Remember how "Resident Evil 4" came out and fans went nuts because, in addition to being awesome, it tweaked a number of established genre conventions? Then "Resident Evil 5" came along and refined the great work done on the previous game, offering a graphically superior and better-tuned but overall similar experience. You could be forgiven for assuming that the inevitable "Resident Evil 6" would continue in that direction, but Capcom's got bigger plans than that for the future of the franchise.

Capcom producer Masachika Kawata, a key player for the franchise, recently spoke about what's ahead in an interview with Spanish-language website MarcaPlayer (via CVG). His words have been translated from Spanish, and were likely translated to that language from Japanese to begin with, but the meaning is clear enough.

"The series will see a complete renovation with the next entry on every level," he said. "But we can’t forget about all the previous entries that have led to the creation of many possibilities for the franchise. I can’t say if we’re going to make it ('Resident Evil 6') survival horror or a shooter, but I can say that it’ll be totally different."

"Resident Evil 4" was noteworthy for introducing a host of new ideas to the third-person shooter and survival horror genres. That game's innovation of an over-the-shoulder camera is just as much a game-changer for popular genre action games today as regenerating health was for first-person shooters.

There's no way to know yet what the Next Big Thing will be, but the "RE" series has had proven success in that arena in the past. "RE6," or whatever the title ends up being, may not influence the face of gaming the way the fourth numbered entry in the series did, but at least we know now that it also won't simply rehash the successes of its two predecessors.