Resident Evil Requiem has a third-person mode because people were too afraid to play Resident Evil 7, according to Requiem's director Koshi Nakanishi.

"I think some people couldn't handle it, and either couldn't finish or didn't even start it," Nakanishi told GamesRadar+. "And that's something that I look back on thinking that, you know, I want to make sure that people can enjoy this game. So if you started the game off in first-person perspective, and you're finding it's too much, then third person is almost a way to step slightly back from that level of horror and make it slightly easier to deal with by having the character on screen as a kind of avatar of yourself."

Resident Evil 7 Worked Because It Was First-Person

It’s a shame: the series' 2017 reinvention breathed new life into the series because it was in first person. After going off the rails with the borderline stylish action of Resident Evil 6, Capcom looked to recent first-person indie horror games like Outlast and Amnesia: The Dark Descent for inspiration. At the same time, it was going back to the series' puzzle-solving roots. The first-person perspective made that classic gameplay feel new. The scares were more grounded. The enemies loomed larger. The world felt all-encompassing and oppressive.

But not everybody could get on board, and I get it. Resident Evil 7 is scary — the scariest game in the franchise. But first-person isn't ancillary to its identity. It's the entire reason it came to be.

Though Nakanishi is talking about literal fear, players' hesitancy to play Resident Evil 7 is in line with how a vocal subset of players talk about first-person games as a whole. When Cyberpunk 2077's hands-off demo was revealed behind closed doors at E3 in 2018, some players immediately began asking for a third-person mode. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle received similarly negative reactions for showing its story through Indy's eyes.

This doesn't seem to go the other direction. Sure, fans mod third-person games like The Last of Us to include first-person modes, and Rockstar added the perspective to Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. But I have never seen fans react negatively to a third-person game on the basis of it being third-person. It's seen as the default triple-A perspective.

Embrace Games Being What Their Developers Want Them To Be

But this kind of thinking is fundamentally anti-art. It is a rejection of choice as a meaningful artistic tool, and an embrace of the idea that a game needs to be all things to all people. But sometimes a game just isn't for you, and that's okay. I play very few real-time strategy games because I've never been able to get a handle on the mixture of long-term planning and short-term tactics required to excel. I always feel overwhelmed and, generally, have a bad time. But that doesn't mean that Relic should make Age of Empires 5 a turn-based tactics game to accommodate my preferences.

I felt the same when someone on Twitter suggested Baldur's Gate 3 should add action combat for people who don't like turn-based mode.

Accessibility modes are a great thing, and I welcome any game that includes screen readers or alternative control schemes or colorblind modes so more people can experience the game as intended. But aesthetic preference is not the same thing as disability. Developers shouldn't alter their vision for their games because some people won't like it. Making artistic choices is the heart of making art, and a game that compromises on its identity will be just that: compromised.