My Dream for an Open-World Resident Evil MMO Looter-Shooter

These days, many franchises are migrating towards an “always online” or season model surrounded by small content drops that focus heavily on a Battle Pass-type rewards system. For some games, like Fortnite, the Battle Pass works really well given the seasonal challenges and constant refreshing feel of changes to the world, its impact on plot, environments, weapons, skins, and so much more. In fact, because Fortnite does this so well, other games have quickly adopted these mechanics and features but haven’t quite found the sweet spot. Merge some of these concepts to the foundation of gameplay that Ubisoft’s The Division and Division 2 have created, and you are more than halfway toward creating my dream of a Resident Evil open-world survival game.

Imagine The Division meets Resident Evil but with plenty of quality of life changes and a brand new original story from the minds that brought you both

Note: Now, to be clear, I have a lot of thoughts on the concept I have long since dreamt about that I plan to elaborate in the coming paragraphs so do me a favor and curb your skepticism until it’s all laid out.

There are a lot of things that games like Fortnite and The Division have done really well but there are even more things that would need to be tweaked for a live-service, always online, open-world Resident Evil game would need in order to work and be sustainable while retaining player retention. But first things first- the story and how that fits into the overall world of Leon S. Kennedy, the Redfields, and Umbrella along with how it impacts the gameplay and player experience (I know, it’s a lot. Bear with me).

I want you to think about this scenario, as it is sort of the base for how this game would work- what if there were plot elements that got in the way of stopping Umbrella from blowing up Raccoon City and keeping the rest of the world from knowing the truth? What if this wasn’t an accident and Umbrella intentionally infected Raccoon city to test their bio-weapons? What if the government was keeping it secret?

STORY | GAMEPLAY

The setting of this title would honestly most likely struggle within the canon of the other Resident Evil titles, so we may need to bend that a little bit and make space for a game like this to exist. And considering that the world would need to feel alive with a robust amount of enemies and objectives with a reward system to boot, there would be no better place than Raccoon City.

Sure, Raccoon City was destroyed and the zombie threat had been neutralized just a few days after Jill Valentine and Carlos defeated Nemesis. But what if they didn’t?

This is what I imagine the story would look a little like:

In an alternate timeline, you are an officer of the Raccoon City Police (RPD), a custom male or female who has been a member of the police force for a short amount of time (maybe a month or two). You begin to start hearing calls around the city, which is in a normal and non-quarantined state, which leads people to believe that wild animals are coming down from the mountains and causing seriously vicious attacks on people in search of food (blamed on Umbrella for their construction in the mountains, which too would be a place you can go for missions). You are able to investigate and learn the lay of the city somewhat within your precinct district and see key locations from previous RE titles all before the zombie outbreak takes over (a couple of hours or so in order to appreciate the city’s appearance before it falls apart). A week after the first call, the city begins to crumble. The streets are filled with abandoned cars and corpses being fed on by hideous creatures of Umbrella’s design.

Umbrella has armed forces lock the city and surrounding area down and all attempts to communicate to the outside world are cut off. You know, that old trope. The game picks up a week after the first call of cannibalism you investigated with the infected all over the city and it’s time to save survivors. Umbrella would have quarantined the city in the middle of the night without civilians knowing and unbeknownst to Leon S Kennedy, who arrives just inside the quarantine zone as Umbrella locks down the streets behind him.

Note: one thing I like about the possibility of an officer investigating an attack is that there could be multiple versions of this happening at the same time. Meaning you are going out to explore alone in your own instance without seeing a dozen or other players online following your same footsteps toward the same mission objective. This means that you and your friends might investigate different calls in different parts of town involving different characters and victims for your first mission in the game before the outbreak takes over.

With the city locked down and zombies on the streets, it is up to you as the player, to save who can and take out as many undead as possible as a larger story progresses around you (whatever that is- hey, I am not a lore writer).

As an MMO, you can play with your friends in a squad or run solo in nearly every activity (save for a handful of endgame activities and challenges that should all have matchmaking) to avoid limiting your experience to having to rely on strangers or other players. The story goes at your pace of play while harder objectives require two-man, three-man, four-man, or six-man squads.

