Resident Evil 5 - Development

Development

Capcom officially announced Resident Evil 5 on July 20, 2005. Jun Takeuchi, the director of Onimusha and producer of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, took over producer duties from Hiroyuki Kobayashi. Keiji Inafune, who served as promotional producer for Resident Evil 2 and executive producer for the PlayStation 2 version of Resident Evil 4, oversaw the project. In February 2007, members of Capcom’s Clover Studio were also called upon to help develop the game. However, many developers from the studio moved on to work on the Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, which debuted for the Wii. Several staff members who also worked on the original Resident Evil were involved in development. Takeuchi announced the game would utilize the same gameplay model introduced in Resident Evil 4, while implementing thematics from the original Resident Evil. Resident Evil 5 runs on version 1.4 of Capcom's internally developed MT Framework engine. The game's scenario was written by Haruo Murata and Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, based on a story idea by concept director Kenichi Ueda. Tsukasa Takenaka provided additional story background and created the in-game files. In a May 2008 interview, Capcom chairman and CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto estimated the game's development costs up to that point at more than 2 billion yen (approx. US$19.3M). Working with Hollywood studios, the game's cut scenes were produced by recording both facial motion capture and Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) simultaneously.

On January 21, 2009 D+PAD Magazine reported that Resident Evil 5 would be released with Limited Edition Xbox 360 box art, pictures of the Limited Edition box claiming to allow 2–16 players to play offline via system link. Capcom initially responded stating that their "box art isn't lying", but refused to give any more details. However, soon after, Capcom issued another statement that contradicted their original response stating that the information on the box art was an error and that the correct number of players supported by system link is only two.