Future Development

Resident Evil Online launches and runs as Survivor alone. The modes in this part were designed alongside it and are kept as possible future development. None of them is part of the current game, none is scheduled, and none may take anything from Survivor: a future mode opens only if the service can pay for it (Seasons and New Content, The Order of Arrival).

They fit what Resident Evil Online is for. It is meant to be the home of every extra and multiplayer mode of the series, so that the main games can stay wholly campaign (Project Overview, The Purpose). Most of these modes descend from extras the series has already shipped beside its campaigns.

This part also keeps one feature that is not a mode, the Refuge: a private room of the player's own, built from their dioramas, in place of the menus between nights (The Refuge). It is the lowest priority of everything here.

This document gathers everything that would change in the rest of the game if they ever opened. The rules of each mode are in its own document. Nothing here holds in Survivor.

The Modes

Mode	Kind	Survivors	You begin with	Document
Outbreak	Co-op scenario · PvE	1 to 4	One of the eight from J's Bar, already infected, with what they carried that night	Outbreak
Versus	Competitive · PvP	2 to 16	A familiar face and that person's own setup	Versus
Mercenaries	Score attack · PvE	1 to 2	A character and one of their fixed loadouts	Mercenaries
Recollections	Curated frame · Community competition	By frame	By frame	Recollections and Endless
Endless	Survivor or Outbreak · No fixed end	By base mode	By base mode	Recollections and Endless

Survivor and Outbreak would be the survival modes: the infection clock, Elpis, the Turned, and the extraction belong to them. Versus and Mercenaries would be the trial modes: compact, contained, and scored, with rules of their own. Recollections and Endless are frames over the survival modes and keep their base mode's rules, except where the frame says otherwise.

The Inheritance

Most of what ΜΝΗΜΗ would run, she inherited from the exercises that came before her. She keeps the rules that held, so that anyone who survived the old exercises would recognize them. Where an old exercise failed, she rewrites it.

Mode	Inherited from	What she kept	What she rewrote
Survivor	Nothing	—	Survivor is her own.
Outbreak	The records of the eight from J's Bar	The eight, their skills, their scenarios, the virus already in every body, the dead who were once teammates	The single virus, the number that counted the infection, scenarios that played the same way every time
Mercenaries	The score trials named for Umbrella's mercenaries	The visible clock, combos, time bonuses, fixed loadouts, ranks	The few stages that never changed
Versus	Contests of armed people fighting with the dead between them	Combo scoring, rising as one of the dead, a sweeper handed to a player, chains that send the dead to a rival	The gunfights that happened to have zombies in them, and the small bare arenas
Recollections	The fixed trials: one survivor, one route, the same gear; and the extra trials of the eight's records	The frame everyone enters the same way	The route that could be learned by heart
Endless	Nothing	—	Endless is her own.

In the Night

Mode	What she would be trying to remember	What it would tell Pithos's buyers	She would be...
Outbreak	How an outbreak unfolds when no one knows which virus it is	How fast an unidentified outbreak is read	The architect of the outbreak and the keeper of the escape
Versus	How the people who fight these viruses measure against each other	How their own soldiers will fare against someone else's	A disturbance that never lets the match settle
Mercenaries	How long a body holds against the dead before it breaks	How long a defended position lasts	A judge who raises the stakes whenever the score gets comfortable
Recollections	—	—	The curator of cruelty
Endless	—	—	An escalator without a ceiling

Who the sleeper would be. Only Survivor wakes a sleeper as nobody. In Outbreak, ΜΝΗΜΗ would fill the life she holds shut with the record of one of the eight, and the sleeper would wake believing they are Kevin Ryman or Cindy Lennox, knowing what that person knew of their night. In Versus and Mercenaries she would do the same with a familiar face. The Echoes of every mode would be woken the same way.

Setups and Requisition

In Outbreak, Versus, and Mercenaries, a survivor would carry a setup into the session. Survivor has none.

Requisition is the budget a setup is built from, counted in points. Every item has a cost, and the same costs hold in every mode that uses them.

Item	Cost
Handgun	15
Shotgun	30
Submachine gun	35
Rifle	40
Magnum	45
Grenade launcher	55
Spare magazine or box of shells	5
Hand grenade	15
First aid spray	15
Anti-virus pill	20
Green herb	5
Body armor	25
Melee weapon	5 to 10
Tool (lockpick, multitool, flashlight)	5

• Outbreak. Each of the eight brings what they carried that night, free. A survivor adds to it from a budget of 40, within that character's pockets.
• Versus. Every character carries their own setup, fixed, built to exactly 100, so no character carries more than another, only something different (Versus).
• Mercenaries. Loadouts are fixed. Each is built to exactly 100, so no loadout is richer than another, only different.

