Rumor: Resident Evil 9 May Be Open-World

gamerant.com:

Resident Evil 9 will be an open-world game, a well-known Capcom leaker has said. The insider also claimed that Dragon's Dogma 2 is at least partially to thank for the Resident Evil series' purported open-world foray.

Since the early aughts, Capcom has been putting out new mainline installments in its popular survival horror franchise once every four years on average. The Japanese gaming giant maintained this release pace even after it started committing to remaking some older games in the series. The seventh and latest mainline entry, Resident Evil Village, was released in 2021, which prompted some fans to speculate that its sequel will hit the market in 2025. YouTuber and Capcom leaker Dusk Golem lent credence to that theory in 2023, stating that Resident Evil 9 is targeting a 2025 launch.

Dusk Golem has now once again taken to social media to offer some new insights into the upcoming title, including the claim that Resident Evil 9 will supposedly have an open world. The leaker explained that the game fits into Capcom's usual pattern of greenlighting projects in trios, noting how the company did so fairly recently with Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil Village, and the Resident Evil 2 remake. On that occasion, its alleged goal was to «take advantage» of the then-latest version of the RE Engine. Similarly, Capcom greenlit Dragon's Dogma 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Resident Evil 9 with the explicit purpose of expanding its in-house engine's open-world functionality, Dusk Golem said.

Now that Dragon's Dogma 2 has successfully leveraged the RE Engine into a AAA open-world experience, both Monster Hunter Wilds and Resident Evil 9 will be looking to build on that achievement, the leaker claimed. The extent of that ambition remains unclear, especially since even Resident Evil Village was once labeled as an open-world game by Capcom, despite it ultimately offering a smaller, interconnected world in the vein of conventional metroidvanias.

The Resident Evil series' purported