Tsuyoshi Tanaka introduces the Resident Evil Outbreak Demo at ECTS 2003

During ECTS 2003, Capcom hosted a Resident Evil Outbreak presentation at the Capcom Eurosoft building in the centre of London.
Hunk and Tyrant101 were invited and got to play Outbreak together with Mr Tanaka (Outbreak's producer) and a couple of other journalists.
Sadly it wasn't allowed to take pictures from any of the monitors.

After the gaming session, Mr Tanaka answered a couple of questions.
Due to the lack of time, the following file contains only the transcription from the QA session with Mr Tanaka.

For more coverage of the ECTS 2003 event, please visit the french version.

The opening chapter takes place in J's Bar. It's where everyone starts in that scenario. You guys all get acquainted with the controls and work together as a team. There's and ending scenario which at that time whether you can beat the bomb or not, the ending will be very different of course. And there are 3 mid scenarios that take place in between.

All scenarios are in fact designed by different people... They all have different writers on them so... If any of you have seen 4 rooms? They all have different directors. That is kind of what we are doing with this game. So each scenario has a different feel to it. Some have a little more item gathering. Some put more emphasis on killing monsters, etc. They are all very different. I can give you one concrete example: one of the scenarios takes place in the laboratory (the research facility) that was seen in Resident Evil 2. And you have to go through all these different rooms and items in order to proceed through this scenario.

Another big feature of this game is that originally, they were going to make it online only, but now it has a standalone feature. You can play it single player or you can play it online.
When you play it single player, it will be yourself and two other AI controlled characters. With those characters, you can give them commands. Sometimes they can even get items for you. Sometimes they will come and help you when ou are in a scene like trapped against a boss, they'll help you fight it.

OK, that was the good news! Now the bad news.

In Japan, the release date is currently set for late November or December. The US, North American release date is set for late March. The European release date we have not decided on, but there is a problem.

The network infrastructure of a company that we are using and I can't tell you that name as it is protected by contract. That company hasn't got its infrastructure set up for Europe. So what you are looking at is that for Europe it may not have an online mode. That been said, they are working night and day (R&D) with this company as well. They are exploiting every kind of net they can in order to get this online. This is how they want the game to be played of course.

This is their vision when they made the game (working together as a team, helping each other out) so they really are focusing on trying to get it out.

In all honesty, and I am not going to bullshit you here, that is a possibility it will not come out with online.