Actually I made two posts on this, so fuck it here's the other one. RE4 is my favorite game of all time and this would turn it into a game not even worth playing.
Imagine if Dr. Salvador, as he initiates his instant kill chainsaw swipe, existed in a world where Leon could move and aim. Just walk backwards, lol. He has a ton of recovery afterwards.
A Ganado is behind him getting ready to throw a sickle, you think if you shoot one more time he'll be stunned. As you're aiming, you move to the left and avoid the throw that goes in a linear arc, get out multiple shots to easily get the stun, and go in for the kick. As opposed to having the intended risk of planting your feet, shooting, not getting the stun, getting hit in the face by the sickle and killed by the chainsaw as you're now not able to move. Or the SYCK play, shooting Salvador, shooting the sickle out of the air, and going back to shooting Salvador, knowing the risk of messing this up and remaining where you are.
This would be everywhere, all over the game. Everything would need to be completely retooled. Salvador would have to run and do massive lunge attacks, recover a lot more quickly, and would likely piss off players if he could still one shot you. Yet if that was gone, they would neuter an iconic enemy. The opening Village sequence would lose a ton of its bite right from the getgo.
RE2 changed the camera angle, and changed a lot of the game around that. You can now see all the way down a hallway, when they would often use camera switches to surprise you. But this occupies a totally different space from RE4, as in 4 you have to go THROUGH everything, not around it. The hallways are still claustrophobic, and the zombies take a ton of bullets to get out of the way. Lickers and Mr. X add the missing pieces to this puzzle--a zombie in the middle of the hallway has a licker above it, you now can't run without the licker going aggro on you, and it's MUCH faster than you are. So you take it slow. But Mr. X's thumping footsteps are coming, which makes you run one direction as he nearly takes up the entire hallway with his frame. These all work in tandem to create scenarios that can be hell to navigate at times, which is part of the fun.
REmake did add a new control scheme but it actually breaks the intended mechanics. You can easily juke zombies all over the place. But even with that, RE1 still works because it's not as tied into specific encounters. You have the general overlay of figuring out where you need to be going, how to criss cross the map as efficiently as you can. I would still say it's not preferred, as Zombies still are meant to pose a good amount of threat, especially when you are in a lower health state and know based on the map what you have to go through with barely any ammo. But RE4 is so intrinsically linked to the capabilities of Leon relative to the enemy abilities that it will never work, full stop. The wii version alone shatters this balance, getting rid of the gun handling entirely, and the way the laser sways which incites you to be closer to be more accurate. Wii Leon is able to snipe with basically any weapon, just dumping ammo into people and making the game a complete breeze. There can be entertainment in that in the way a modded game is still fun, but it dilutes the original purpose of everything pretty hard. When the game is offering a stock for the Red9, a super powerful pistol, it's asking to give up valuable inventory space entirely for the sake of a more stable weapon, it's something that matters.
A remake would be so daunting to even try to tackle. RE2 is a 5 hour game that now maybe takes 8, that uses a lot of back and forth navigation primarily against three enemy types. The remake cut a few on top of that. RE4 is a 16-20 hour game that is almost always pushing forward, against a much higher roster of enemies-enemies that if any get cut would be immediately obvious due to how well the game is paced the whole time. So we have a much longer game, with many, MANY more assets, of which each and every enemy type would need to be dramatically redone to cater towards a new range of movement abilities.
...and even if they did this, we would just get LTTP "THIS is what people think is the best game of all time??" threads, because there's damn near no way in hell they can recapture lightning in a bottle while changing all of that. Seperate Ways is the same mechanical base as RE4 but it kinda blows as the encounters just aren't there. It's the entire lifeblood of why this game is so incredible.
