Nintendo has said it was unwilling to backtrack on the design of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond’s controversial open world hub despite seeing “changed” attitudes to open-world games, as the project had already been rebooted once already.
The Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 blockbuster launched last month to mostly positive reviews, but also a broad swathe of criticism specifically for its annoying supporting characters and bland open-world desert hub where you ride around rather aimlessly on a motorbike.
Now, in an interview with Famitsu (translated via ResetEra / Nintendo Everything), the Metroid Prime 4: Beyond development team has revealed that it struggled balancing Nintendo’s desire to experiment with open-world gameplay with the Metroid series’ core exploration, and ultimately had to stick to its original plan for the game rather than risk delaying it any further.
“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,'” Nintendo said. (The interview does not label comments from individual developers by name.)
“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,” Nintendo continued. “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. 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.”
In other words, the hub design seen in the finished Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was Nintendo’s original compromise for including some open world elements while sticking to the franchise’s core exploration in its main areas.
“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 added. “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.”
Arriving 18 years after Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the last game in Retro Studios’ beloved Prime trilogy, Prime 4 was officially announced at E3 2017. Initially, Bandai Namco was put in charge of development, but development was rebooted in January 2019 back at Retro Studios after Nintendo decided the game’s development had fallen short of expectations.
Nintendo’s comment that the open-world hub was part of its “original vision” for Prime 4 certainly suggests it was not Retro Studios’ design, though the implication is that Nintendo only realized the flaws with it after the game’s development was begun anew.
“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,” Nintendo concluded. “Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
The idea of Samus gaining psychic abilities also predated Retro Studios’ reboot, and originated as an explanation for why she is now able to control the Charge Beam’s directional shot. After Retro took over the project, Nintendo said it asked the studio to implement further gameplay features that expanded on the idea of Samus gaining a psychic power set.
“Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is an excellent, if relatively uneven, revival that reaches heights worthy of the Metroid name in its best moments,” IGN wrote in our Metroid Prime 4: Beyond review, scoring the game 8/10.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
