Two months after its very successful launch, the hype surroundingResident Evil 4 Remakeappears to have finally died down. That’ll happen whenNintendolaunches aBreath of the Wildsequel. That doesn’t mean the latestResident Evilgame isn’t still relevant though, and even the 18-year-old original version of the game caught a lot of people’s attention last week when someone stumbled on a fun new detail.
Codec calls were a clever way for Leon to keep in touch with characters not within the immediate vicinity in the originalResident Evil 4, most notably Ingrid Hunnigan. WhatCapcomclearly didn’t anticipate in 2005 was people eventually playing its game using an ultrawide monitor, because why would it?
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Jeffery2084has shared an image of what a Resident Evil 4 codec call looks like when playing the game in widescreen. The image naturally isn’t stretched, which is a good thing on the surface, but unlike the rest of the game where there’s more environment to show in that additional real estate, that isn’t the case when Leon takes a codec call.
That results in a big black rectangle on the right-hand side of the screen, but that’s not the interesting part. That rectangle is partly filled by Leon’s left arm, and a little bit of his body too. That’s because even though Leon’s face is shown as a still image during the calls, Capcom has simply placed his entire model behind the codec call window. A detail that would have never been discovered had the game not been played in ultrawide years later.
An amusing detail that has prompted others to share similar examples of developers using smoke and mirrors to save time, effort, and money. Storing objects like quest markers underground so they don’t need to load when discovered appears to be a popular one, as is replicating an entire room in a mirror as that’s a lot easier than having the game constantly track where the player is, and where they’re looking, to ensure the reflection is accurate.
Others have joked if you keep the codec call in ultrawide and stack two more screens on top, you’ll discover Leon takes his codec calls without pants on, just like the rest of us. No, that almost definitely isn’t true, but if you really want to see Resident Evil 4’s hero without pants,there’s a mod for that in the remake, because of course there is.
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