Yeap.
Btw, am I the only one who thinks the first games where set mostly at night more because of technical limitations than atmosphere? They kinda remind me the first Syphon Filter trilogy, if someone played those. Mostly nighttime levels with a ''dark'' aura to prevent seeing the limitations of the game world.
That and night lends itself well to horror settings in general.
Technical limitations weren't quite as big of a deal for Resident Evil compared to Syphon Filter simply due to the fact that Classic RE's games all used pre-rendered backgrounds to get around some of the technical limitations of the time.
That said, having all the early games be set mostly in either indoor locations or narrow streets and alleys at night was likely due to the limitations of the time.
I've read that the RE2/3 rendition of Raccoon has so many narrow passages/streets because the programmers built it like a Japanese city, plus it was easier to make than a wide open American city
Quoting this again because it reminds me of something that was brought up earlier in the thread and also something else I've been thinking about when looking back on the old PS1 RE trilogy.
Way earlier in the thread, someone mentioned how S.T.A.R.S didn't make a lot of sense for a unit of an American police department in the semi-rural Midwest but could make more sense for a regional police force in Japan and that the devs came up with the S.T.A.R.S unit to explain why the protagonists would be adept with guns as well as other skills like lockpicking and wilderness survival.
By RE2, they apparently hit the books and realized American cops carry guns regularly and specialized tactical units were mostly just in large cities.
I'm wondering if that could explain some of the weirdness of Raccoon City, particularly in RE2. The narrow streets and frequent back alleyways are more typical of a Japanese city or town and that makes a lot more sense with the gameplay and the technical limits but you look at RE2 and the city streets at the beginning of the game sort of imply that you're wandering through some run-down ghetto neighborhood that was dangerous even before the virus.
The chain link fence basketball courts and the over-the-top levels of graffiti straight out of 1970's-1980's NYC feel like a weird attempt to make Raccoon City seem more stereotypically "American".
Like, I get this weird feeling the Capcom devs knew that Raccoon City would be laid out more like a Japanese city when they were making RE2, so they tried to make it more American-looking to try and make up for it.
