game before Resident Evil."

Do you mind the level of gore on show with this game?