Metroid Prime 3 developer reveals scrapped open world plans

[YolkFolk]

Metroid Prime 3 developer reveals scrapped open world plans

www.eurogamer.net

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Early plans for Metroid Prime 3 featured a more open world and less-linear story, a former staff member at Retro Studios has revealed.

Bryan Walker, senior producer on Metroid Prime 2 and 3, said one concept would have seen Samus traverse environments in her ship in a "much more ambitious" way than we saw in the final game.

Speaking on Kiwi Talkz, as transcribed by VGC, Walker suggested this idea was eventually dropped after the final Wii technical specs were detailed.

We knew what the Xbox 360 was going to have, [we] knew what the PS3 was going to have and the initial specs we were looking at [for Wii] were not competitive from a hardware and memory standpoint... there were all these disadvantages.

 

[Dark Cloud]

Yeah I already saw this. I wonder if they’re willing to do it for Metroid Prime 4. I honestly wouldn’t mind.

 

[FrakEarth]

I feel like both Skyward Sword and Metroid Prime 3 had hints of a more robust open world intention - with Skyward Sword you could conceivably imagine how the Hyrule/underworld areas might interconnect, or how with better hardware you might have been able to seamlessly fly from one to another, which would have made it feel very different indeed. And in MP3, the scope definitely widened - going from GF ships to various different planets using the gunship - if that had been more of a manual process than an automated one it would have felt amazing.

Interesting that one of Nintendo's 2nd parties were basing ambitions off of specs for competing consoles before they got the internal memo too. They must have been a bit gutted.

 

[Deleted user]

Yup, you have to work within the constrains of what you are given. That leads to innovative thinking. Just look at the Miis people are able to create even though the Mii program is very limited. And Metroid Prime 3 turned out well. IMO it's better than Prime 1.

 

[Dark Cloud]

Where…where’s the dislike button lol

 

[Lelouch0612]

How Monolith Soft made Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii is still a mystery to me

 

[Sander RX]

Where…where’s the dislike button lol

Would it be called “Wah!” ?

Btw hi DK!

 

[Maxrunner]

Maybe they'll recover some ideias for Prime 4. I would kinda dig having some of Breath of the Wild concepts of its systems attached to the ideia of using the Samus ship to travel between planets and stuff.

 

[Brock Reiher]

This makes sense, Prime 3 feels like it's missing a lot. I don't know if even more space travel would have made for a better game, but it would have been more interesting.

 

[Dark Cloud]

Would it be called “Wah!” ?

Btw hi DK!

Wahhhhhh. Hey!

 

[Yoshifan31]

Interesting, I always thought that they went for a more linear game because they followed industry trends and wanted to appeal to traditional FPS players. Between things like the whole intro and the fact that objectives were explicitly defined, I thought they were definitely catering to that audience. I still think it’s a better game than Prime 2 purely because Prime 3 just has more interesting areas to me

How Monolith Soft made Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii is still a mystery to me

Well it’s not that graphically intensive if you look closely (especially the characters), on top of that despite the maps being big the world has basically zero interactivity. They also used a bunch of tricks to mask loading times, like putting them in cutscenes.

 

[Magic-Man]

Metroid Prime 4 open world incoming

 

[MCeleste]

Prime 3 is a fantastic game and I've grown to like it as much as any other Prime, but it definitely the most constrained by its hardware. You can feel a grander idea struggling to break free, but it just isn't able to.

and then you fall down an endless spacehole and shoot missiles into Ridley's big dumb dinomouth and 10/10 best game holy fuck

 

[Tron1]

So sad.

 

[TheDok]

Yeah you can really tell when playing the game. Everything involving the ship feels super constrained. Most of the mechanics are used like twice at most.

It'd be really interesting to see the the idea of open-ended ship exploration across multiple planets be fleshed out. But near guaranteed Prime 4 is going back to a single planet ala the first game

 

[Jersh]

I feel like both Skyward Sword and Metroid Prime 3 had hints of a more robust open world intention - with Skyward Sword you could conceivably imagine how the Hyrule/underworld areas might interconnect, or how with better hardware you might have been able to seamlessly fly from one to another, which would have made it feel very different indeed. And in MP3, the scope definitely widened - going from GF ships to various different planets using the gunship - if that had been more of a manual process than an automated one it would have felt amazing.

Interesting that one of Nintendo's 2nd parties were basing ambitions off of specs for competing consoles before they got the internal memo too. They must have been a bit gutted.

I think I disagree with Skyward Sword; the overworld is heavily designed around defined entry and exit points with a clear sense of progression through them.