A few days ago, a rather extensive interview with Nintendo regarding Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’s development was posted by Famitsu Magazine. While details of the game’s timeline placement within the series made the biggest splash, there’s another nugget of insight buried within the sprawling text. If you were curious why 4: Beyond contained an open-world hub that felt years out of date with design trends, it’s specifically because the game’s development cycle took ages and went through an entire reboot before releasing.
As spotted by IGN, Nintendo said in the interview, “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.’”
With this in mind, the team started to design limited areas that could be freely explored with a hub connecting them all, which inevitably led to the creation of Samus’ motorcycle, Vi-O-La. Through the bike, it was kind of a “have your cake and eat it, too” situation where Nintendo was placated by having an open-world while Retro Studios was able to focus on more traditional Metroid elements in the closed off sections. Due to the length of development, though, it seems this compromise came too late.
“In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed,” Nintendo states. “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.” If you’ll recall, Metroid Prime 4 was initially announced at E3 2017 with Bandai Namco in the lead role before development was rebooted and handed over to Retro in 2019.
Nintendo wasn’t unaware of the changing tide of game trends, however. “During this time, shooting games and action games went through evolutions, with an increase in game speed in particular,” Nintendo notes, “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.” That’s certainly a bold move, which might be why 4: Beyond has wound up being rather divisive for fans.
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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.
