Resident Evil 4’s launch date is approaching soon and reviews are live, yet Digital Foundry’s coverage isn’t. The explanation for this curiosity – and our thoughts on how the launch version compares to the Chainsaw Demo – take centre stage this week’s DF Direct Weekly.
John and Alex’s RE4 impressions are well worth tuning in for – see the YouTube embed below or the podcast on your app of choice – but the launch coverage explanation is straightforward enough to convey here. In short, coverage restrictions meant that any video review of the game wouldn’t be able to show much at all, including some of the most interesting areas in the game. It makes sense that Capcom wants to avoid story spoilers, but their requirements also meant that we couldn’t really show much beyond what we already covered in in our analysis of the Chainsaw Demo.
With that in mind, we’ve decided that it makes sense to wait until the game launches on March 24th, when we’ll be free to offer a much more complete picture of the game, its changes from the 2005 original, performance on different consoles and so on. We have multiple videos in the works, so stay tuned!
Further into the Direct, we also covered rumours surrounding the PS5 Pro and the recently-denied-by-Valve Steam Deck OLED. A potential PS5 Pro is an exciting prospect for many gamers, but as we discuss on the Direct, the realities of such a device make it less than likely in our estimation. Providing an additional platform for developers to target would require a lot of extra work for everyone involved, and the silicon available right now wouldn’t provide a massive step up in performance either. It’s impossible to rule out definitively, but generally we only see new consoles when it’s economically viable for a new machine to deliver a genuinely impactful upgrade, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here – something Rich wrote about last year.