100 Things You Never Knew About Resident Evil
52. Work Smarter
Capcom have a tendency to reuse abandoned ideas in future games if it fits. Lots of once abandoned Resident Evil concepts have been revisited in some form over the years and, really, it's hard to be mad about it. If you can make use of the time and effort that already went into something rather than wasting it, why not?
But Resident Evil hasn't just reused stuff from previous design sessions and has in fact taken from pre-existing, finished Capcom games. After all, very few things can be as big as Biohazard so who's going to notice? To that end, as a budget title, it made sense to stock Revelations 2's Raid Mode with animations from the likes of Lost Planet, in particular the emotes.
Elsewhere, most people don't realise that the Mercenaries soundtrack from Resident Evil 4 is largely comprised of tracks from the 2003 GameCube commercial flop P.N.03. The likes of Krauser and Hunk's Merc themes are just random tracks from that game, ripped wholesale and dropped into RE4.
It's not lazy, it's working smarter.