Triskaidekaphobia: RE5 Vesus DLC screens (Jill, Wesker playable), Capcom defends DLC pricing

March 13, 2009

Happy Friday the 13th! As such, it’s also Happy Resident Evil 5 day! The game’s out and about, lurking around retail shelves, and for some people, there seems to be some triskaidekaphobia* going on. See, apparently, people are lashing out at Capcom for charging for DLC which supposedly just unlocks existing on-disc content. Check out the full article for the story, as well as more screenshots (Jill and Wesker confirmed!) and clarifications on Versus mode.

* triskaidekaphobia – fear of the number 13, for the uninitiated.

Yesterday, Capcom announced the upcoming DLC scheduled for both the PS3 and Xbox 360 of Resident Evil 5. Just as we expected, Jill Valentine and Albert Wesker are going to be playable. More screens can be found below, but to elaborate more on the Versus mode, it’s actually split into two game types, both of which can be played as one-on-one or two-versus-two:

Slayer – kill as much Manji as you can within the time limit, person/team with the highest kills wins
Survivor – battle against other characters, person/team last standing wins

Meanwhile, people have been lashing out at Capcom for charging for the DLC (US$ 4.99 on PSN, 400 MS Points on XBL). People speaking against the DLC charges have played their “why do you want us to pay for content that’s already on the disc” card. Capcom, on the other hand, defends their stand on the matter:

Although Versus mode makes use of the assets that exist in the game, the functionality is not currently in the game and is above and beyond the initial scope of Resident Evil 5. We have never included a Versus mode in Resident Evil before, and as well as the costs of development of the feature, there’s also additional bandwidth costs associated with it.

It may be worth mentioning that one of the reasons why people think the Versus mode is on-disc content is because of some evidence found in the Trophies list. Apparently, ten Trophies are unlocked via Versus-Slayer and Versus-Survivor mode, so hearing Capcom say that the Versus mode wasn’t part of the initial scope seems quite odd.

And yes, the DLC (which actually sounds more of a patch now) doesn’t add anything new like characters or weapons – it just adds functionality for the Versus mode, which uses already existing objects and assets from the disc.

Hmmm. Anyways. More screens!