Resident Evil 4 VR Executive Producer Defends Censorship: “It’s The Year 2022 And Some Of This Stuff Doesn’t Age Well”

Ryan Pearson |

Apr 22, 2022

Resident Evil 4 VR executive producer Tom Ivey recently defended the decision to censor the game pointing to the current year and claiming the censored and cut content didn’t “fit with the Resident Evil franchise these days.”

As previously reported, Resident Evil 4 VR was discovered to have censored dialogue and more prior to its launch. The dialogue was typically flirtatious in nature, such as Leon flirting with Ingrid Hannigan, Luis’ comments on Ashley’s “ballistics,” and Ashley’s request for “overtime” at the end of the game.

Another scene of Leon discovering the corpse of an impaled women was also changed, from “Guess there’s no sex discrimination around here,” to “I guess no one’s safe here.”

Sources speaking to Peter Pischke of The Happy Warrior Substack claimed the alterations were (in Pischke’s words) “focused on removing any scenes and dialogue that the gaming news media and social justice crowd may deem misogynistic.”

In a leaked video sent to Pischke tracking the alterations, Japanese text notes the changes were related to “sexual harassment, sarcastic expressions, sexist conversations, and expressions that may be indirectly linked to them have been removed.”

The video also claims “These were not unavoidably removed as part of the translation or porting process but were done by Armature Studio at the request of OculusVR and with the approval of CAPCOM.”

Facebook later stated that the game “also includes select changes to in-game dialogue and animations that we believe will update Resident Evil 4 for a modern audience.”

Amid Resident Evil 4 VR on Meta Quest 2 (the rebranded Oculus Quest 2) adding its Mercenaries mode in an update, Eurogamer spoke to Tom Ivey, the executive producer for developer Armature.

Eurogamer asked about the altered dialogue and scenes to which Ivey responded, “It’s the year 2022 and some of this stuff doesn’t age well, and it doesn’t fit with the Resident Evil franchise these days.”

“So the idea was that we’re keeping every aspect of the rooms and the creatures that you fight, and the story and how it progresses and the plot points of the story,” Ivey explained.

“But, you know, just kind of saying it’s the year 2022 – does this fit with the way that Resident Evil should be presented in this day and age?” Ivey reiterated. “That’s the concept there.”

“I definitely agree with the changes we made to the game so – we’re definitely on board with that,” Ivey defended. “We think it’s the right thing.”

Not only did Ivey defend the previous censorship of the game, but he also revealed the there are fundamental changes to Mercenaries.

He noted, “All the gameplay from the original RE4, we’ve kind of cordoned off into one selection, which is called Classic mode. “So you can play all the maps and characters, and the way that the timers work and the placement of the timers in the levels and all that is exactly the same.”

“But there’s also things that are fundamental changes to the rules of Mercenaries,” he revealed. “There’s a mode called Time Rush, which is you start with a very, very limited amount of time. And we place two timers in random locations around the map so you have to look around really quick… see that timer and think how am I going to get there while also killing guys while running to keep my combo going? And then I pick it up and I get maybe like 20 more seconds.”