There is so much more that would need to be fleshed out by a team of writers, world-builders, and lore architects, but with what I have thought about, I know there are at least more than a few different ways to go about what I have outlined above to have this game and its plot make sense. And while I can’t obviously list them all, this is what I feel is the best I could come up with on the spot:

• The game could be an alternate reality with plot changes so that Raccoon City never got wiped out. The story could show us a “What If…” (or simply an alternate reality that doesn’t acknowledge the What If… at all) scenario where Umbrella managed to pay off the right people (in the government or whatever) and decided to use every survivor in Raccoon City as a test subject to determine just how resilient humans could be facing off against those infected by the virus and or how quickly the populace of a town would succumb to infection. This would be an interesting way to go with the supporting reason being that Umbrella plans on using the virus for warfare and bioweapons for terrorism rather than for Spencer’s and Wesker’s original plans which were slightly different in motivation.

With the above story change, I would imagine that every so often, Umbrella would drop in new experiments, new test subjects of immense power, strength, and stamina to see what unknown variables appear during human x infected encounters. These could be random encounters or Raid or Dungeon bosses that reward higher-end loot drops (which we will talk more about later) and everything in between.

• Think of it like this- survivors face massive amounts of zombies but there are other, stronger, and more agile enemies out there like Lickers and more that establish varying degrees of difficulty the further you venture out from the many safehouses in the city (with the main obviously being Raccoon Police Dept.). Umbrella would then drop in a Nemesis (or another super-strong enemy) as a dungeon or raid boss, where players would have to team up to take down.
• I also had this thought that the outskirts of town, the surrounding wilderness, would also be accessible in this open-world but would also be the home of other enemies, new and old, that become increasingly more difficult to beat the further the player ventures out. If the player goes out too far, say to the border or end of the map, Umbrella soldiers are there to keep people from escaping and will kill you on sight if you get too close.

The gameplay all depends on the story, or at least some of it will. And a lot of my vision for this game would need to be more fleshed out by people significantly smarter and more capable than myself. However, I do see a lot of the game taking elements of the other titles but feeling a lot like The Division and Resident Evil 4. Let me explain.

While I personally love the first-person experience of RE7 and RE8, it would be nice to give players the option rather than removing it entirely and doing a camera over-the-shoulder as the player’s only option (I am all about options). I say that because in most looter-shooter games, players typically focus on two things- how they look and what guns they go after. You can’t really appreciate your look as much as you could if you are always in first-person and you can’t exactly appreciate your guns as much as you could without falling in love with the look and feel of it which is most noticeable in first-person (say what you will about Bungie’s Destiny franchise but no one comes close to rivaling their gunplay).

In short, imagine a fluid hybrid between The Division‘s desolate city landscape and Days Gone‘s outer wilderness surrounded by mutations, experiments, and hordes (the latter of which Days Gone does fairly well). Unique gunplay, fair loot drops without a painful grind but respects your time, and customization that is both formidable against your foes and fashionable among your friends. Slap a season pass with challenges like Fortnite on top of it (that never expire like Halo Infinite), and ensure a long-term story that makes sense within the Resident Evil universe with familiar faces from the franchise and bam, you have your keys to success.

Now I get that you might be rolling your eyes at the mere thought of some armchair developer like me basically saying “take all the best things from all these games and slap them together with a Resident Evil skin on it“, and you would be right to do so. But I promise that is not what I am saying. At least not entirely. The truth is, all of these developers and their games have given birth to aspects and elements, dare I say parts, of the perfect looter-shooter. But what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate well into their game’s sustainability and player health count. Because at the end of the day, devs and pubs only care about one thing: money. And to do that, you need players to keep on playing and keep on spending money. You can’t have one without the other.

Hopefully, if you have gotten this far in this article, you will see what I mean as you continue to read.

GEAR DROPS

One major thing I think that looter-shooters keep getting wrong is the loot, believe it or not, and there are some massive jarring issues that would need to be addressed in order to keep things fresh and solid for this game, were I to have my way. However, before I dive into some examples of what games do poorly and what games do right that I would like to see in this title, it is important to note that I would never expect a Resident Evil game to have the best loot-drop experience of all time. It could, but I would never hold Capcom or anyone else to that. With that in mind, let’s look at some looters that could use some tweaking and how it could benefit this RE Looter-Shooter MMO fantasy of mine.

