In two words: knife durability.

I already didn’t this mechanic in the RE2 remake, but bringing it into RE4 is manifestly more egregious because it fundamentally clashes with the gameplay loop and mechanics in a way that it didn’t in RE2. My aim here is to explain why that’s the case.

But first let’s look at how knives worked in the other RE games and the changes in the design that happened.

Early RE

The design intent of the knife in the early RE games was very straightforward: it was a weapon of last resort. It assured that you always had some offensive potential even if you’d used up all your ammo, though it was generally an extraordinarily weak/bad option. And it was often dangerous to use for ammo conservation even on downed enemies (remember those RE1 zombies biting your feet after you’d shot them?).

Then something interesting happened. The first RE Remake—the 2002 one on the Gamecube—introduced daggers, which had a distinct function from the knife. While the knife was still your unbreakable option of last resort, the daggers basically functioned as one-time get-out-of-jail-free cards. They were defense items that could be used to stab and escape from an enemy that grabbed you.

Which was, well, fine. These type of defensive daggers had never been a thing in the RE games, but they didn’t really affect the core gameplay aside from making things a little more lenient on the player.

The RE4 revolution

RE4 was released three years later (2005) and fundamentally changed a lot of elements of RE’s design. It was no longer a horror game with some action sprinkled in, but rather fundamentally an action game with horror themes. Where before enemies had solely been obstacles—there was no real benefit to killing them, and so simply avoiding/running past them was a perfectly fine option—they now dropped loot in the form of ammo or money, which could be spent with the famed RE4 merchant to upgrade your weapons. It was a game about killing zombies rather than one about just surviving them.

This being the case, the meta-game of RE4 became all about killing as many enemies as you could as ammo-efficiently as possible, and it gave you great tools to do that, of which the knife was a big part. The dagger idea from the RE1 remake had been abandoned, but on the other hand, the knife had never been more useful/viable.

Shooting or knifing an enemy in the head or lower legs would lead to a stagger that allowed you to unleash powerful kicking or grabbing animations, during which you were invincible to enemy attacks. Rather than gunning an enemy to death, you could often kill them by firing a single bullet to the head, round-house kicking them, and then slashing them with the knife on the ground until they were dead. Bullets used: one. Extra ammo could be saved for especially hairy encounters or sold to the merchant for faster upgrading of your weapons.

You could even control crowds this way, to an extent. A single staggered zombie would allow you to unleash that invincible kick animation on a large group in front of you and down them all. It wasn’t always feasible to knife them all in situations like this; sometimes a grenade was a better follow-up, or there were simply too many enemies to possibly down all at once. But the combat fundamentally revolved around trying to control your space, grouping enemies up so you could damage multiple at a time, and dispatching them all as efficiently as you could.

The knife’s big change

There were a lot of RE games released between RE4 and the end of the 2010’s, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll skip ahead to key entry for the point I’m trying to make.

The RE2 remake (2019), released seventeen years after the RE1 remake and fourteen years after RE4, essentially combined the knife and dagger from the RE1 remake into a single item. It could be used as a melee weapon or as a defensive escape-from-a-grab item, but either way it had a durability meter, and that meter just didn’t last very long.

While I never liked the idea that the knife could no longer be used as an ammo conservation method, or that you could theoretically be stuck with too little ammo to kill one of the game’s bosses, the (somewhat) saving grace of the knife now being a breakable/finite combat item was that the RE2 remake had made something of a return to a focus on survival rather than action. Enemies did not drop loot, and while there were gun upgrades, these were found in the world rather than bought from a merchant. In short, the best way to conserve ammo was simply to avoid enemies altogether.

This design intent was epitomized by the imposing Mr. X. In an action game, something like Mr. X just comes of as unfair and annoying. But for a horror game, he makes perfect sense: you’re not supposed to engage in combat with him, you’re supposed to just run.

Regardless, since killing enemies wasn’t actually incentivized, beyond making it less annoying to retrace your steps—something you did often in RE2—the fact that you had no indestructible knife as a weapon of last resort and ammo conservation tool didn’t matter too much.

