Platform holder Nintendo has admitted that consumer opinion on open-world games changed during the long development of Metroid Prime 4.
That’s according to an unnamed developer, who spoke to Japanese media outlet Famitsu – as translated by Nintendo Everything – and said that when work started on the project, a lot of people wanted the firm to take some inspiration from the then-recently released and wildly successful 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’,” the unnamed developer is quoted as saying.
“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.”
One issue in Metroid Prime 4’s development was that the game took a very long time to make. The project was initially announced at E3 2017, before being rebooted in 2019 with Prime series creator Retro Studios at the helm.
The problem was that consumer views on open-world projects had changed a great deal from Metroid Prime 4’s inception to the years leading up to its release, and, as the unnamed developer said, it was too late in the day to restart development once more.
“In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realised that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed,” the developer said.
“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. 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. Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
Metroid Prime 4 was finally released on December 4, 2025, to a very divided reception.