Setups grow with level, never with power. In Outbreak, each level and each weapon's mastery widen what a survivor may choose: new weapons, attachments, tools. The budget never grows. A veteran has more ways to spend it, not more to spend. In Versus, a character's setup never changes; playing unlocks characters. In Mercenaries, ranks unlock new characters and new loadouts.

In the Night, a setup is what ΜΝΗΜΗ lets a survivor carry in, and Requisition is the measure she keeps of it.

Which Rules Would Hold Where

No rule of the core documents would hold in a future mode unless this table says so.

Rule	Survivor	Outbreak	Versus	Mercenaries
Who is played	An original survivor, the only mode that has one	One of the eight	A familiar face	A familiar face
What is carried in	Nothing	What that one of the eight carried, and a setup	That character's own setup, fixed	A fixed loadout
ΜΝΗΜΗ's Laws	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Her voice through the city's devices	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
The earpiece	Yes	Yes: a CT-98 in a pocket, the one thing she adds to what each of the eight carried	No	No
A road, through the earpiece	Once infected	From the first minute	No	No
Her bodies	Yes	No	No	No
Visions	Yes	Yes	No	No
The Pulse and the answer to stillness	Yes	Yes	Her own (Versus)	Her own (Mercenaries)
The infection and its clock	Caught or chosen	From the first minute, unnamed	No: the dead wound, never infect	No: the dead wound, never infect
The strain map	Yes	No: one virus	No	No
Elpis and the road	Scarce	One dose for every survivor	No	No
Petitions and pure strains	Yes	No	No	No
The Turn	Four shapes; every one but the Mass plays on, and no Turned can win	The Mass, ridden for a few minutes	The fallen rise as the dead, in one format (Versus)	No
The extraction	Ways out, seats, the signal, the Climb	The scenario's escape	No	No
The dead and the sound tiers	Yes	Yes	A thin population	The horde
Scarcity, wear, and finding things	Yes	Yes	No	No
Hunger and thirst	Yes	No	No	No
Objectives, restrictions, events	Yes	Yes	Disturbances only	No
Puzzles and vaults	Yes	Yes	No	No
Safe rooms	Yes	No	No	No
Companions, the Stranded, ties, story nights	Yes	No	No	No
Survivors harming one another	Freely	A stray shot can wound a partner; the eight win or lose together	The point of the mode	No
Open voice	Yes	No: only the eight's calls	Yes	Yes
A clock on the screen	No	No	No	Yes
Offline, among Echoes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

What Each Would Change in the Core Systems

Scale and maps

The trial modes and Outbreak would be played on compact maps: single pieces of the open worlds, cut out and sealed. A compact map is not a map of its own. It is a bound of a world that already exists, and building it builds no streets or rooms, only its seals (The Worlds, One World, Every Mode). Their character is fast, aggressive, and relentless, and there is nowhere to disappear to. Outbreak would burn at Slow or Hard Burn, by difficulty; the others have no infection pace. An Outbreak ends when its survivors finish the escape ΜΝΗΜΗ built for them, or when no one is left to finish it.

The first compact maps are single pieces of Raccoon City and the land around it, as they were in September 1998, cut out and sealed; the Ruins and the Valley would give bounds of their own the same way. The scenarios of Outbreak are cut the same way, one bound for each (The Worlds, Bounds on Each World). Two of them lie past Survivor's barricades, in the world's outskirts: the Military Base, and the Arklay hills of Flashback. They are built when the first mode that plays in them arrives, as part of the same world.

The Hospital. Raccoon General Hospital, alone. A vertical labyrinth of white corridors and dead machines, an operating theater, a laboratory two floors down that is on no floor plan, and a parking structure that is the only way down to the street.

The Laboratory. NEST. Experimental chambers, storage vaults, security systems that still obey orders no one remembers giving, sectors sealed from the inside.

The Military Base. The Army's staging base behind the barricades, in the last days of the quarantine. Hangars, depots, watchtowers, bunkers. Wide lanes, long sightlines, and armories that are never quite empty: the fastest map in the rotation.

The Metro. The Kite Bros Railway lines beneath the city. Stations, tunnels, platforms, maintenance rooms. Darkness is the default. Sound carries farther than anyone wants.

