The picture quality of video games has come a long way since the 8 bit days of the NES and the Sega Master System. These days, gamers marvel at the visual quality of the Playstation 5 and the Xbox Series S. That doesn’t mean that the picture can’t get even better. That is what the people behind the Resident Evil 4 HD project were hoping to accomplish.
The original game was first released in 2014, and it looked amazing for the standards of back then. Capcom, the developer and publisher of the game, soon moved on to other projects. So Albert Marin and a partner dedicated close to a decade to make Resident Evil 4 HD look even better.
Marin went as far as going to two of the locations from the game, Raglan Castle in Wales and the Palau Güell in Barcelona, to snap photographs. He describes the process” I collected a great number of locations the game’s developers use as source material. Most textures are re-created from scratch using some texture library images as a base. The original textures need to be analyzed several times in order to make sure the new source images match in terms of color, lighting, and even the material.”
The enterprising artist continues:
“For example, a rock texture: It may sound like an easy challenge, and it is, if you don’t have an original texture you need to be faithful to. You can’t imagine how complicated it can be to find a rock surface that matches with the original among the hundreds of different kinds of rocks nature has to offer!”
The HD expansion of the game is expected to be released on February 2nd. You can check out some of the stunning visuals from the project below.
