People have been a little confused by Capcom’s decision to green light the Resident Evil project, Operation Raccoon City. This is due to the fact that the game will be a squad-based FPS, a gameplay experience very different from the previous iterations.

Series producer Masachika Kawata defends the decision in an interview with Gamasutra, saying that people would become bored of a franchise that didn’t change it up.

“At the core, basically, we want to make the best use of our brand,” he said.

“Resident Evil is an IP, and a franchise, that people have loved for a long time. It’s still very, very popular and we’re very, very happy about that, and we want to basically answer all the requests that we get about the series.

“People want to see a lot of different experiences within the Resident Evil universe, and so we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to answer those requests with a lot of different experiences, in different forms, in games.”

He also mentioned that he’s “not too concerned” that an FPS iteration will dilute the Resident Evil brand.

“All these different Resident Evil games that are coming out are focused on very different things. I’m thinking that if we would have brought out all these Resident Evil titles, and they were all focused on survival horror, absolutely I think people would be really sick of Resident Evil.

“But in my mind, we’ve got this online shooter game, we’ve got other things like Mercenaries that are even more action-focused, and some other games. And by going in a lot of different directions, I’m pretty confident that people are going to still be enjoying Resident Evil for a long time.”

If you’re still foaming at the mouth, Kawata insists that 3DS title Revelations will use the traditional formula.

“Revelations, which is a 3DS title, is very much going to be core-fan focused and survival horror-focused,” he assures us.

“It’s going to be a more deliberately paced-game, a little bit more classic Resident Evil, solving puzzles, things like that. So definitely there is the plan to go that direction as well.”

Fans are pretty upset by this change in the franchise, and perhaps rightly so – stunts like this have generally not been very successful in the past; we’ll have to wait and see if Capcom can get it right.