• Borderlands has a problem with far too many drops and not enough meaningful drops. On one hand, it feels great to get to the endgame and get showered with weapons that are at or around the player level. The problem is, there are far too many combinations and no way to adjust them. When Borderlands 3 dropped, I was blown away at the idea of “over 1 billion guns” but when you realize this is misleading as it’s just a bunch of variants of the same gun with differences the player may not even notice, that number drops significantly. But the issue here is that there are far too many drops that eventually, seeing Purple tier auras or higher surrounding a weapon become less exciting and inevitably meaningless. However, there are a lot of hardcore players out there that may feel the difference between barrels or stocks or whatever, and will at some point find that perfect combination of a gun that scratches every itch they have. The issue with that then becomes, you will eventually out-level the weapon and you have to do it all over again, which sucks. Enter Bungie’s Destiny with their infusion mechanic.
• Destiny suffers from absolutely terrible management. There, I said it. The game is lacking in almost every aspect with demands and feature requests that have existed for the nearly seven years the franchise has been around. Almost every part of the franchise was hacked to pieces, redone, recycled, reused, and stretched so thin that there have been countless times where players simply just abandoned the games due to Bungie making tone-deaf, brain-dead decisions only to walk back on them just so they could say “See? We are listening.” And while I have written many articles on Destiny in the past, often criticizing Bungie for being flat-out stupid and overwhelmingly predatory in their FOMO and microtransaction models (seriously, their Season Pass is a joke), the one thing they get is how a gun should feel in a player’s hand. Even with issues regarding their loot system and how often they nerf popular weapons into uselessness, Bungie has got the look, the feel, and the sound of guns down to a mastered art form that no other company can even touch. The uniqueness of perks, the synergy, along with the aesthetics, are unrivaled in a sea of copycats. And the best part? You can infuse them up indefinitely (disregarding the bullshit that Sunsetting was only for them to recall that, which is a whole other story). This means you can carry the weapons with you for the life of your character… as long as Bungie doesn’t nerf it.
• The Division (1&2) games have weapons that you don’t remember, that are never talked about or referenced in any discussion about looters. They just aren’t. Because they are boring and are nothing special (this could be mainly in that the games are grounded in reality while both Borderlands and Destiny involve space magic while the former is also all about humor and craziness). There is not really anything memorable about anything regarding loot in those games, save for the way the system around customizing your guns works. That, in my opinion, was truly beautiful. I loved the idea of finding a gun as a solid base that I could change the look and feel of by adding or removing parts. Stocks, barrels, clips, scopes, skins, etc. It was all there to create a completely unique weapon that was specific to you and how you wanted to play. The combinations were well-executed in form and function and I really wished that I liked these games more because I really loved how their loot system worked in terms of making a gun to fit my play style. It was just too repetitive and uninteresting in every other way for me to remain engaged. And I have to admit, the gameplay experience was so forgettable that I don’t even remember if I hated how often or seldom loot dropped for me. I never got around to Dark Zones since I was bored by then but I remember my friends complaining about it one by one before they fell off and went to play something else.

customization that is both formidable against your foes and fashionable among your friends

I wanted to specifically reference these three games because they all do something well- they all offer a piece or two of some sort of incredible building blocks that could be used to create the perfect looter-shooter. And again, while I say that a Resident Evil MMO will likely never happen, if it did, it would be far from perfect, as would its loot system. However, this is what I would personally like to see taken from the above three games and added into this imaginary fantasy title:

• First of all, there needs to be a healthy amount of loot drops. We do not need over a billion guns, or even a million, or even a thousand (this applies to gear/armor and attachments/enhancements as well). What we need is a consistent amount of sources that are farmable (daily or weekly but there needs to be a variety of sources so players don’t just log in for fifteen minutes and then turn around and log out for the rest of the day) for decent to excellent weapons. Have there be multiple sources for your average run-of-the-mill rare and legendary equivalent, and then of course the more exotic/epic/highest tier weapons and gear can come from unique and specific boss encounters or challenges. I am not sure what a reasonable amount of guns/gear is but there should always be something unique and interesting out there for the player to go after.

