Capcom’s “Resident Evil Requiem” launched last week to rave reviews across the board. Critics and audience scores are currently at 89/100 and 9.5/10, respectively, on Metacritic.
The sales figures were similarly strong with 344,214 concurrent players in its first weekend on Steam, according to SteamDB, while the company announced today sales of over five million copies in less than a week – the most successful launch for the series to date. However, two aspects of the game have stirred up a lot of talk and even arguments online – its length and its design.
On HowLongToBeat, the title clocks in at 10.5 hours for the main story and 27 hours for completionist. That’s about on par with much of the series with the “Resident Evil 2” remake, “Resident Evil 7” and “Resident Evil Village” all clocking in about the same runtimes. The one exception in recent years is the “Resident Evil 4” remake at 16 hours for the main story and 64.5 hours for completionists.
The length has resulted in a division with arguments on Reddit over quality vs. quantity. The former have praised the game’s pacing, lack of bloat, replayability and bucking the trend of needlessly long video games. The latter have slammed it as being ‘too short’ for its $70 price point and wanting something more akin to the RE4 remake or longer.
One post pointed out “Hollow Knight: Silksong,” a brutal platformer, for offering better “dollars to hours played” value with that posting getting roasted. One well-liked response from TheNCSMaster saying: “‘Dollars to hours played’ is one of the dumbest modern gamer mindsets. It not only completely disregards replayability, but simply looks at the runtime, ignoring what you’re actually DOING in those hours.”
Part of the debate concerns the other much-discussed element: its design. ‘Requiem’ is a linear game, even more so than something like the “Resident Evil 2” remake. That linearity has allowed for a superb level of graphical fidelity and art design across separate sections and scripted events that help build its atmosphere.
However, a viral meme cropped up on social media (via X) claiming fans now demand a fully open-world sequel – a meme the Resident Evil community pushed back against hard. Artist Dave McElfatrick responded on X: “For the love of god, please don’t. Stop making sh—y sandbox games” which garnered over 12,000 likes.
Concerns raised by fans are that an open world would dilute the game’s horror into a series of ‘fetch quests’ and a lot of padding. Capcom previously scrapped a multiplayer open-world version of “Resident Evil” in 2021.
