Thursday, March 02, 2006

Resident Evil 4: Enemy item drops

One of the things about the game that's interesting is the way it implements the traditional Resident Evil item crunch, which forces you to conserve your items and ammo instead of going wild.

Enemies in RE4 usually drop items when they die. Typically, they can drop money, ammo or health.

But its not completely random what they drop. My first time through the game, I hardly ever saw an enemy drop an herb. My second time, I was less cautious about keeping my health in the green, and one dropped a green herb. Further, if you have a lot of a certain type of ammo, then it's much less likely that foes will drop it. If you're completely out of a type, then foes will be much more likely to leave that behind. Items found in crates, on the other hand, are always the same.

In other words, the game checks your inventory, and seeks to remedy dire deficiencies. It also won't drop a type of ammo if you don't have a weapon that can utilize it, which is nice of it. But mind, this is most useful when you're fighting a legion of normal foes, since then you'll get a lot of item drops. If you're fighting a boss that takes a lot of punishment, and are unable to generate those item drops, it's a lot less helpful... especially if you're going into that boss with a necessary ammo deficiency.

2 comments:

Rodneylives said...

Argh, I wrote this quickly, so to further elaborate:

In my first playthrough, I saw no enemy drop a health item for the whole game, barring one or two instances I had attributed to special cases. On a later playthrough, enemies droped health items fairly often, and from the very start -- now that I think back, I think it was because I used *more* health items than usual, and didn't have many in inventory.

In particular, that First Aid Spray you start with went unused for a long time in my first run through, but I used it fairly early on the second run. That may have had something to do with it.

Anonymous said...

pI play RE4 on the PS2 and just for fun I wanted to do a run without a handgun. To provide a new challenge, I equipped the Handcannon (upgraded all the way sans exculsive) and the Semi-automatic Rifle (upgraded all the way with exclusive) and began a game. Even though I don't have a handgun, the game still provides ammo drops for the handgun. At one point, my Handcannon was completely empty and the next 3 ammo drops were for the handgun.

I believe the original poster was correct with the exception of the handgun. It appears to me the game almost wants me to play with the handgun... LOL

To counter the handgun ammo drops, I collected handgun ammo until the drops became less frequent. Currently, I have 70 rounds for the handgun and the drops for the handgun have just about stopped.