Jack Mathews, lead technical engineer for the Prime Trilogy, explains why Sol Valley was ‘just a waste’
Metroid Prime 4 is an incredible game when it’s focused on Samus exploring themed biomes, solving puzzles, and shooting the shit out of alien enemies. It’s a far worse game when she’s stuck on a bike popping wheelies over sand dunes. In our review, Zack Zwiezen called the desert, known as Sol Valley in the game, “the most baffling part of Prime 4,” annoyed that the desolate area seemed disconnected both mechanically and narratively from the much cooler parts of the game. In an interview with games journalist and YouTuber Kiwi Talks (via VGC), Jack Mathews, the lead technical engineer for the original Metroid Prime trilogy, gives his thoughts on why that is.
In the interview, Mathews talked about how the knowledge and toolsets used to make dungeons in the original trilogy would have been easily applied to MP4‘s dungeons—Fury Green, Volt Forge, Ice Belt, and so on—because they’re so similar. The team had tons of experience creating that kind of environment, and was plainly very capable of doing so again.
But Mathews called Sol Valley the game’s “Zelda ocean,” invoking the big open sea area from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. He said it was the sort of thing that had not previously existed in a Metroid game and thus that needed to be built from the ground up, taking up time and developer labor that could have been focused on enhancing the core of the game.
“It’s just a waste,” he said. “It’s a split of resources that makes no sense.”
In addition to Sol Valley taking away focus from other parts of Metroid Prime 4, Mathews also said creating such a novel asset would have presented a big “risk” to the development timeline. Working on familiar elements like the dungeons, developers would be able to reasonably estimate how long it’d take to make those things. Sol Valley, however, is a different story.
“With Sol Valley, it’s like,[…]You need to make this whole system, make it fun,” he said, noting that’d likely be a “challenge” for the developers because it’d all be new to them. “How do you clarify that risk? 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?”
It’s worth nothing that development on Metroid Prime 4 was rebooted, with the game changing hands from a team at Bandai Namco to Retro Studios, which developed the original trilogy. And it seems like, rather than letting the OGs cook, Nintendo forced them to work with what had already been done.
“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,” Mathews said. “And Sol Valley just makes no sense.”