Nintendo has shared some interesting insight into how it approached Metroid Prime 4 and has discussed why the game isn’t open-world.
It seems the company noticed at least some fan interest in seeing the franchise adopt that approach. However, rather than going full open-world, Nintendo and Retro Studios created a hub of sorts, which has drawn some comparison to the older 3D Zelda games. Although Nintendo “realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed”, the company didn’t want to backtrack on development again (as the project was already rebooted once) and “resolved to move forward with our original vision.”
You can find our translation of Nintendo’s comments below, which come from the latest issue of Famitsu. Note that there was not a specific developer attributed to the quote.
“At the start of the project, perhaps due to the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we saw a lot of comments on the internet saying ‘we want to play an open-world Metroid’. However, Metroid’s core element of ‘increasing the amount of explorable areas by unlocking powers’ is not very compatible with the ‘freedom to go anywhere from the beginning’ of open worlds. Thus we thought to design a limited area that could be freely explored, and have that be a hub that could connect to other areas. Then we thought that if one could move around on the bike in a satisfying way in that area, it could be a segment that mitigates the tension from exploration, and paces the whole game.
In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed. That being said, development had already been reset once before (when we started again from scratch with Retro Studios) so backtracking development again was out of the question, and we resolved to move forward with our original vision. During this time, shooting games and action games went through evolutions, with an increase in game speed in particular, but taking in those changes would have made it difficult to construct the tempo of an adventure game, so we actively chose to not take them into account. Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
On the topic of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, a bunch of cut NPC dialogue was recently found within the game’s files. You can check all of that out here.
Translation provided by SatsumaFS and Simon Griffin on behalf of Nintendo Everything.
Related