RE Requiem Free Mercenaries Mode May Launch Next Week

Capcom won't say the word "Mercenaries," but they're doing everything short of spelling it out. In a recent interview with Denfaminico Gamer, Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi and producer Masato Kumazawa dropped some heavy hints about the game's upcoming free mini-game update, and the timing they're suggesting puts it just days away.

Kumazawa's quote is about as close to a release window as you can get without actually announcing one: "This mini-game is content that is unlocked after clearing the main story. So, if you're planning to play it, clearing the main story during Golden Week would be just right for you to be able to play it." Golden Week, Japan's biggest holiday stretch, runs from April 29 to May 6. If Kumazawa is telling players to finish the campaign during that window, the math isn't complicated. May 7 looks like the earliest realistic date.

Nakanishi, meanwhile, leaned into the combat angle without naming the mode directly. "It's based on the battles in the main game," he said. "For those who have cleared the main story and are thinking, 'I still haven't had enough fun,' I think you'll be able to enjoy this and go 'Whoa!!', so sharpen your tomahawk and wait." A combat-focused mini-game you unlock after beating the campaign, built around score-chasing and replayability. If that's not Mercenaries, I'll eat my controller.

Why This One Could Be Special

Mercenaries has been part of Resident Evil since RE3: Nemesis, and it's consistently one of the best reasons to keep a Resi disc in the tray after the credits roll. RE4's version was legendary. RE5's co-op Mercenaries ate up hundreds of hours. RE4 Remake's take was solid but felt slightly undercooked. Requiem, though, has combat that's a step above most of its predecessors, especially in Leon's chapters, where the third-person action feels tight and aggressive. If Capcom can build a proper Mercenaries framework around that foundation, this could end up being the best version we've had in years. I wrote last week about a whole chapter being cut from Requiem during development, and the team's philosophy of cutting to improve pacing clearly paid off in the main game. I'm hoping that same discipline shows up here.

The fact that it's free is the other half of the story. Requiem exceeded five million units sold in its first five days and has since passed seven million. Capcom could absolutely have charged for this and plenty of players would have paid. Releasing it as a free update to a game that already costs full price is the right call, and I'm glad to see Capcom making it. A paid story DLC is also in the works and has entered full production, according to Kumazawa on X, though details on that remain thin beyond a promise to go "deeper into the world of Requiem."

One other detail from the interview stood out: roughly 90% of players chose third-person for Leon's chapters, while Grace's chapters split closer to 60/40 in favour of first-person. That kind of data should inform how Mercenaries handles its character roster, assuming multiple playable characters are on the table. If Capcom is smart, they'll lean into what players already gravitate toward for each character rather than forcing a single perspective. Given how well Requiem handled the dual-perspective campaign, I'd expect them to get this right.