"The biggest challenge with Nemesis was actually his broad range of attacks, and Nemesis was the first enemy we encountered this with," Matthews said. Now, you can't have Resident Evil 3 without the Nemesis, and getting him just right did have its share of challenges. We didn't want Resident Evil to feel like it was casually dropping that in." Battlestar Galactica is a really good example, it's all built around who's a Cylon, who isn't a Cylon motivator. There are whole games that are built around this idea of. There are whole games built around traitor mechanics. But, one of the things we landed on was that there was a whole bunch of moving parts in Resident Evil 2 already, and we really wanted the game to feel focused. We originally had an idea that maybe there was a mechanic where one of you is actually a secret agent for another company, and so we had objectives in bits and pieces. "We introduced the traits in the character, and we'd already looked at this for Resident Evil 2 with Ada Wong.
"We did go through several different ways of saying can we introduce some backstabbing in the character," Matthews said. While they did ultimately include him as a playable character, he went through a few versions that highlighted that villainous or traitorous aspect, but it always felt shoehorned in.
They're all working together, and the actual part where he's revealed to be a traitor, and working against him as a bad guy, doesn't happen until later on in the game." "He's this slightly mysterious, slightly antagonistic character, that Jill meets and when she encounters him she agrees to help him escape the city as part of her escape. "So, really for that, you have to look at it from a perspective of when you first meet him, he's not," Matthews said. Which then gave us questions to say, 'Well, he's the bad guy, right?'" Unfortunately, that landed us at, well, fortunately, unfortunately, depending on which way you see it, Nikolai is definitely the character that fits into that fourth slot. Whilst I certainly wouldn't take that decision back or change it, we did get some players saying, 'Well, we don't actually recognize this guy, who is this?', and so, we knew we had to have it where they were instantly recognizable here.
In Resident Evil 2 for example, Sherry was going to be the fourth survivor we wanted to use, but unfortunately, because we didn't want someone to be lumbered with, 'Well, you have to play the character who can't attack,' we ended up having her switched out for Robert Kendo. "We wanted to have four survivors who are really recognizable. "So Nikolai presented us with an interesting challenge," Matthews said. You'll discover items and pathways along the way that you'll need to hang onto in case you run into the thing that utilizes them, just like in the console versions of the game, though in many cases you don't have to find these hidden things to progress through to the game's conclusion, which adds to the game's replayability. When you finally find the key, backtrack your way through, and then obviously unlock that gate, and then carry on forward." That forces you to go off in a different direction and explore that way. "What we wanted to really expand on was this idea of now you're in a city, and we very early on had this awesome idea of 'Well, wouldn't it be really cool if you could explore the city in an open world?' Wouldn't it be amazing if you could backtrack around through the city?' You go to a certain area, you find a gate you need to get through, but it's locked by a padlock, so you have to go find the key. "When it came to looking at Resident Evil 3, most of us were very happy with the core engine, and how the characters moved around and the overall feel of it," Matthews said.