Look up critical and fan reception to last year’s Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and the common complaint will be that the “Sol Valley” segments were lacking in execution (our own review even says the same!). While many felt they were downright unnecessary, even fans of them admit that something more could have been done with the open-world bits to justify their inclusion in the otherwise fairly traditional Metroid game. What about devs who worked on past Metroid Prime games, though? What are their thoughts on Sol Valley?
In an interview with Kiwi Talkz recently, former Retro Studios technical engineer Jack Matthews (who left Retro after Metroid Prime 3: Corruption) offered his own interpretation of why he felt Sol Valley failed to make a splash with players. According to him, “You’re basically taking a Zelda dungeon game, and then saying ‘now put the Wind Waker sea in this’. Sol Valley is the Wind Waker sea, right? You’re pretty much there, you don’t see more than one other major thing until you get close to it, nothing else is probably is loaded or barely loaded.”
While that does seem like a fitting comparison, Matthews doesn’t discredit Sol Valley just because of that. His idea is that the time it took to create, map out, and code this distinctly different style of gameplay didn’t factor into the rest of Prime 4’s development. “It’s a split focus. And it’s a split focus on pretty major technology and design things,” Matthews explained. “Anything you do for Sol Valley doesn’t really carry over into any other part of the game.”
Matthews brings up how any new idea in game development is a big risk, especially when working on a sequel. How will fans react? Does this idea enhance the gameplay? Will spending time on this result in other areas lacking refinement? “But this is your challenge. How do you how do you clarify that risk?” Matthews posits. “How do you know how long it’s going to take to build anything in that, to find fun in that, to know if it will be fun? And how do you schedule it?”
Kiwi Talkz brings up the idea that these segments were hold-overs from Bandai Namco’s version of Metroid Prime 4 to which Matthews says he doesn’t know, but believes that is uncharacteristic of Retro. “If I am Retro, I’m trying to make as similar of a game as possible, have an understanding of what I’m making, and do what I think was and is fun. And Sol Valley just makes no sense,” he said.
“The only thing that I can think is that someone very much liked motorbikes and thought that there needed to be downtime,” he explained, “not really understanding that in a Metroid Prime game the downtime is the not-shooting, exploration time.” He closes out by saying that he feels Retro filled the smaller biomes with tons of action and believed it could spread out the game with these segments, but it ultimately came down to people not wanting that.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
