Resident Evil Upgrades Cannot Be Reversed On PC, Irritating Some Players

Upgrades for numerous Resident Evil games went live after Capcom’s Showcase this week, but players are quickly finding out that it comes with the concession of not being able to choose lower quality settings anymore.

Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, and Resident Evil 7 all received big visual upgrades this week on consoles and PC, with Resident Evil Village getting its own later this year. On consoles this means you can download native Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 versions of each game now, with older versions persisting on older consoles (and, in the case of the PlayStation 5, on newer ones too). This isn’t the case, however, on PC, where your only option is the newer versions.

Usually this wouldn’t be an issue, but there are a couple of reasons why this has caused problems. Firstly, the minimum requirements for each game have now increased, which means you might not be able to play them at all if you were previously just scraping by. The games are also now exclusively using DirectX 12, which is required for features like ray tracing, but means that older Windows support and compatibility with many mods (including popular VR ones) is gone.

The only way to avoid these new versions is to have automatic updates for each game turned off, and the hope that you’ll never have to reinstall them again in the future. It’s a pity that Capcom hasn’t provided the option to at least download the original versions or give users an option for which DirectX version to use as so many other games do.

Resident Evil Village is getting a similar update in October, which also includes the game’s first story expansion and new features for its Mercenaries mode, including the ability to play as Lady Dimitrescu.