While we all wait for Capcom to announce the inevitable remake of Resident Evil 3 (I mean come on, look how well Resi 2 did this year), an impressive new HD texture pack for the original 1999 survival horror has just been released to keep us busy.
Resident Evil 3 – Seamless HD Project breathes frightening new life into the beloved PlayStation title, offering a complete HD overhaul for the Nintendo GameCube version of the game running on the Dolphin emulator.
You can check out what the team has achieved with the project so far in the video below, and get a good look at how the footage compares to the original GameCube release. You can even switch HD textures on or off yourself while playing the game, Master Chief Collection-style.
The modders explain a little bit about their process in the video’s description:
Custom-made tools have been used to prevent the apparition of seams where the masks are displayed on top of the backgrounds. This is done by recreating the Mask textures from fully processed backgrounds through analyzing and exploiting the game’s data.
While it’s not the ground-up remake in the vein of Resident Evil 2 we’re all desperately waiting for, this is as good an excuse as any to return to one of the more overlooked games in the Resi franchise.
But just when can we expect an official remake from Capcom? It’s not entirely clear, and the developer is keeping pretty tight-lipped on whether or not such a project even exists, though everyone is convinced it’s only a matter of time given just how well Resident Evil 2 Remake performed critically and commercially.
Just after the release of Resi 2’s remake, the game’s director Yoshiaki Hirabayashi admitted that the only reason it got greenlit in the first place, was because fans were demanding it. To that end, he teased that Resident Evil 3 could very possibly get the same treatment if fans are vocal enough, which they quite clearly have been.
There have also been rumblings that the game is already in development alongside Resident Evil 8, but these reports are entirely unconfirmed. Personally, I’d say we can expect to see it eventually, just not any time in the near future.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.