Can you imagine a Metroid with an open world design? There were corresponding ideas for Metroid Prime 3 from Retro Studios.
Brian Walker, who was Retro’s director of development and product at the time, talked about these plans in an interview Kiwi Talks.
Ambitious plans for Samos
According to Walker, director Mark Pacini had these ambitious plans for a third Metroid Prime, in which Samus would explore a line-less gaming environment on his ship. He says, some ideas were also implemented as prototypes, but in the end the open world ideas were very ambitious.
Walker reveals, “Mark had an interesting twist in the vision and made some formulas for Metroid Prime 3 versus Metroid Prime 2.” “We wanted to use the ship as a pretty much playable element, and we had that to a point in Prime 3, but Mark had more ambitious plans.”
“He also suggested an open world that was a lot less linear which the team liked. We weren’t able to prototype many of these ideas because they were too big. We have some prototypes of ships but the open world was a lot bigger.”
Wii devices that have problems
Only the heavily scripted ship sequence ended up in the final game. Perhaps one reason for this was the weakness of the Wii hardware compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3.
“We knew what the Xbox 360 was going to be, and we knew what the PS3 would be,” Walker says. “And the initial specifications that we have [für die Wii] It wasn’t competitive in terms of hardware or memory…there were all these downsides. “
“We were a little anxious, to be honest. Then they showed the Wiimote and the whole team was like, ‘Ah! Okay. “
Despite everything, he’s proud of Part Three: “Maybe we missed our goals with Prime 3 because we weren’t able to expand the formula a bit. We’re still very proud of Prime 3, it turns out to be a great game, but I’d be very interested to see how Fan base interaction with the expanded ship and non-linear experience.”
Is this an idea that could be picked up for the upcoming Metroid Prime 4? We basically still don’t know anything about the title, whose development was restarted at the beginning of 2019. In the meantime, Retro Studios has taken the helm.
Meanwhile, rumors about a modified version of Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Switch continue to circulate.
This Friday, October 8, 2021, the new Metroid Dread for the Nintendo Switch will launch again.
