Resident Evil 7's strangest scrapped feature
Breath of the riled.
Resident Evil 7 boldly reinvented the survival horror series with a return to the franchise's roots reimagined as a first-person southern gothic adventure, but there's a couple of cool ideas that didn't make the cut that Capcom recently revealed in a "making of" documentary.
The most interesting is that the game originally had a mechanic in which players would sneak past enemies by holding their breath.
"There would be a limit to how long you could hold it, with a breath gauge on the screen which would go down as you held the button, and if you didn't get past them in time, then the zombies would find you and grab you," explained executive producer Jun Takeuchi.
So why didn't this concept make it into the final game? Here's Takeuchi with the answer:
"It was a really fun idea, but we found people tended to tense up and hold their breath for real, making it very tiring to play! It was a great idea on paper, but we ditched it because we thought doing that for 15 hours would give people hypoxia."
Elsewhere in the documentary, director Koshi Nakanishi noted that there was originally an evil dog in the game. Not a monster type, but rather a single recurring enemy.
"One thing that I kind of wish we could have kept was that the family used to have a pet dog," he said. "It was part of the dinner scene, I think. For one reason or another we had to cut it, which is a shame. Thinking back now, I wish we could have kept that."
"I forget its name," Nakanishi lamented. "It was Diane or something."