• Weapon parts and attachments/enhancements should come from various sources as well. Whatever the rarity model the guns and armor/gear comes in, so should the attachments and parts to improve your gun (barrels, sights/scopes, etc.).
• Regardless of rarity, any useable gear drops should have a rarity and a decent understanding of where it comes from for players to farm it. If we use the White, Green, Blue, Purple, Yellow rarity system, it should be understood that W, G, and B come from various neighborhoods or sections of the map unique to their area. Higher-end loot like P and Y should come from more challenging encounters but never should the player feel bad for not having P and Y gear. Those should be trophies to go after while lower gear can be improved or upgraded for higher-end encounters. Of course, the better the rarity, the better it will be for the endgame and usually, P and Y have unique perks that make them worthy of their rarity and most likely, a unique look as well.
• Gear should be specific to each part of the body. Maybe customizing each leg or each arm individually might be too much but it would certainly be welcome to mix and match for fashion purposes as well as practical reasons (ie better armor stats, etc).
• No gear should get left behind. The lower the gear, the more materials you would need to upgrade it for Raid boss encounters. Let players keep what they want and let them look how they want. For example, if we have a rarity system that matches this model: White, Green, Blue, Purple, Yellow, perhaps the higher tiers have more perks and stat bonuses. It would be great to say, take a white and get it up to yellow capability but to do this, say you would need to farm and dismantle yellows for special yellow-tier materials that would be needed to upgrade white. The lower the rarity, the more materials it needs to come up. Simple as that.
• Do not make crap gear on purpose. Everything in the game should feel adequate for trash mobs or low-tier enemies and hordes. Base-level weapons may not one-shot an enemy, but as you progress, you should feel more powerful. Of course, players will want to go after items that better match their fashion, play style, and objective. But everything should be decent enough to be usable to some extent. The only restriction would be its level and any hindrance ineffectiveness should be centered around its firepower.
• Keep firepower for weapons and armor strength separate. Level lockouts are fine to restrict the player from getting endgame gear too early at a low level, but armor should not drop at higher levels based on the player’s damage output. They should be two different systems meaning that it would be entirely possible to be a glass cannon. And by that, I mean you could deal massive damage with your weapons but can also be one-shot by a weak enemy if your armor isn’t high enough.

Imagine all the cool tech that Umbrella has in their labs just ripe for the picking that could be turned into awesome weapons and armor.

• Considering this is a Resident Evil game, it would stand to reason that some NPCs would do some study on the various Umbrella viruses in the confines of Raccoon City (they can’t leave so the only thing they can do is learn to survive). Perhaps there are even some scientists that were left behind when everyone else evacuated and are found within the city that are unable to leave due to being a risk to Umbrella. In exchange for safety (or a moral obligation), they would opt to help the player by developing weapons that obliterate the infected enemies in fun and unique ways. This way we aren’t locked into common handguns and shotguns and snipers but also a handful of absurd weapons like what you find in DOOM. Imagine all the cool tech that Umbrella has in their labs just ripe for the picking.
• I haven’t made any real focus on style much, despite highlighting its significance. On one hand, it would be nice to have two different layers for armor- one for protection and one for what it looks like. For example; let’s say your character has a high-stat, super rare chest piece that gives you all the perks and armor bonuses you like but it looks hideous. Having two slots (layers) for the chest would allow you to equip this item and then stack another item on top of it to appear how you want to look. More specifically, let’s say you are wearing a bulletproof vest but you don’t want to appear as if you are wearing one, strictly for cosmetic purposes. Maybe you would rather appear to have a RPD t-shirt on instead. This way you would be able to equip both, one for stats and one for looks. And no, it wouldn’t look like you are wearing a bulletproof vest with a t-shirt over it, it would look like you are just wearing the t-shirt.
• Adding to the armor bit a little, these too would also have rarity tied to them with unique pieces for each arm, leg, chest, and head. As to what level of detail, that is hard to solidify considering the subjectiveness of it all. But considering more options are better than less, you should be at least able to customize the color or shader on your gear.

This is all well and good but it really only scratches the surface on what I would want to see in the game and obviously, the story would need a lot of work from people familiar with all the lore of RE. But hopefully this enough to get you thinking that there is at least the possibility for something magical here.

SOLO VS MULTIPLAYER

I never got around to playing any PVP in The Division and Borderlands but it would certainly have to be a little different than either of those games and absolutely nothing like Destiny’s Crucible (you know, with actual updates and cheat protection). I would imagine it would have to borrow some elements from GTA Online with friendly fire turned on or off. If turned on, other players can steal things from you (nothing like your legendary Raid armor or weapons. Maybe health items or money. Smaller things you can earn back). And even though I never got around to The Division 2’s Dark Zone, perhaps there is something there that could be fun and engaging if you threw zombies into it?

One thing I loved about Borderlands 1-3, is that I wasn’t required to rely on others to get the job done. I can progress the story and earn gear I love all on my own. But, there should be something there for players who prefer to play together, too. As many do. Of course, we can’t try and please everyone but we can at least give them and others the experience of carefully planned encounters where you have to work together as a team to reach your objective. Raids are really good for this sort of thing since there are creatures that could be tossed at you that you just won’t be able to solo yourself. Naturally, you would need to be feel compensated and handsomely rewarded for your accomplishment and triumph over such an enemy so there would need to be unique gear drops for those, too.