Map	Day	Night	Rain	Blackout	Quarantine	Infestation
The Hospital	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓
The Laboratory	—	—	—	✓	✓	✓
The Military Base	✓	✓	✓	✓	—	✓
The Metro	—	—	—	✓	✓	✓

The Military Base is the quarantine. The Laboratory and the Metro never see the sky.

The infection in Outbreak

The two survival modes would share the body: the stages, the Threshold, the paces of the clock, going down, and Resonance. A player who has learned how the virus feels in one would have learned it in the other. What the virus means is different.

	Survivor	Outbreak
How it begins	Everyone clean. It is caught in the world, at a different minute for each survivor, or chosen from a vial.	Already in every body. Every clock starts together.
What is known	ΜΝΗΜΗ tells each survivor of their strain privately, by name once their player has found it, and the Mark draws its color for everyone to read	Never named. Every Mark is black. The dead's behavior, or George Hamilton, gives it away.
How many viruses	Six, mapped by region; in the Valley, the Plaga	One, the map's
The cure	Scarce, fought over, stolen, and given away; in the Valley, the machine	One dose for every survivor, each still earned
What else the virus offers	Petitions and pure strains	Nothing
The Turn	A form shaped by how the survivor held out; every form but the Mass plays on, as a monster that can no longer win	The Mass, ridden for a few minutes, with no mind
What it makes of people	Four kinds, the clean, the marked, the cured, and the Turned, each wanting something from the others	One kind: everyone marked, against the same enemy

Outbreak is the virus as the eight met it: already inside, unnamed, and the same for everyone. In Outbreak the map's virus is already in every survivor's blood when the scenario begins, as it was in everyone left in Raccoon City by the end of that September, and the Mark is there from the first minute. Since no single wound carried it in, it rises where the city's air and water did, at the lips and the throat. ΜΝΗΜΗ never names the virus, and the Mark draws no color for what she has not named: every Mark in an Outbreak is black from the first line to the last. There is no Choosing: the map's virus was there first. Antivirals are found in Outbreak as in Survivor.

Pace	Where	Seed to Threshold, for a body never wounded	Feeling
Slow Burn	Outbreak at Easy and Normal	About forty minutes	A long, creeping dread
Hard Burn	Outbreak at Hard, Very Hard, and Nightmare	About thirty minutes	Little room to wander
Fast Burn	Recollections that call for it	About fifteen minutes	The virus is almost a countdown

In Outbreak every clock starts together. The latent gifts and curses of the strains would hold in Outbreak, unnamed. Petitions, pure strains, and the Embrace stay Survivor's alone. In Outbreak, the virus belongs to the whole map, and no one is told its name. Versus and Mercenaries have no infection: their dead wound, but never infect.

Elpis, the Turn, and the extraction in Outbreak

• Elpis. Outbreak's Reserve would be plentiful: one dose for every survivor, each still to be earned.
• The Turn. The Turn's three beats, and the Lost, are the same in both survival modes. In Outbreak, every survivor who turns rises as the Mass of the map's virus (Outbreak).
• The extraction. In Outbreak, the extraction is whatever the scenario's escape provides. The signal rises when the scenario's escape chain is complete, and not before, and the scenario's escape decides what can reach it as it leaves.

ΜΝΗΜΗ's voice

She speaks only through devices in Outbreak too, and only as a person (ΜΝΗΜΗ as Director, How She Speaks). Each of the eight wakes with a CT-98 in a pocket beside whatever their records gave them, its earbud already in, and she speaks to them through it from the first minute, and through the city's devices to all of them. Nothing she says comes into their heads. The eight cannot ask her anything: they have only their calls (Outbreak, Partners and Calls).

The dead, survival, objectives, and the living

• The dead. The dead hunt by the rules of The Dead and the Engineered in every mode that has them. Threat levels, containment, and B.O.W. events belong to the survival modes; Versus and Mercenaries place their dead as Versus and Mercenaries say.
• Survival. In Outbreak, survivors begin with very little. Versus and Mercenaries are the exception to scarcity: there, what a survivor carries is a setup or a loadout, and nothing is found. Health, stamina, and fighting work in every mode as they do in Survivor.
• Objectives. Objectives, restrictions, puzzles, and vaults belong to the survival modes; Outbreak rests on the same purpose as Survivor, survive until extraction. Versus has only ΜΝΗΜΗ's disturbances, and Mercenaries none (Versus).
• The living. In Outbreak, the eight are a team who win or lose together, and a stray shot can wound a partner. In Versus, the fight between players is the point of the mode. Voice is part of the sound system in every mode but Outbreak, where the eight have only their calls (Outbreak).

