Metroid Prime 4 fans are fed up with the game's annoying companions

After a nearly decade-long wait, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is officially out on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, ending what has been a rather painful existence for Metroid fans hungry for any kind of content.

Unfortunately, a new kind of pain has taken over. This one, in the ear.

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Metroid Prime 4 is good, but maybe not as good as some of you are hoping for.

That's because fans of the iconic Nintendo franchise absolutely can't stand the voices of friends in the game. So much so that they're actively looking for ways to mute those sounds, and even offer to pay Nintendo for a feature to remove them entirely.

On Metroid's Reddit, although many are praising the game's mechanics, there's also a vocal group who want to shut down the side characters.

“I'm actually more annoyed with Miles than I thought I would be,” wrote one user (thanks to GamesRadar for flagging). “I thought that after you left the area where you met him, he stopped giving tutorials and hints. At first there was a tantrum, but a short one. But after 3 hours, he still reminds me to save my game (after I saved just a few moments ago), and any time I finish a puzzle he must have changed something in the environment.

“You have to drive around that whole desert collecting green crystals, and they punish you every 5 minutes with a miles chime,” wrote another.

Aha!

A commenter shared that a content creator muted the voice acting in the game, and, as it turns out, nothing of value was lost.

That's probably a small Band-Aid fix, but really, enough people, including this user who's willing to pay $10 for the ability to turn Myles off talking, are looking for a simple mute button, which might come in a patch, to file a complaint.

Games have previously added mute buttons in response to fan backlash

A mute button is surprisingly unheard of, which makes the possibility of Metroid Prime 4 coming that much more believable. When Borderlands 4 launched earlier this year, it introduced a button to specifically mute Claptrap's volume, meaning you could turn off the pesky yellow mascot entirely.

Elsewhere, Dynasty Warriors Origins had a patch after its launch that negated the ability of NPCs to make a ton of empty noises. Otherwise, known as a “mute patch”. That's not all, though, the release of Gods of War on PC also includes the feature to mute Atreus and Freya, the two biggest poster children for annoying dudes.

Which is to say, Metroid Prime 4 is really just the latest example of many examples of recent games that have dudes who talk a lot, rehash the same tired lines and cues, and people are clearly tired of it.