The next major entries in the series—the RE3 remake and RE8—returned to an infinite-durability knife, and RE8 even introduced the powerful Karambit knife to make melee-only runs more viable. Still, in neither game was the knife as core to the gameplay as it had been in RE4, since they didn’t contain the same easy stagger animations with invincible follow-up kicks that created prime opportunities to employ your knife.

Knife durability in the RE4 remake

Of course it’s important to say that the RE4 remake isn’t out yet and won’t be for another five months, and things could still change. But hands-on preview coverage confirms that knives function as they did in the RE2 remake—they break rather quickly and aren’t intended to function as they did in the original game. No longer is the core combat loop centered around staggering a zombie, kicking him down (possibly along with the group surrounding him), and following with knife strikes.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but if the intent is to capture the spirit of the original, I’d argue that adding durability to the knife is a fundamental misstep. Frequent use of the knife was so core to RE4’s combat that taking it away feels very, very wrong. I always killed every enemy I could in my many RE4 playthroughs because the loot gained from doing so always outweighed the resources spent killing them if you could doing it efficiently, particularly with the unbreakable knife.

In the remake it seems apparent that there is no longer any “free lunch” to be had even with skilled play: one way or another, you’re going to need to spend X amount of finite ammo—whether it’s bullets or some of your knife’s durability—to down any opponent, because you have no attack that doesn’t consume something, aside from those kicks, which themselves can only be initiated by a resource-spending attack.

Taking away your one unlimited attack option fundamentally changes the game feel, because adding knife durability has a domino effect that reverberates through the entire combat loop. E.g., if you can’t knife them while they’re down, then those invincible melee kicks become less useful by proxy: since the kicks will tend to disperse/de-bunch large groups, you’ll likely be better off with a shotgun blast or grenade after grouping them rather than a roundhouse kick.

Might anything mitigate this change?

There are a few potential saving graces to this situation.

First, as already mentioned, the game isn’t out yet and there’s always the possibility that they’ll reverse themselves and remove knife durability as a concept—though it seems unlikely this late in development, especially since the knife has been given powerful new abilities to compensate for being breakable, such as parrying chainsaw attacks and instant finishes of downed zombies. They would have to reverse a lot of work to make the change.

Another, stronger possibility is that the game will contain an unlockable infinite-durability knife. That’s because the RE2 remake did this exact thing: an infinite-durability knife could be obtained by finding and destroying all the Mr. Racoon toys found throughout the game. So I wouldn’t be surprised if this game did something similar. Again, though, the new more powerful knife will function very differently than the original RE4 knife did.

The other thing is simply that the original RE4 remains one of the greatest video games ever made, and has aged better than any other entry in the series. So if the RE4 remake’s combat ends up being unsatisfactory in this way or any other way, well, you can always simply return to the original, because it remains a great game, and the recently completed fan HD remaster of the PC version means it now looks better than it ever has. This fact alone makes the addition of the knife durability mechanic sting less.

Closing thoughts

All of that said, I still can’t help but be disappointed. There were always going to be changes in the remake’s gameplay, and from the beginning I was doubtful that the remake team would fully grasp everything that made the original such a classic, because so much of RE4’s magic was in the interplay of some fairly specific gameplay design elements. And while the remake team seems—from the early footage and hands-on-impression articles—to have done most of the other stuff pretty well, adding knife durability feels a bit like removing that one crucial gear that brings the rest of the machine grinding to a halt. It may still be a good game considered in isolation, but with this one core change it feels like the remake is abandoning a crucial part of what made the original what it was, and that the development team has, indeed, failed to fully grasp the game they are remaking.

This feels like a very lazy way to solve the "problem" of players being so familiar with the RE4 combat loop. I would hope instead they would work on enemy behaviors so that you have to relearn good ways to perform Knife Crimes.

But that's probably harder than just saying Well It Breaks Now.. ehh.

I've been biased against this game i'll just start with that :P, because RE4 is widely considered one of the best games of all time so to remake it implies that you're going to honour it and make changes that categorically improve it, after all why would you bother redoing something if you weren't going to do it better?

