Why did Resident Evil 4 change the series?
Resident Evil 4 did not just change its own series. Released for the GameCube in January 2005 after four discarded versions, it is widely cited among the best and most influential games ever made, and its specific inventions can be traced, on the record, into the games that followed it across the whole third person genre.
THE CAMERA
The change you can see in one screenshotEvery earlier Resident Evil watched its hero from a fixed corner of the room. Resident Evil 4 puts the camera behind Leon's shoulder, tightening over it when he aims, with a laser sight instead of a crosshair. Control of aim becomes anatomical: shoot a leg and a Ganado stumbles, shoot an arm and the weapon drops, shoot a thrown axe out of the air. The discarded Hook Man version had already prototyped this camera in 2003; Mikami's finished game is the one that shipped it. The view was then popularized across the industry: Gears of War, Dead Space, and The Last of Us are all on the record as influenced by it.
THE ENEMY AND THE ECONOMY
From scarcity suffered to scarcity managedThe zombies are gone. The Ganados dodge, wield tools and projectiles, communicate, and work collectively, which turns every fight into a problem of positioning rather than ammunition arithmetic. At the same time the old economy loosens into a system: a grid based attache case for an inventory, treasures to sell, and a Merchant who upgrades weapons. Survival stops being only about what you refuse to spend and becomes about what you choose to build. Context sensitive actions and quick time events, carried over from Hook Man, fold the cinematics into the controls.