The recently-released Metroid Prime 4: Beyond saw a middling critical reception, but its open-world hub has ended up having an interesting behind-the-scenes story. In a new interview with Famitsu, developers of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond have revealed that Nintendo was not willing to backtrack on its decision to feature the open-world hub, despite the perception of the genre seeing many changes.
Though the title was announced back in 2017, it had likely been in development even before that. However, it garnered significant attention when Nintendo announced a reboot to development in 2019 with Retro Studios now in charge.
However, the developers noted that the success Nintendo saw with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild played a big role in defining the game structure of Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. This was despite the Metroid franchise’s traditional structure, where players would gradually find new ways of exploring, opening the world up further. They pointed out that this structure would be counter-intuitive to having an open-world game like Breath of the Wild. Ultimately, the hub area was a compromise between Nintendo and the team to mix in both styles of level design.
“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’,” said the developers. “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. 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.”
The fact that attitudes towards open-world games had changed since all the way back when Metroid Prime 4: Beyond was first announced was a major sticking point, however, because the title went through a long and arduous development cycle. Since development had already seen at least one reboot, “backtracking development again was out of the question, and we resolved to move forward with our original vision,” said the developers.
“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 not to take them into account. Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is available on the Nintendo Switch and the Switch 2. For more details, check out our review.