However, unlike Bungie’s Destiny franchise, there needs to be an in-game matchmaking system or means of recruiting teammates for these challenges. It is absurd that you have to rely on LFG (look for group) sites like Reddit or apps like Discord just to play your game. Either every activity has matchmaking, or there is a system implemented in there that lets you search for people to join with you that meet the agreed requirements to participate. It’s not hard. And if you say it is, then you are doing something wrong.

The beauty of this model of gameplay is that you are an officer of the law. There are a lot of you. You are not special, you are not unique, you are one of many. So it is your job to keep the peace and save people. Meaning that it will be fairly common to see other officers on the street. However, there will have to be those unique encounters where you do feel special and go out on your own to progress your version of the story. Maybe this is meeting up with Chris Redfield or carrying out a mission for Wesker or receiving orders to gather supplies at Leon’s request back at RPD. Whatever the case, the game is built around the idea of you being a cop trying to uncover the truth of all this. That way it doesn’t take you out of the immersion when you see another player out on the street teabagging Nemesis’ corpse.

BOSSES | RAIDS

Boss encounters vary from game to game and naturally, in a Resident Evil title they need to be filled with familiar types that we have seen from at least the first three games (since we are keeping things within the general Raccoon City area). Considering that RE4 moved things over to Europe with las plagas, it is imperative to keep things consistent with the Raccoon City trilogy and any related tie-ins. But, since we are altering history a bit to make this story and everything fit within this game experience, it would be fun to sort of tease the future a little bit in learning about other experiments and creatures that Umbrella knows about and is working on.

That said, there are many bio-weapons to choose from that can be bosses. From Lickers to Tyrants to special encounters with RE3’s Nemesis and more. But because this is an alternate past, we can assume there would new, never before seen enemy types that could act as quest and raid bosses.

The one thing that bosses need to be, is unique. They need to feel different than the enemies we would otherwise encounter day in and day out on the streets. As mentioned before, they can be larger versions of common enemies but not identical. They need to be unique alphas or mutations of mutations. Bullet sponges don’t bother me but there needs to be more than just how much damage they can take and how much they can dish out. Mechanics to trigger vulnerabilities would be nice and knock-back mechanics would not be (no freaking stomping- looking at you Bungie).

The bosses, as also mentioned before, should have a match-making feature or at least a way to invite other players that meet the requested requirements to join. Along with how to encounter the bosses with a party, it should go without saying that they offer unique loot and materials and nowhere else.

When it comes to the rewards for these bosses, I personally would like to see them farmable, at least for raids, at least on a rotation. If there are multiple raids, make one farmable each week. Something to give players a reason to… you know, play.

One thing I can’t stand about Borderlands Raids is that there is very little need or necessity to complete them. By the time you are high enough level, you have good enough gear to face anything, and grinding for weapons to have for the sake of having them when the rest of the game is over is super boring to me. Destiny refuses to respect the player’s time, likely intentionally (I am of the strict belief that Bungie deploys shitty mechanics and drop rates on purpose to piss off the fanbase only to undo them later so they can turn around and request praise for listening to the community). The other issue with Destiny in this regard is how little there is to do in the game on any given day. Bosses should not be a once-a-week encounter. Let the players have fun, let them grind out rewards, let them get better at the encounter. Locking players out of earning rewards for the most interesting and engaging content in your game is just foolish.

RANDOM WORLD ENCOUNTERS

Days Gone was a pretty fun game. I enjoyed the open-world concept and the idea that at any moment I could run into a horde of hundreds of “freaks” or infected that run incredibly fast to try and slaughter and eat your bones really excited me. But with as much as that game did well, it also did poorly. The world felt so empty with only a small select few enemy types, some way more common than others, and any non-infected encounter (bandits, marauders, raiders, etc.) all felt identical. Any encounter in the wild that was random felt more like it was pulling from one of maybe three or four possible scenarios that had very little nuance between them, if any. Sure, the human enemies were different than the infected enemies but any human foe felt like they were doing the same thing over and over again. And while my dream for the perfect open-world MMO game featuring the world and characters of Resident Evil would have some of these elements, it would need to be smarter and far less lazy, despite having undead enemies with no upper brain function.

I get that development is hard. But I feel like that is an excuse that is being used by devs and pubs that simply don’t want to do it because it costs money, not because it is hard. If Bethesda can make brilliant (usually) 24hr AI in Elder Scrolls games, and if Rockstar can make GTAV the masterpiece it is, even with its insane online experience, then we know the technology exists. Skyrim came out in 2011 and GTAV came out in 2013 so don’t give me that bullshit that making games is hard. It can be done. You are just being cheap.

