Team Arklay’s released a 12 second teaser trailer on December 17th, 2019 for the upcoming full trailer reveal of their complete remake of the original Dino Crisis from the PlayStation 1. The teaser doesn’t showcase much other than Regina in a dark corridor with flashing hazard lights and two carnivores raptors looking to chow down on the heroine.

The teaser trailer is basically like an announcement for an announcement. It doesn’t reveal much of anything other than what the gunplay might be like in the Unreal Engine 4 remake, but you can check it out for yourself to see what’s in store from Team Arklay with the teaser below.

It bears repeating that we don’t get to see much, and the whole point of the teaser is to setup for the full gameplay reveal trailer, but what we do see… well, it looks like it’s early in development.

The AI is definitely very rough around the edges.

There are two raptors in the corridor while the lights swirl and the alarm seems to be raised. The first raptor gets stun-locked in front of Regina as she peppers it consecutively with her pistol. A second raptor moves at a moderate clip down the hall toward her, almost at a casual trot.

It’s hard to see it as a horror moment because it looks like you can just shoot the dinosaurs and they get stunned instantly. Hopefully the gunplay is refined a bit more where you have to shoot them in their legs to force them to trip and fall, or shooting them in the face forces them to stop, reorient their position and change their attack vector.

I know it’s an indie team but when you can see these kind of immersion blockers in place when it comes to the gameplay mechanics, it can definitely strip away from feeling really connected to the experience, especially if they’re going for the horror vibes.

One of the things I would implement within the AI flow chart framework is that if they get attacked with a value greater than 2, then it plays the dodge/evasion script function, which runs a script that forces the AI off its current path and to move on the opposite side of a noded pathway toward the player-character (assuming there’s at least two different but parallel pathfinding nodes on the floor).

Of course it would require a little more work to also ensure that a second or third AI doesn’t block the pathway, so you would have to setup an additional condition so that if the pathway is blocked the AI trying to move along that pathway switches to the unobstructed node.

Anyway, while the work would definitely compile to what they’re already doing it would very much make the gameplay feel a little more frantic and tense as the AI keeps on the move as you attempt to attempt to attack them.

Hopefully those issues are addressed in the full trailer, since what we saw in the teaser was just a snippet. We’ll likely find out exactly how the AI behaves in the full trailer, which is set to release soon. Hopefully it doesn’t get hit with a cease and desist letter by Capcom between that time, though, since it appears the publisher is working on reviving the Dino Crisis franchise.

(Thanks for the news tip Guardian EvaUnit02)