There was no question about remaking RE2 and 3, there's plenty of people who didn't like how those games played originally to start with, but there's also the age, the graphics, the voice acting, seeing familiar locations and people spruced up is always fun when done well and they did a good job and used modern game design to increase the horror aspects of those games, but RE4?

It was clear from the first reveal they were continuing their work from the previous two remakes, everything is darker, slower, they're going the horror route instead of amplifying what made RE4 so revolutionary. Now that's not to say there's no action there's clearly plenty of it and it's at the same scale as it was in the original from what we've seen, Leon has been given some of his original tricks and some new moves like knife parries, but so far to me it really looks like RE2 remake with some additions tacked on, the stun and melee system in RE4 and 5 was really unique and rewarding and what i really wanted was for them to go nuts with it, in a similar way to how they went crazy with DMC5, but presumably with the renewed focus on horror what we've seen from the combat is... probably all there is, besides different weapons, i don't see it expanding dramatically.

There's nothing wrong with that, lots of people are very excited to play a version of RE4 where everything's darker and nobody smiles, i just wonder if this is the right way to honour the industry changing original.

I dunno - it's been a fair while, but I don't remember using the knife all that much?

If they take away my suplex on the other hand, I riot.

Yeah, one of the cool secrets about RE4 was how important the knife turned out to be in terms of setting up melee attacks. Discovering that using the knife at the right moment can stagger the chainsaw using psycho, and melee him for massive damage was game changing. And they actually improved it in RE5 where you can do all kinds of cool melee attacks. So I hope they leave it in the remake and don't remove it.

I am very anxious about these knife changes, as well. RE4 is the rare near-perfectly tuned action game, and changing even that small detail totally changes the gameplay loop. We'll see how it shakes out when it releases, I suppose.

I suspect they might. They may see it as too goofy and these remakes have been pretty self-serious. But we likely won't know until release, because the suplex could only be done on castle zombies, not village ones, and I doubt we'll see any castle gameplay before release.

Conceptually the idea of a knife breaking after a few slashes is pretty stupid, but I personally never liked the idea of min-maxing in an action game, which is probably why they made the change. The knife is overpowered and breaks up the action at least for players like myself who feel guilty for "wasting" ammunition every time there would be the possibility of using the knife. RE4 was a game where you couldn't move and attack at the same time, I assume now the enemies will be more mobile and you will have less opportunities to set up perfect kills, which I hope will make the combat more dynamic instead of the player always being allowed to essentially abuse the AI to play perfectly in every encounter.

The way all RE games turn out, I fully expect that I'll have 10 unused knives in my inventory towards the end anyway and at that point it might as well be unlimited use. RE4 is also one of the games that has the merchant so you can buy more knives, and likely upgrade them as well so that knife-runs will be a possibility for those that want them.

I’ve beaten RE4 a good five or six times in my day and all I ever used the knife for was breaking boxes.

Hmm.

@lapsariangiraff: Having to stop and push down and a face button to turn around is perfectly tuned? Yeah I dunno. There was some jank from the time that it was released. The controls have significant changes and look leagues better.

@apewins: I fully agree with the disdain for feeling the need to play 'efficiently' in this game.

RE4 always annoyed me as it seemed like some kind of half-step toward a proper action game, while keeping a bunch of classic survival aspects to appease fans of the series. I can absolutely see why fans of the original would say that no-movement-allowed aiming and abusing the roundhouse crit animations are part of the core experience, but for me, these sorts of changes make me way more interested in a new take on an old game that I did not like much back in the day.

It's almost like these new games shouldn't even be given the 'remake' label. The recent Spyro was a remake in the truest sense - refined, yet very similar controls on top of identical, yet modern-looking level geometry and mechanics. The new RE games seem more deserving of an entirely new descriptor as they're more of a 're-imagining' than any other terms we currently use.

I think it's a little too early to judge the knife change yet. I've played RE4 on five different consoles and probably finished it at least 10 times on both normal and harder difficulties. While the knife is essential for the higher level playthroughs, I trust that Capcom knows what they're doing when it comes to the introduction of this mechanic and possibly others.

I would go as far to say the the knife almost breaks the current game in some ways. If you want to be stingy with ammo, it's a great way to conserve if you know how to use it right. Makes it fun in it's own way, but it's not the intended method.

