Resident Evil 4 HD Project releases next week after 8 years of work

pcgamer.com:

The Resident Evil 4 HD project began in 2014 and, eight years or so down the line, is finally complete and will release February 2nd. You may well be wondering why this project exists at all, given that developer Capcom has re-released Resident Evil 4 itself in several HD versions, and the answer is: They weren't so good.

The version of Resident Evil 4 that arrived on Steam in 2014 was technically high-definition, but lacked basic customisation options and the textures had merely been made a little sharper. It just didn't look the part, or do justice to one of the best games ever made. So the Resident Evil HD project decided that if Capcom wasn't going to do it properly, they would: This is a a huge texture and asset overhaul for the PC version of Resident Evil 4, which recreates the textures for every background, item and character in the game.

To give an idea of the dedication here, one of the two main creators Albert Marin actually retraced Capcom's footsteps to locations like Raglan Castle in Wales and the Palau Güell in Barcelona to photograph many of the same textures used in the original game, but at much higher resolutions.

«I collected a great number of locations the game’s developers use as source material,» Marin told The Verge last year. «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.

»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