The Game Awards host Geoff Keighley will be kicking off this year’s Gamescom festivities through a new special event called Opening Night Live, which is scheduled to take place on Monday, August 19 at 11 am PDT/2 pm EDT. The event will feature world premieres and major announcements from the world’s biggest video game publishers, including Capcom, the publisher of the Resident Evil franchise.
Capcom’s inclusion in the lineup of companies that will be making announcements at Gamescom is especially interesting because the company is rumored to have a new Resident Evil game in active development. In fact, rumors and leaks have claimed that the next Resident Evil game is so far in development that it could launch as early as January 2020. Many lost hope at that prospect when E3 2019 came and went without any Resident Evil announcement, but now there’s renewed hope, and not just because Capcom will be at Gamescom.
Just last week, it was revealed that Capcom was looking for people in its Resident Evil Ambassador program in Japan to test a new game. Whether or not that game is a Resident Evil title or something completely different has yet to be officially confirmed, but if Capcom is letting outsiders test the new game, it certainly suggests that whatever it is is far along in development.
As for what the next Resident Evil game will be, the prevailing theory is that it will be a Resident Evil 3: Nemesis remake. Capcom saw a huge amount of success with its Resident Evil 2 remake, and the game still sits as the highest-rated game of 2019 at the time of this writing. It seems like a no-brainer for Capcom to pursue a Resident Evil 3 remake next, especially since the two games share some locations and it could potentially re-use assets that were used to create the RE2 remake.
If it’s not a Resident Evil 3 remake, it’s possible that the next Resident Evil game could be Resident Evil 8. We know that development has already started on Resident Evil 8 to some extent, with rumors pointing to the game following up on the Resident Evil 7 story. However, the rumors also claim that Resident Evil 8 is aiming for next-generation consoles, so it may be too optimistic to hope to see it at Gamescom.
Of course, Capcom could announce something completely different at Gamescom 2019. Fans will just have to tune in to the Geoff Keighley-hosted Opening Night Live event on August 19 to learn more.
