Resident Evil Just Shrank Lady Dimitrescu

The upcoming "Winters' Expansion" DLC pack releases October 28, 2022 and adds three major elements to "Resident Evil Village": a new campaign focused on Rose, a third person camera option, and the return of the beloved "The Mercenaries" game mode. "The Mercenaries" has been included in most "Resident Evil" games since it debuted in "Resident Evil 4," but the game mode was left out of "Resident Evil 7," making it about a decade since the score-based minigame was a major part of the series.

As part of The Mercenaries, players are able to take on levels as some of the other characters that aren't playable during the game's story — for example, in "Resident Evil 4," players could unlock HUNK and Albert Wesker. The way "Resident Evil Village" is implementing The Mercenaries is much the same as previous entries, and the characters who are available to play as in the mode are native to "Resident Evil Village." 

Announced in the Gold Edition trailer, Chris Redfield, Heisenberg, and Lady Dimitrescu will all be playable in The Mercenaries with their own unique abilities and playstyles. To make this work for "Resident Evil Village," though, some concessions had to be made — namely, Lady Dimitrescu's towering height.

In an interview with Polygon, game director Kento Kinoshita discussed the upcoming DLC, and was asked about what it would be like to control each of these three new characters. Lady Dimitrescu towers above just about every other enemy in the game's narrative at a staggering 9 foot 6 inches, but to make her playable, the team had to reduce her height to below nine feet. "Lady Dimitrescu's height brought up a lot of challenges during development," Kinoshata said. By reducing her stature to a little below nine feet, he noted that players won't have to worry about hitting the ceiling.

Though some might see this as going too far with Lady Dimitrescu changes, it certainly doesn't make her any less intimidating — in this new playable form one of her abilities is to throw furniture, just like in a particularly memorable moment in the story. This half-foot reduction doesn't carry over to the main game, so if players still want to see the vampire at her full height, the campaign will continue to portray Lady D at her full 9-foot-6-inch glory. 

The only way to make Lady D usable in "The Mercenaries" without breaking the game was to make her shorter. While it's not about to make all of "Resident Evil Village" look completely different like the Winters DLC, fans will have to ask themselves whether they can stomach some shrinkage in order to play as the fearsome vampire villain.