Something to look forward to: This week, a modding group released the 1.0 version of its project that replaces the textures in Capcom's Resident Evil 4 with higher resolution versions and adds other visual tweaks. It is the culmination of eight years of work and has been praised for its faithfulness to the original art.

Since 2014, two modders have been working to retexture the entirety of Capcom's influential 2005 third-person survival horror shooter, Resident Evil 4. While playable versions of the HD texture mod have been released before, Cris and Albert have just released the first fully complete version.

Capcom originally designed Resident Evil 4 for old CRT televisions in standard definition. While Capcom's re-releases for PC and modern consoles can render the game in HD and 4K, the company has done relatively little to upgrade the original low-resolution textures.

They found some of the original real-world sources for many other Resident Evil 4 textures and re-implemented them in high resolution, which was not easy. Some required traveling across Spain and Wales to acquire the asset. Those they couldn't find had to be redrawn.

In the end, Cris and Albert's mod replaces every texture with assets 8-16 times their original resolution, including those for the DLC, like The Mercenaries, Assignment Ada, and Separate Ways. They also made subtle improvements to the lighting and some 3D models to restore missing lighting effects from the original GameCube version.

The mod is compatible with the Steam version of Resident Evil 4 (versions 1.0.6 and 1.1), though unfortunately not Capcom's recent VR version. The download page has instructions for both manual and automatic installation of the 38GB mod.