Endless in Survivor

• Endless has no Late Signal: ΜΝΗΜΗ does not raise the extraction on her own judgment, and the Beacon ends the night (Recollections and Endless).
• Endless has no last morning. Its Raccoon City never reaches the dawn, and the Beacon ends it as always.
• Endless has no island's end. Saddler's death begins no count there, but every Plaga still dies with him, and the Beacon ends the night as always.

Who is played, and progression

Mode	Who you play
Outbreak	One of the eight from J's Bar
Versus	A familiar face from the Archive
Mercenaries	A familiar face, with the loadouts they are known for

Familiar faces and the eight differ in appearance, voice, animation, and personality, and carry small, balanced traits. No character is mandatory, and no character is ever sold: familiar faces are open to everyone, or opened by play, as Mercenaries ranks open them. What can be bought is how they look. In Survivor, familiar faces are never worn by players: they are companions, and ΜΝΗΜΗ plays them. In the Night, every mode but Survivor is an old exercise, and keeps the people it was built around.

Setup progression would apply in Outbreak: level and mastery widen what a setup can hold, and the budget stays fixed. In Versus, every character's setup is fixed, and playing Versus unlocks characters. In Mercenaries, ranks unlock characters and loadouts instead.

Echoes

• The first watch. Every mode would begin online. ΜΝΗΜΗ would keep the count of what she has watched separately for every piece of a mode an Echo has to know: each of the eight in Outbreak, each stage in Mercenaries. Your own Echo would be built after fifty sessions of a mode.
• Queue fill. The empty places of an Outbreak would always be filled, because the eight were always filled by someone.

Mode	Offline
Outbreak	Your partners are Echoes of the eight.
Versus	Echo opponents and teammates. No match is ranked.
Mercenaries	Runs are recorded on a board of your own.
Recollections	Any frame can be played. Only a connected run counts in the competition.
Endless	The Beacon rises once no living survivor or Echo still carries the virus, or, in the Valley, a Plaga.

The After-Action Report

Each mode would write its own report: Mercenaries closes with a score and a rank from C to SSS, Versus with a match record, and Outbreak with the ending the survivors found.

Cosmetics, the Dossier, and the economy

Kind	What it is	Where it shows	Price
Faces	Alternate looks for a familiar face, drawn from that person's own records: Leon Kennedy as he was in Spain in 2004, Albert Wesker as the S.T.A.R.S. captain of 1998	Every mode in which that person can be played: Versus, Mercenaries, and, for the eight, Outbreak	500 Ribbons or $4.99

• The eight of Outbreak and the familiar faces of Versus and Mercenaries could be dressed.
• Gear looks would show in the setup modes when the setup carries that gear. Forms would show on a player's own Turned in Outbreak.
• A Portrait could show a familiar face in any look the player owns, or one of the eight.
• Ribbons would pay the same rate in every mode, so no mode is the "farming" mode. A Release Weekend would double Ribbons in the modes its release belongs to: a new look for Leon Kennedy would double every mode in which Leon can be played, and a new Form the modes in which that Form can be worn.
• Events could hold variants of any mode and Recollection frames, and Leads could ask for things such as escape Below Freezing Point on Hard. If the service ever ended, its last update would open every Recollection frame it ever ran.

The roadmap that was

Before Resident Evil Online narrowed to Survivor, the order of arrival was: at launch, Survivor in Raccoon City, Outbreak with four scenarios (Outbreak, The Hive, Hellfire, Below Freezing Point), Mercenaries on the Hospital, the Laboratory, and the Metro, and Recollections; in the first year, Versus and the Military Base, Endless, and three more Outbreak scenarios; in the second year, the Ruins and the last three Outbreak scenarios; and after the Opening, the Valley. Mercenaries was to reuse everything Survivor and Outbreak built.

An Outbreak, blueprinted

Layer	Setting
Mode	Outbreak, four survivors, Normal
Scenario	The Hive, Raccoon General Hospital
Condition	Night, Blackout
Infection Pace	Slow Burn
Virus	The T-Virus, unnamed to the survivors
Threats	Zombies and Lickers, leeches in the walls, a Tyrant held below
Resources	Lean
Elpis Reserve	Plentiful: four doses, each still to be earned
Escape	The rooftop helicopter, room for all four
Opening Objective	Restore the power
Restriction	Elevators unavailable. Reason: no power.