Before Capcom restarted Resident Evil 7’s development, the plan was to bring back Leon Kennedy and build on Umbrella’s connections to the series. Former Capcom manager Miguel Corti says the first-person horror game that eventually shipped grew out of a company reorganization and an order to start over.
Responding to a long thread about Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Corti shared his account in a 66-post thread. It covers the troubled development of Capcom’s seventh mainline Resident Evil game, with influences ranging from Call of Duty to Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, and explains how an intended sequel became a soft reboot.
The original Resident Evil 7 wasn’t a soft reboot
According to Corti, the early version would continue after Resident Evil 6 rather than make a clean break. Poor reviews hadn’t put Capcom’s leadership off that approach: the game “sold like gangbusters,” he wrote, and higher-ups were “more than happy with RE6.”
The development team wanted stronger reviews, too. Taking inspiration from The Last of Us, they pursued a single-player game with a greater focus on narrative, but kept its story tied to existing continuity. “What was going to be the solution for RE7?” Corti wrote. “More Leon and more Umbrella connections!” Apparently, Rebecca Chambers and Jill Valentine were also discussed as possible returning characters at some point, rather than confirmed additions.
Those connections to increasingly tangled franchise lore left the development team stuck in a rut. It took a Capcom reorganization to break the deadlock, with Corti recalling that “a mandate came down to redo RE7 from scratch.”
The new Resident Evil 7 faced problems
After the reorganization, Capcom assigned a new team and director and brought in an external writer. At this point, the team decided that the reworked version would be a first-person shooter. As Corti put it: “That was a bombshell of an idea for an RE game, but actually slots right into the gaming trends at the time.” He says the single-house setting and Baker family also entered the picture during this post-reorganization phase.
Starting over didn’t settle every story issue. Some concepts apparently made it into the finished game without making “a lick of narrative sense,” which Corti considers part of the reason its narrative doesn’t hold together.
The Last of Us influenced this version, too. Its opening, in which Joel loses his daughter, provided a reference point for Ethan’s search for his presumed-dead wife, Mia. According to Corti, Capcom expected that search to have a similar emotional effect.
Corti’s objection was that players had no real connection to Mia, and her backstory didn’t make sense. His account describes numerous apparent problems surrounding her character. The eventual fix was to force in a connection to the wider Resident Evil franchise through Umbrella’s appearance, returning to the continuity that had already caused difficulties for the earlier concept.
The source article credits the released Resident Evil 7 with reviving interest in Resident Evil after the sixth game had left the horror series looking exhausted. It views the reboot as a remarkable recovery despite its flaws and describes fans as largely happy with the result. Capcom, however, was disappointed by its initial sales. Corti says it has since “been a top seller for Capcom in the intervening years.”
That later success sits alongside a more difficult production history. Corti says many obvious flaws were identified during development but “roundly ignored,” even as team members tried to “not let it fail without a fight.” His account shows how much work and how many abandoned iterations preceded the reinvention, while arguing that changing the game’s direction didn’t resolve all of its narrative problems.
