Early Version of Resident Evil 7’s Not a Hero Had Chris Save His Whole Team
- Resident Evil 7's free "Not a Hero" expansion has a grim ending.
- An early version of the expansion, from late March 2017, plays out very differently.
- This early version comes from a 33-minute video that the YouTube channel Thekempy posted on October 24.
Resident Evil 7’s free “Not a Hero” expansion has a grim ending. Chris Redfield goes after Lucas Baker, fails to save any of the three soldiers Lucas has captured, and finally kills Lucas after he turns into a monster.
An early version of the expansion, from late March 2017, plays out very differently. In it, Chris saves all three soldiers, fights a different monster at the end and catches Lucas alive.
This early version comes from a 33-minute video that the YouTube channel Thekempy posted on October 24. He says the game files were recovered from the hard drive of a PlayStation 4 development kit. Some of the data had been overwritten long ago, so parts of it are broken. The footage is unofficial, and as of October 26 we could not find any statement from Capcom about it.
Why Capcom held the expansion back
Capcom first planned to release “Not a Hero” in spring 2017. Thekempy says Capcom’s own Division 1 team made the main game, while an outside studio, HexaDrive, was given the expansion.
On April 25, 2017, Capcom announced a delay in a video message. Director Koshi Nakanishi said the team “concluded that this DLC was not good enough to meet those high expectations,” GameSpot reported. The finished version came out on December 12, 2017, in North America and Europe, along with the paid End of Zoe chapter and the Gold Edition, according to Gematsu.
Thekempy dates the recovered build to late March 2017. That is roughly a month before Capcom announced the delay.
What changed between 2017 and the final game
We watched the full video and compared each change with the version Capcom released. Each time in the last column links to that moment in Thekempy’s video.
| Part of the game | Early 2017 version | Final version | Watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| First room | Nothing happens. Chris meets Lucas later. | Chris finds the first soldier, and Lucas tricks him into wearing a bomb bracelet. | 3:48 |
| Main area | Graffiti reads “Lucas’ Adventure World.” Three doors each hide a captured soldier. | The graffiti is gone, and Lucas’s screens and the door names are different. | 4:44 |
| Upgrades | Found in locked boxes. The first box is guarded by tripwire bombs. | Thekempy calls the final game’s upgrades far more gruesome. | 6:45 |
| The three soldiers | Chris saves all three. | All three die in Lucas’s traps. | 22:47 |
| Bomb countdown | There is none, so there is no search for liquid nitrogen. | Chris freezes the bracelet with liquid nitrogen. | 19:13 |
| Final boss | Alan, a mutated agent of the Connections | Lucas, after he mutates | 27:02 |
| Lucas | Questioned and caught alive | Killed by Chris | 28:08 |
Chris saves his team
The biggest difference is what happens to the soldiers. In the final game, every rescue fails. In the early version, Lucas welcomes Chris to what he calls his “Adventure World.” He hides the soldiers behind three doors and turns their rescue into a game. Chris brings each of them out alive.
The soldiers also have more to say. One admits that he and the others used to work for the old Umbrella and calls them “the bad guys.” Chris replies, “Not anymore.” Later, a radio call confirms that all three made it back to the surface.
Thekempy also mentions footage from an even older build, where the area was called “Lucas Land.” It had no monitors and a different oxygen display. He says he knows little else about that version.
A different monster, and Lucas lives
Near the end, the early version has lab notes about Lucas’s experiments on Alan. In the main game’s story, Alan Droney is the Connections agent who traveled with Mia and Eveline on the ship. Thekempy points out that the notes still exist as objects in the final game, but players can’t read them.
Alan turns out to be the final boss. Thekempy says the fight works much like the final game’s boss fight. Afterward, Chris finds Lucas and demands to know who he works for. Lucas says he can’t help, and the mission ends with Lucas still alive.
In the released game, Chris shoots Lucas, Lucas mutates into the final boss, and Chris kills him, as the Resident Evil Wiki describes. Thekempy thinks the long black screen after Lucas transforms is a sign the boss was changed from Alan to Lucas late in development. He says he doesn’t know why the ending changed, but guesses Lucas may have been seen as a loose end.
Other small changes
A lot of the dialogue is different, including radio chats in which Chris asks whether the “new Umbrella” can be trusted. The handgun also kicks back much harder than in the final game, Thekempy notes.
The clearest sign of the original plan is in Chris’s mission briefing. In the early version, the note on Lucas ends with “Must be brought back alive for questioning.” In the game Capcom released, that line is gone.