@timoneous: Design intent is important, but to quote Bob Ross, sometimes we make happy little accidents. It makes me think of how Warframe's bullet jump was originally a glitch and then made into a feature. Whether RE4's designers intended it or not, the stagger-->kick-->knife loop was core to high-level play, and for me and a lot of other players it's a huge part of what's kept the game interesting for seventeen years, because there's that whole other layer to it that some players will never even see because of the game's dynamic difficulty adjustment. Digital Extremes saw what Warframe's players were doing and codified the exploit, and made it a better game as a result; the RE4 remake team has decided to go in the other direction with one of the greatest games ever made.

I think I'll probably end up getting the remake at release and I'll still enjoy my time with it. But am I still going to be avidly playing it seventeen years later as I do the original? I very much doubt it.

@dooz: I was referring to the tuning of the damage, design, and enemies, not so much the controls. It worked very well for the time, and still works well (despite being a bit clunky by modern standards) to this day. We can't say that about many 17 year old games.

Quality of life changes like "smoother movement" and "easier inventory shortcuts" are fine. Straight up changing a core aspect of the game like the knife? Nuh-uh.

FWIW @apewins and @stealydan's mentioned dislike of the "efficient"/min-max method of playing RE4 reminded me of another weird RE4 meta-game: gaining ammo with gun upgrades. When you upgrade your clip size at the merchant, he will also re-fill your ammo for free, meaning ideally you'll aim to have an empty or near-empty gun before doing those upgrades; that can really matter for high-damage weapons like the magnum for which the game gives you little ammo. It's something that a new player cannot engage with well because they don't know when/where the merchant will appear on a first play. Yet with successive plays it's something else you can hone, more depth that adds complexity and interest to future runs. It's another thing that I think has added to the (very) long tail of this game for me.

But there's no telling whether that sort of stuff and that method of playing will land with everyone. There are games that have "min-max" mechanics that for me are very unfun (manipulating Demon's Souls world tendency mechanics leaps to mind, for some reason), yet for me RE4 somehow hits all the right notes with all of its weird min-maxing meta-games. It doesn't for everyone, no game does, but it seems to do that for a lot of people.

That's because you're a normal person who just played the game like anyone else, enjoyed it, realized it was fantastic and moved on with your life and revisited now and then because it's so damn good. Like most of us you learned the controls, realized you had to hold down a few buttons to slowly aim the knife and then another button to attack and realized it was kinda awkward and slow and never looked back. Obviously, some really hardcore player who wants to play on hard mode, speed run the game, have maximum efficiency and all that you would take into account and "infinite" attack like the knife and take advantage of it.

As for Resident Evil 4 (2023), this is a new video game. It's more like a remake of a film rather than what is more common in game remakes. It is not hiding the fact on every level and aspect it is changing, upgrading, and reimagining a hell of a lot about the game, including the knife mechanics. That old Gamecube game was designed around the knife being what it was, and this brand new PS5 is designed around what it is. They didn't copy and paste the previous game and change one thing. Everything from the big strokes to the small minutiae of the controls, mechanics, weapons, levels, enemies, upgrades, etc. is all new and redesigned and balanced to work in concert. It is something new, and should be considered as a new video game, just like the RE2 remake - which to me was a brand new video game that happened to be inspired by the old RE2 (and for my money, a drastically superior game to the point I have no interest in seriously playing the PS1 RE2 ever again.)
Now with RE4, I don't know how much I will like the remake compared to the original. RE2's remake is one of my favorite games of the last five years and the original was a curiosity I caught up on at one point over the years but never fully completed. Where as RE4 I finished when it was relatively new as a kid and have replayed at least a few times over the years. That being said, the remake looks fantastic and I'm rooting for it as it is a week out from release - the original RE4 is a landmark game, but it certainly has its shortcomings that were not so awesome upon release and are even more glaring in 2023. I'm all here for Capcom addressing those, refreshing all of the fun I had in the original, and creating a new combat system that's even more fun than the original game.

Having seen the footage, my big problem is that enemies are still dropping Pesetas when in 2023 they should be dropping Euros. An absolutely unforgivable lack of attention to detail that completely ruins my immersion in the game and breaks the core gameplay loop. 0/10.

