After being announced in 2017, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond finally launched on Switch and Switch 2 earlier this month to solid reviews, but also plenty of complaints about the game’s open-world desert hub. Well, it turns out that despite realizing that players were souring on open-world games, development studio Retro was stuck with its design and had to finish it.
In a new interview with Japanese video game magazine Famitsu, the development team behind Prime 4 talked openly about the game’s controversial open-world hub and motorcycle. The answer below comes from ResetEra via machine translation:
“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,‘” explained an unspecified member of Retro Studios. “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.”
However, the development of Metroid Prime 4 took “longer than expected to finish” and had already been reset once in 2019 after Bandai Namco, the game’s original developer, was removed from the project and replaced with Prime creators Retro. And in that time, Retro says fan feelings towards open-world games “changed.” But, apparently, another reset was “out of the question,” and so the team had to move forward with its open-world hub despite knowing that many players wouldn’t be happy about it.
In the same interview, it’s further explained that during the creation of Prime 4, shooters and action games evolved and became faster. The team ignored these changes so it could retain the “tempo of an adventure game.” The end result, Retro says, is a game that is “pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
As for the inclusion of the game’s divisive motorcycle, Viola, Retro told the outlet that it came about because the player moves fairly slowly in Prime 4, and traversing the large open area of the desert was a problem.
“While Samus possesses high-speed abilities like the Boost Ball and Speed Booster, we determined that ‘riding a bike’ was the optimal solution to satisfy both the perspective of ‘moving freely and quickly across large areas’ and the perspective of ‘looking cool,” said Retro. “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.”
It’s certainly nice to hear more about how these decisions were made, but it doesn’t change the fact that the open-world hub in Prime 4 just didn’t work out.