After seven long years in the making, the incredible Resident Evil 4 HD Project mod is launching on PC on February 22, 2022.
Resident Evil 4 has been re-released a few times in semi-recent years, with the most recent being the Oculus Quest 2-exclusive VR port. It also has an official HD remaster from Capcom, but that's almost eight years old now! The tools fans have to remaster old games have expanded a lot in that time, which is why the developers behind the Resident Evil 4 HD Project mod call it the "definitive graphical experience for the game."
"I know some of you may feel slightly disappointed when you see the release day, but believe me, it will deserve the extra month of waiting," reads a recent update on the mod's website. "Thanks to the combined efforts of the community, we’ve been able to raise this project to another level by fixing some infamous issues this and previous HD ports had."
- Resident Evil 4 director Shinji Mikami promised 20 years ago to disembowel himself if the legendary third-person shooter ever left GameCube, so nobody tell him it's now on over 10 different platforms
- 27 years later, Resident Evil 2 speedrunners get the "single most needed" quality of life mod, and the fastest world records are already being cut in half
The project's long road to version 1.0 began way back in 2014, but one developer going by Albert started research for it way, way back in 2008. This research involved visiting the various real-world locations in Spain and Wales that inspired the original game and creating higher resolution assets for the mod. Between Albert and the other developer, Cris, nearly 13,000 hours have apparently been put into the mod. Meanwhile, total expense costs amount to over $15,000, and that doesn't include another $16,000 the developers have received in donations from fans.
This is all to say this is an incredibly extensive mod that remasters visuals across all gameplay sections, all cinematics, and even the Separate Ways minigame that's available on every official Resident Evil 4 release except the original GameCube one and the Oculus Quest 2 port. The developers recommend running the mod at the default 60 FPS or 30 FPS, as anything else "can and will cause numerous amounts of different bugs."
Version 1.0 introduces a load of fixes and improvements, but it sounds like there will be more updates in the future. "There’s still a list of things that can be improved/restored and I’m sure they eventually will be able to bring us something else," Albert says.
While you wait for Resident Evil 4 HD Project, here are the best horror games to play right now.
