Nintendo has stated that the company was unwilling to backtrack on the design of the open-world hub featured in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. This was despite seeing a “Changed” attitude towards open-world games by gamers, owing in part to the fact that the game had already been rebooted once up to this point.
The long awaited follow up to the Metroid Prime series was released in December for the Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, receiving mostly positive reviews. Amid even the more positive reviews, there were some criticisms lodged against characters, particularly one sidekick character, as well as the bland open world with little to do but traverse it on a motorcycle. Now, the development team behind the game sat for an interview with Famitsu (translated by ResetEra and Nintendo Everything), in which the team discussed the struggle to balance Nintendo’s desire to experiment with open-world gameplay with everything that players would expect of a Metroid Prime experience.
While no individual developers are singled out for the quotes, it was stated:
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 towards 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.
This is to say that the hub design seen in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond the original compromise made with Nintendo, the inclusion of an open world, while maintaining the core gameplay in the main areas of the title. The title arrives 18 years after the last of Retro Studio’s trilogy on the Wii, with Metroid Prime 3: Corruption being the last to release before this. Initially, when the game was announced back at E3 2017, Namco Bandai was intended to develop the game; however, in 2019, it was rebooted with Retro Studio due to Nintendo’s feelings that development had fallen short of expectations.
The implication here is that the open-world hub was initially part of the development at Namco Bandai and was held over with Retro being made to do what they could with it. Most likely, the feature, by the time Nintendo figured out it didn’t work with the overall experience, was so deeply integrated to remove without restarting the project a second time.
The interview concluded with the development team stating:
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 to take them into account. Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.
This isn’t the only feature to predate Retro Studio’s involvement, with Samus gaining psychic abilities also being part of the project prior. Nintendo asked Retro to expand upon this idea when they ultimately took the reins on the project.
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