Instinction Devs Talk About “Dino Crisis Itch”, Legal Action From Capcom, Next-Gen Technologies and More

Hashbane Interactive will not shy away from calling its new Instinction game a spiritual successor to the long-dormant Dino Crisis franchise.

New Zealand-based Hashbane Interactive has and will not shy away from calling Instinction a spiritual successor to Dino Crisis even if it means a lawsuit from Capcom which owns the rights to the long-dormant franchise.

Speaking with SegmentNext in a recent interview, studio co-founder Jade Saunders was pretty candid in exclaiming that “Capcom is more than welcome to try to pursue legal action” and which would actually “be great publicity for us if they did and a waste of their time.”

Instinction pays homage to the Dino Crisis franchise while being distinct enough to avoid copyright infringement, noted Saunders before adding that “Capcom failed their community, nearly two decades is a long time to wait and an insult to Dino Crisis lovers.” That is how Hashbane Interactive ended up deciding to make its own Dino Crisis-like game in order “to satisfy the itch.”

That being said, lead developer Richard Gold hopes that Capcom will instead decide to team up with Hashbane Interactive for the sake of the community.

“Dino Crisis is and always will retain its own identity, we like what it was and have no intention to distract from that,” said Gold. Instinction will retain its own identity as well but also feature modding support to resemble content from earlier Dino Crisis games. The suggestion here being that modders will have the tools to shape the game into a modern-day Dino Crisis release if they want.

Instinction will be single-player with players able to switch between both first and third-person perspectives on the fly, one stark difference from the fixed cameras of the early Dino Crisis games. There will also be a four-player cooperative mode which the developer confirmed supports cross-play on both consoles and PC.

Hashbane Interactive further noted that Instinction will be gunning for a next-generation visual fidelity by incorporating cumbersome technologies like ray tracing and Nvidia-exclusive deep learning super sampling (DLSS) for a “cinematic and realistic” experience. The developer also intends to patch the game to support AMD FidelityFX when the super sampling technique rolls out.

When asked about frame-rates and resolutions, Gold confirmed that the current build of Instinction “manages” stable 120 frames per second but with the use of dynamic resolutions.

“DLSS allows for some smart trickery to maintain high fps at a high resolution,” he said. “Playing a stable game at 8K for instance has to be supersampled from 4K and would need the correct hardware on a PC, consoles aren’t there yet.”

Instinction will be receiving a proper reveal in the coming summers with Hashbane Interactive providing development updates and a lot more information about gameplay mechanics and biomes.

“We currently have a fully operational game, we’re just building out the rest of the experience, the videos and content on social media is mostly older content that we are systematically releasing bit-by-bit until the gameplay trailer so as to obtain some valuable community feedback that we implement back into the game,” stated Saunders.

Instinction remains in active development for both previous- and current-generation PlayStation and Xbox consoles alongside PC. Hashbane Interactive will consider porting the game to Nintendo Switch based on the success of the initial launch which takes place in the second half of 2022. A Google Stadia release however has been scrapped.

Saqib is a managing editor at segmentnext.com who has halted regime changes, curbed demonic invasions, and averted at least one cosmic omnicide from the confines of his gaming chair. When not whipping his writers into ...