Resident Evil 4 HD Project's Castle chapter due March
This is stunning work
The next chapter of the hugely impressive Resident Evil 4 HD Project [official site] will arrive on March 31st, its makers have announced, overhauling the game's castle areas. This is possibly the best fan-made overhaul I've seen, and certainly goes far beyond Capcom's work in the official HD re-release. Working with unofficial tools, the RE4HD Project's makers have added more 3D detail to the world, relit areas, and taken such care in recreating textures that they even track down buildings Capcom photographed as source material. Check out this new comparison video showing off improvements:
Pret-ty swish, isn't it?
I don't often use fan-made texture packs, as many lack consistency or change the tone of the game too much, but this is all very impressive. A few minor bits aside, it looks coherent and quite reverent of of the original material. Given that Resident Evil 4 is one of the finest games, this is great.
I've been following the mod's development blog for years, delighted each time they post about things like discovering how to edit real-time lights, fixing lighting issues in the base game, finding buildings Capcom photographed, fixing errors Capcom made, or just making some really nice curtains.
The RE4HD Project released an overhaul of the Village sections in 2014, which you can download over here. I believe that's not final, with some tweaks still to come. You'll need that 2014 re-release to play it. The dev blog has already shown plenty of progress on the Island areas so hopefully it won't be too long before RE4 is fully prettied-up.
It's a shame that Capcom's official updated version of RE4 didn't change much visually (despite boasts of "a complete visual overhaul") but they did give the game a solid foundation on modern systems. Combined with this mod, ooh I'm looking forward to this being done. Resident Evil 4 for the ages.