People judging RE4 by today' standards
How can anyone that was alive during RE4's launch go for Bloodborne is beyond me
Bloodborne is amazing, but RE 4 was something from the future. It changed the industry in ways that Bloodborne didn't.
Maybe Demon's Souls would be a better contender, since it was an inovation at the time, but even then ...
Over the shoulder camera wasn't a thing before RE 4. The audio/visual presentation was unnmatched. Cutscene direction was far ahead anything at the time.
I think that this time your love for Bloodborne went too far, Era lol
But see, this is why I think RE4's influence is greatly overstated in the context of this thread. It's much more of a technological innovation than a design one. People previously mentioned in this thread "you can feel RE4's influence to this date when playing Uncharted 4", and while that's technically true, you can't feel RE4's level and enemy design in Uncharted 4, you can't feel the precise limb damage to set up unique melee finishers, you can't feel the importance of positioning due to the limitations of your character's movement.
RE4's camera angle revolutionized gaming. Its specific game design elements? Not so much, unfortunately. Kill.Switch came before and even had a cover system, by the way, which is more what newer TPS would lean into than RE4's superb gameplay. RE4 was just more famous and better, and was around when 3D gaming was early enough that a camera position could be considered revolutionary. Don't you remember people shitting on RE5 for not being able to move and shoot at the same time, while pointing to games with vastly inferior combat to show how it should be done? No one gave a shit about what made RE4~5 gameplay good, unfortunately, they only wanted the most superficial elements to remain.
Miyazaki, on the other hand, changed the way people who were making games long before he decided to join the industry think about level design and combat pace. God of War was around before Miyazaki joined the industry, the newer God of War namedropped Dark Souls in interviews to talk about the combat pace, and Bloodborne as an inspiration in level design. The organic multiplayer introduced in Demon's Souls would find its way to Watch Dogs, of all things. This is the game design itself being influential and impacting the industry, not just realizing that they can copy a camera position and then do their own thing with pretty much anything else.
It's still a fact that RE4 had a bigger impact on the industry, but the reason for that has nothing to do with a "which is the better game" discussion.
To this day I think Demon's Souls is criminally underrated by the SoulseBourne crowd, and probably wasn't even played by half of them. :(
I definitely think the reason why it's underrated is because a lot of people didn't play them. I feel like the series really exploded in popularity with the PC release of Dark Souls 1, so on PC you don't have Demon's, and people who started playing them when the PS4 was already around can now play every single game in the series on the PS4, except for Demon's. Most won't bother to go back to the PS3 for one game, and that's assuming they even have a PS3.
It's a shame Sony didn't remaster it. They're probably saving it for the PS5 to make a bigger impact, but "a bigger impact" will surely come with artistic changes that may not be for the better. I wish everyone could experience it in a close-to-original way. That atmosphere is superb. It's not my favorite in the series or anything, but it's unique enough that I still find myself going back to it frequently, and that to me is more important than just being better.