Beyond Was Retro Studios making the best of a bad situation

Now that the dust has settled on Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, it's clear that it wasn't what the most die-hard fans wanted. While still a great game, it failed to capture the epic nostalgia of the GameCube original or its sequels as you teamed up with extremely talkative characters before embarking on a formulaic quest to retrieve colored keys and make it back home.

It was shorter, more predictable, and less experimental than all the games that came before it, regardless of its quality. While I'm excited to see where this new trilogy goes with its story and mechanics, after nearly two decades of waiting, many people were hoping for something more. But after hearing more details about the development of the project, it is fortunate that the game saw the light of day.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was never rebooted by Retro Studios

Nintendo first announced Metroid Prime 4 in June 2017 with nothing more than a logo and a platform. It was still years away, with inside reports confirming Bandai Namco as the developer. The fact that the project was outsourced was a surprise, especially since Retro Studios was so beloved for bringing the original trilogy to life all those years ago. We didn't hear anything about the game for almost two years, until Nintendo announced that it wasn't happy with the quality of the game and would completely reboot the project and bring Retro back into the fold.

At this point, I think a lot of people – myself included – think that everything created by Bandai Namco has been scrapped and that Retro Studios is free to execute on their own vision for Metroid Prime 4. Time flies, and it will be another six years until it is released. But a new interview by Famitsu (translated by Nintendo Everything) sheds a more definitive light on things, and how rebooting the project was never an option.

For one, Nintendo decided long ago that it wanted to explore Samus gaining psychic abilities on a new planet throughout the story, as well as being able to control a charge beam and explore the overworld using some sort of vehicle. In its development timeline, we've also seen games like Breath of the Wild redefine the open-world genre and what Nintendo's properties were capable of through reinvention.

Retro Studios feared that players would expect Metroid Prime to take similar strikes, but after two years of tumultuous production and so much ground to cover, that wasn't an option.

“In the end, the game took longer than expected to finish, and we realized that the impact players had on open-world games had changed,” a member of the development team told Famitsu. “That being said, development had already been reset once before (when we started again from scratch with Retro Studio), so backtrack development was again out of the question, and we decided to move forward with our original vision.

“At this time, shooting games and action games went through development, especially the increase in game speed, but taking those changes would have made it difficult to build the tempo of an adventure game, so we actively chose not to pay attention to them. Therefore, I think this game is very divorced from the change of time.”

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond isn't open world, but it does feature a hub area with collectibles and alternate locations that provide an exploratory illusion. The interview is also accurate, as you'll struggle to capitalize on the satisfying progression of revisiting past locations and engaging in great puzzles and combat encounters if you can go anywhere and do as much as you like. Things slowly unfold, making the game feel archaic in ways that prove both a blessing and a curse.

Retro Studios was fighting an uphill battle with Metroid Prime 4

The player who gets all the missile expansions in Metroid Prime 4: Beyond.

It's interesting to learn from this interview that the development team knew that Metroid Prime 4 was going to be divisively received by fans for sticking to the classic formula and opting to embrace it for being very particular about aspects of modern game design. It notably lacks the triple-A open world trimmings we've come to expect from most blockbusters, but still likes to hold our hands needlessly for fear we'll miss something or forget where to go.

Metroid Prime has always been about the joy of discovery, and many players were left disappointed that it was lacking in the fourth entry. But can Retro include such things without rebooting development? There's really no way of knowing.

Retro Studios wasn't in a position to create Metroid Prime 4: it had imagined it for years, but applied its expertise to the framework laid out before them. You can only do so much in this situation, and I doubt we'll see the true modern interpretation of the series that the creators first brought to life until the next game rolls around. But with it already committed to some mechanics and characters, there's no telling what form it will take. Here's hoping the team is given all the resources and freedom it needs to shine.