/s

Something I'm still really curious about, because I deleted the demo and despite realizing I could just install it again and fidget with it, but I won't do that because I'm already replaying the original and getting more and more excited to see how it compares to the remake, so: am I really alone in finding this adaptation to look a little...ugly? Relatively speaking of course, of course, but...I haven't seen that take from anybody big nor small so I'm starting to worry that I'm a total freak.

@nodima: Sure, i'll agree with that, in a technical sense it looks better of course i.e. shadows, textures, polygons, post processing, but artistically i love what i'll call the early MT Framework era of Capcom games even though RE4 was before that.

RE4 has a unique look in the series, making the most out of the Gamecube at the time its environments and high detail characters and animation are extremely memorable, and one of the reasons why revisiting the game is so enjoyable.

The remake follows on from RE8 and two other remakes, we're used to this engine so it doesn't have any obvious advancements to show off and by making the game darker there's not a lot to look at either, at least in the demo, they made some really cool characters in 4, 5 and 6 and there's been an obvious downgrade since 2 remake, Leon was more boy like for his first day on the job and they've had to carry the design over to this, excusing away his sudden hero abilities with a still image cutscene describing his "special training", the result is it looks like the iconic jacket barely fits him, he's still confident and cocky carrying over the Bingo wisecrack, but when the game seems to want to go for a horror tone it's harder to believe coming from a still young and inexperienced Leon, that training must have been special indeed.

I dunno, Ashley looks a bit like a fantasy character, Luis seems like a dumbass and has a bigger role in the game, my friend's reaction to Krauser was that he sounded like a 17 year old edgelord, i forgot to mention Leon is Canadian now, say what you will about RE6 the production quality and design in that game was insane, and while 7 and 8 impressed in their own ways the remakes haven't quite hit the mark for me, it was really cool to see 2 and 3 modernised but i can't defend 4 in the same way, the original is still incredible.

@nodima: Obviously I've only seen the preview footage from the reviews, but I do think Ashley's model in particular looks a little off. Obviously on a pure pixel and polygon level it's better than the old one but I dunno, it feels a bit . . . stiff?

She just doesn't seem to emote very well in the new version. The original managed to have a bit more of the "awkward teenager" energy that seemed appropriate for a college student. While her design and voice acting were a bit anime, that fit the tone of the game.

I know part of the goal with her new design was to try and flesh out her character and make her more mature/less sexualized. But I sort of feel like they went too far the other way in the process. She doesn't really read as "college student" anymore. It's more like "strung-out young professional."

Don't forget that Ashley in the original RE4 was heavily based off the Pop star Brittney Spears when she was at the high of her popularity before the mental breakdown a couple of years later. Both her looks and personality was meant to be based on that celebrity. However, they changed her to look like an average young adult woman, so I'm not surprised that they changed her personality as well. This game is getting rave reviews across the board, and while I solely don't base my gaming decisions on reviews, I wanted to pay this remake anyway, and I will let that be my excuse. I played both the RE2 and RE3 remake and liked them both. And while the demo has given me some doubts, based on reviews it seems like Leon has been given some new mechanics to deal with the more aggressive Genados. I'll get around to it eventually and give my final verdict when I'm finished.

The knife loses different amounts of durability if it's used defensively or offensively, and by employing things like wall-bounces, sneak attacks and finishers on stunned enemies you use less durability, while you use more if you use it to escape a grab. In other words it's modifying the RE6 model very carefully to make your meter about "the meta-game of RE4 became all about killing as many enemies as you could as ammo-efficiently as possible". It's carefully designed from the ground up to feel like a perfect part of RE4's loop and make that game's somewhat repetitive combat more dynamic and based more around taking risks and playing offensively.

So far, I have one big problem. The dog is dead.

RE4 is the awkward teenage years of third person shooter games. Boy, the controls are bad and the story is bad even for an RE game. I think this is one of the most over-remembered, nostalgia tinted games (up there with Goldeneye). I'm hopeful that they actually make RE4 good, but if the dog is dead, screw this game.