Capcom: We could just go wild with Exoprimal

gamesindustry.biz:

There's something about Exoprimal, Capcom's new live-service dinosaur game, that feels a little old school.

It's camp, over-the-top, stylish and experimental in ways you wouldn't expect. It reminds me of the sort-of games Capcom used to make back in the noughties.

And in many ways, it is. Because Exoprimal is something Capcom doesn't do very often, and that's make a game not in the Resident Evil, Street Fighter or Monster Hunter franchises.

"Capcom has many long-standing IPs, and with those games you do need to consider the background of the previous games whenever you're designing a new one," explains Exoprimal director Takuro Hiraoka, who had previously worked on Monster Hunter gamers.

"We were entirely free with this game to start from scratch, and think about all the stuff we want to put in it… so what we're into, and the aspects we want to play around. For example, having futuristic exosuits facing off against prehistoric dinosaurs... that represents the interests of the dev team, and the kind of things we thought were cool. We wanted to put those things together with a fun over-the-top story where these things are happening. That creativity reflects the fact we could go wild with whatever we wanted to do with the game."

Capcom's reticence around new IP is understandable. The AAA games space is an expensive world to inhabit, and the company just isn't on the same scale as many of its competitors. It appears to have prudently decided it's better to be No.1 in a comparatively niche genre like horror than it is to be No.12 in action shooters.

Even when it does try to branch out with VR projects or live-service games, it typically does so within the confines of an IP like Resident Evil or Monster Hunter. So what