Veteran Resident Evil producer shares details on his NetEase game

Veteran Resident Evil producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi has shared details on the first game being developed at his new studio GPTRACK50.

It was announced in August 2022 that Kobayashi had left Capcom after 27 years to join NetEase, which is China’s second largest gaming company behind Tencent.

In October 2022 it was then announced that Kobayashi would be president of GPTRACK50, a new NetEase-owned studio set up to create original games that can be adapted to other entertainment mediums including films, novels and manga.

Now, in the latest issue of Weekly Famitsu (as reported by ryokutya2089), Kobyashi has given more information on the studio’s first game.

According to the report, the game will be an entirely new 3D action RPG which can be played in single-player, and it won’t be as difficult as some other games that intentionally kill the player regularly.

The game has typical RPG concepts like jobs, attributes, weapons and a battle system that lets players focus on enemies’ weak points.

According to Kobayashi, the general outline of the game’s world has been decided and a prototype version is expected to be finished in Spring 2024, after which the game may be officially announced.

Further reading

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Kobayashi began his career as a programmer on the original Resident Evil game before going on to serve as a producer on multiple entries in Capcom’s horror series, including Resident Evil 4. He held the same role on Dino Crisis, Devil May Cry, Dragon’s Dogma and Sengoku Basara titles.

Despite perhaps being best known in Japan for the Resident Evil and Sengoku Basara games, Kobayashi reportedly says his new game will be neither a horror game like the former, nor a feudal war game like the latter.

Also in the article, Kobayashi reportedly said that he joined NetEase because he saw that Suda51 and Toshihiro Nagoshi, both of whom now lead NetEase-owned studios, were also receiving support from the company and felt comfortable knowing this.