Update on testing at the bottom of post.

Been trying on Hardcore a few times to see if the encounter in the Village is time based before the Lycans run off, So far i've tried a strategy three times with success, will be doing more testing Hopefully the points below should be easy to follow if you want to try this yourself.

Shotgun house

• The first house where you get the shotgun, barricade the door with the shelf first, run around and grab all the items (especially the 2 gunpower's)
• When the Lycan begins to attack the shelf, wait until he almost swings then take a shot at his head, it'll cause him to stagger and jump back, repeat this as long as ammo allows, but only ever fire one shot at a time, be sure to use the shotgun here too to help buy time.
• Once Ethan says "There's no end to them" queues the encounter to intensify with more Lycans and Arrows being shot at Ethan
• Once the bookshelf is broken, head to the back of the house, jump down the hole, and pick up the Scrap Metal as you crawl your way out of the house, sprint up to the second house.

Ladder House (2nd barricade house)

• Depending on how long you were able to hold out at the Shotgun House, Big Lycan should be roaring away shortly after you enter the second house and barricade it. Ethan will also audibly signal his arrival.
• First things first, force close the door and barricade ASAP as a Lycan you ran by is probably right on your tail.
• Go into your inventory and create Handgun Bullets and grab all the items on the main floor as you probably won't be able to get them until later.
• Your priority is to make sure the Lycans do not break the bookshelf or the Window to your left, just rinse and repeat, shooting the Lycans off the windows and making the Lycan hitting the bookcase jump back, in a minute Big Lycan should be at the front of the house swinging his mallet, this damages the lycans around him.
• Important thing to note, the Big Lycan luckily cannot break the shelf.
• Help Big Lycan kill the small Lycan at the door, cap him in the head with the Shotgun.
• Now that the Lycan at the door is dead, just keep the Lycan's at the window off with the knife.
• Rinse and repeat until a Lycan spins you around and initiates the cutscene.

I've so far tested this three times on Hardcore. Every time it has worked, now there may be times where the shelf may break which may just be RNG, since some Lycans may come in on all fours to attack the Door/shelf and you may not see him.

One attempt I timed it once I barricaded the Shotgun House at 0:08:05, with a Lycan grabbing me from behind to initiate the cutscene at 0:11:38 in the Ladder House, I'll be continuing to try to find a good start and end point to determine if it really is a fixed timed encounter, I may also put up a clip of it once I figure out the best way to record and share.

To those that are running Hardcore and have difficulties with the first Village encounter, hopefully this does help you!

Further testing showed me that certain queues in the encounter are time based.

• Entering Shotgun House (Starts the Encounter, Lycan's roar)
• 1 minute in "There's no end to them"
• 1 minute and 14 seconds in (Big Lycan roars)
• 2 minutes annd 17 seconds in (cutscene) Big thing to note to trigger the cutscene, you do want to be moving around, if you just stand still the cutscene will not trigger until you take a step.

^another thing to add onto this. more often than not the Ai can 'bug' out with Lycans body blocking each other so they cant get to hitting the shelf. as long as the one trying to get past the other isn't running, which then helps eventually get through. this was done on standard. it's harder for this to occur on VoS difficulty

I noticed that myself on my tests but brainfarted and forgot to add that as a potential thing to watch out for, thanks H1pp0_ for catching that!

I did one or two more test runs and basically you can stay at the Shotgun House longer, especially if the AI ends up bugging out and not attacking the shelf, but I found it just better to move out to the Ladder House when Big Lycan's audio queue occurs.

I'll look into cleaning up the main post since it looks a bit, messy as we end up learning more.

What I've found is that the whole encounter takes about 4min 20 sec to complete so far. You can also sit on the ladder in the second house to stop taking any damage however it does not activate the checkpoint for the big lycan and might not pass any time of this 4min 20 sec. Will be doing further testing.

So after a few more hours of testing @Zengro 's way of clearing it makes it pretty consistent on getting under 4 mins and like @TrashWolf said running around killing them all or even just dodging and blocking makes the encounter last longer. So still searching for the exact checkpoints to progress

Sitting in the crawlspace underneath the shotgun house works pretty well until the first trigger occurs. I just camp by the grating there and the lycans will just kind of path back and forth for a bit. I usually kill two with pistol headshots while waiting. Lycans upstairs will be attacking the shelf and eventually destroy it; this may be what triggers their AI to realize it can go underneath the house, or it might be due to the event flag (which appears to be purely based on time elapsed.) Either way you can have lycans come through the opening to the outside, or they can come down from upstairs, so I usually beat it once the Ethan makes his first quip.

I then ran to the ladder house, shoving the shelf over the door and looting. I waited a bit until I can see lycans visibly circling around outside, shot the red barrel (which kills some of them, the damage clearly bypasses the walls), then climb up the ladder. Staying on the roof tends to be really dangerous so I hop down and run to the red gates. Ethan whines about them being locked, and at about this time I have some more lycans tailing me, who I kill with the second barrel. The big guy is usually active either shortly before or shortly after I climb the ladder in the house. After that I just run a beat, leading the lycans on a chase, using the shotgun or pistol to stagger ones that are in my way. I'm pretty sure the game just makes a lycan magically appear and grab you to start the cutscene, kind of like Jack appearing out of the shadow realm slug you in RE7's attic.

This is on hardcore. I'm pretty sure that killing at least a couple of lycans is necessary, and they drop useful loot in any case, which I collect while evading them after using the second barrel. I can usually kill 2-3 with each barrel, and I usually pop at least one while camping in the crawlspace before leaving the shotgun house. Assuming camping on ladders turns out to not be viable, I would recommend unlocking the blue door that runs past the chicken coops (it's next to the "radio house") before moving on to trigger the village assault, since running in circles around and through houses was very necessary to stay alive. Lycans on hardcore are very fast and I haven't found any method of negating their grab attacks other than just not letting them get close. Trying to just run past them without staggering them usually gets me grabbed. Grabs hurt and the animations take forever. Don't get grabbed.

@PizzaSHARK Im at school and cant comment on everything but wanted to tell everyone that guarding negates grab animations so when I see the arm raised or both coming to hug me I hold guard until I am hit then let go.

You can actually just straight up sit in the house you get the shotgun in and interrupt the lycan hitting the barricade, eventually they stop hitting the barricade and the game triggers the next scene in around 4 min, works on all difficulties

I camped the roof top with the magnum in my NG+ test run and I sat there for what felt like 10 minutes. The arrow to the knee cutscene won't trigger unless you are on the ground. (inside houses seems to work too, just not the roof)