I am not asking for a birth, life, and death cycle for characters. But make them feel more alive with agendas and emotions and more lines of dialogue. Hell, Skyrim felt like it had maybe five guys doing all the voices and it still feels better than Cyberpunk (which is a whole other can of worms we won’t open).

The encounters around the world should be truly random and unique. Create experiences surrounding fear and horror that players may not see if they don’t look close enough. If after 10 years, Skyrim is still offering surprises to players, a game that is always online can feature a fresh experience without recycling dialogue of NPCs every thirty minutes (or every thirty seconds like Days Gone did).

The world needs to simply feel like civilians are dying and trying to survive. State of Decay has some great foundation here as well for survivors. They don’t have to be brilliant in terms of AI, but just seeming like they have things to do. And the encounters in the world need to more than a woman trapped in an alley surrounded by zombies. Perhaps even the people you save could become honorable members of the RPD to go out and help save other survivors but could call for help when they are overwhelmed? Maybe they can get killed? There also needs to be a timer between these encounters so you don’t run into the same ones right in a row in rapid succession.

This is probably one of the more complicated requests because there is so much that can be done here. But is essential for an open-world, always online, MMO.

BOUNTIES AND SEASONAL OBJECTIVES

One aspect of the game that I think would be fun would be to have factions. Imagine varying ideologies about what is happening around the city. You could have one group of religious fanatics, another group of hunters who are just excited to go out and kill things, the RPD who is out saving people, and of course gangs of opportunists who loot the city for their own ends. Some are just out to survive while others think this is a punishment (or gift) from God while others are having the time of their lives. The possibilities here create more opportunity for bounties, questions, mission objectives, and hunts for certain undead or infected enemies and even humans who have gone awol against their own factions.

Bounties would need to be repeatable with random rewards tied to them and a certain amount of experience points to progress your character in whatever leveling system works best for this sort of game. If it is going to be always online it will have to have a seasonal model for sure and I personally love Fortnite’s Battle Pass. Adding to that, 343 Industries has made it so that players would be able to buy any Battle Pass from the past and choose which one to progress in so you never miss out. Want to buy Season Pass 12 during Season 15? Sure, go ahead. Feel like putting progress toward those sweet cosmetics back from Season 8 during Season 17? Sure, why not. Whatever you buy, you keep forever. And don’t worry about the fear of missing out because that is not part of the game. Buy what you want, when you want, with no expiration.

Leon, Chris, Jill, and Claire

These four all fit into the original trilogy in some way or another depending on which character you chose to play as. In my dream, I would see Leon leading the charge with the RPD after arriving on his first day, trying his best to save lives while Jill helps as another leader who takes on special operations missions. All four of them could fit into the game in some ways by giving the player mission objectives and challenges to complete. I don’t know how but they would be integral to the game and the pacing of the story while being close to the player. Perhaps Chris takes the player on recon missions in the underground research facilities at Umbrella or something.

I would like to add one thought that just came to me while typing this out- you know how in MMOs where you go up to a mission-giver and you are standing there, overlapping character models with a dozen or so other players? I can’t say how to resolve this perfectly but I can add that I truly can’t stand when that happens. So, for the sake of say, talking to Leon who has become the leader of the RPD due to his great leadership skills, let’s say you are tasked with speaking to him. In order to avoid having all these players on-screen at once ruining the immersion, maybe you enter the lobby of the RPD. In there you see all the players going in different directions, some even headed toward Leon in an office somewhere strategizing a survival plan of some kind. His door is closed. You can only see Leon when you enter this office and the only ones inside are Leon, maybe Jill, and you and whoever is in your squad at the time. Keep the instances separate or just make them cutscenes without showing Leon walking around when he gives you top secret orders that he entrusts only to you. Or something like that.

In Conclusion

The fact is, I know there are obstacles that make this sort of game damn near impossible to bring to life. That’s why this is nothing more than a silly little dream. But if it ever happens and someone over at Capcom wants to get some ideas on what could make this idea a reality, I hope that at least some of what I have talked about fits into it somehow. And I know I didn’t touch base on every single topic that needs to be addressed to make the ideal MMO, that too would be impossible, at least for me (it has taken me a week already just to write all this up). The point is, I see that there could be massive potential in this concept and I know I would not be the only person who would spend countless hours invested in it.

Even though it may not happen, it is still fun to think about when my mind slowly drifts off into the vastness of my imagination.