Nintendo explains why Metroid Prime 4 resisted becoming open world
The success of Breath of the Wild created expectations the Metroid team ultimately chose not to follow.
It has been a few weeks since Metroid Prime 4: Beyond finally landed on Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, ending years of anticipation. Now that players are diving deep into the cosmos with Samus Aran, we are finally getting a look behind the curtain at the game’s tumultuous development.
In a recent interview with the Japanese outlet Famitsu (vía Nintendo Everything), Nintendo revealed that the massive success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild created significant pressure to transform Metroid into an open-world experience. Fans vocalized their desire to see Samus dropped into a massive map with total freedom. While the team acknowledged this feedback, they quickly identified a fundamental conflict: “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.”
Structuring the galaxy: A hybrid approach
“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,’” it is mentioned in the interview. “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.”
Although this was implemented, over time the development studio encountered other changes in the community’s tastes, but starting everything from scratch again was “out of the question.”
“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.”
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Ultimately, this adherence to the “original vision” is likely what saved the project from further delays. If they had attempted to re-engineer the game every time a new trend emerged, we might still be waiting for a release date. Instead, we have a polished experience that feels distinctly like Metroid, proving that sometimes, sticking to your roots is the most innovative choice you can make.
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