Although there’s some debate these days over whether he actually ever said it, Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto is often attributed with the saying: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
If he did indeed say it, and assuming it’s a principle he believes in either way, you’ve got to imagine that even Miyamoto must have been tapping his watch at some point over the course of Metroid Prime 4’s development.
When the game was originally announced way back at E3 2017, not even the fact it was just a teaser trailer with a logo could have led anyone to believe that the finished product would still be at least eight years away.
And yet, thanks to a troubled development thatNintendohas been uncharacteristically open about, Metroid Prime 4 – snappy new Beyond subtitle and all – is finally due for release some time in 2025. Probably.
The main reason for the lengthy wait was Nintendo’s announcement in 2019 that development on the game had essentially been scrapped and started all over again from scratch, with development moved from an unknown team (which was reportedlyBandai Namco) toRetro Studios, the developer that worked on the first three Metroid Prime games.
One of the benefits of the move to Retro is that the studio appears to have solid job retention stats: while at times it’s often a little disingenuous to say a sequel is being worked on by the same studio because the vast majority of the staff have moved on, our analysis shows that many of the production, direction, art, design, audio and engineering staff working on Metroid Prime 4 also worked on the series in the past.
Joining the Retro veterans are numerous other developers with experience in notable games: one example isKyle Hefley, who’s serving as lead character artist on Metroid Prime 4but had previously spent nearly a decade at343 Industriesmodelling many of the armoured super soldiers and alien warriors seen inHalo4, Halo 5 andHalo Infinite.
Other pros joining from other studios include Bat Nandakumar (lead engineer, worked on numerous Call of Duty: Black Ops games) and Jon Marcella (environment designer, spent a decade atSony Santa Monicaworking on theGod of Warseries). A number of developers fromEpicMickey studio Junction Point are also currently at Retro, having moved over when it closed down.
All this – along with the fact that this do-over will have been six years in development by the time the game is released – gives us hope that Metroid Prime 4 will be every bit as engaging and engrossing as previous entries in the series (which still hold up, as 2023’sMetroid Prime Remasteredproved).
While Nintendo is currently remaining tight-lipped about what the fourth game entails, the first gameplay footage shown last year at least reveals that bounty hunter Sylux from Metroid Prime Hunters will be one of the main antagonists, and that the same first-person exploration that made the first three games feel so different from run-of-the-mill FPS games appears to be present and accounted for again this time around.
Given its more concentrated following and the fact that early adopters of new hardware tend to consist of the more dedicated fans, could we even see aBreath of the Wildstyle generation-straddling with versions on both theSwitchand its predecessor? Time will tell.
