Metroid Prime 4: Development Reboot

In this year's preview, I was still confident that Metroid Prime 4 would be showcased and released in 2019. Two months ago Reggie even confirmed in an interview with Mashable.com that the development of the game is going well and they already have internal expectations for a release. But we can certainly forget that now.

Today, Nintendo released a video message from Takahashi, where he explains that they are not satisfied with the current state of development of Metroid Prime 4. As a result they are going to collaborate with Retro Studios to make it happen, which will effectively restart the development of the game.

Well, why not so from the beginning? After Federation Force, it was already easy to be skeptical about Tanabe's vision for the series. And since we didn't know anything about the "talented new developers" that were going to create Metroid Prime 4, skepticism unfolded even more, especially if it was going to be developed in Japan, because Japanese aren't usually all that comfortable with First Person Shooters...

So, the project going back to Retro certainly feels right, but at the same time Retro hasn't delivered anything after the excellent Tropical Freeze, released almost five years ago. What have they been doing in all this time? We don't know... But we know that several staff members had left the studio over the years, so it's not the same key talent anymore, which was responsible for the original Metroid Prime Trilogy. So, this might even have been a reason why Retro wasn't going to develop Metroid Prime 4 in the first place.

But maybe this is exactly what both ends need to get back on track. Maybe Retro Studios needs a motivating project like Metroid Prime 4 to get back on their feet. And maybe then Retro Studios will become the studio that Metroid Prime 4 needs to be really good in the end. We'll see. In time.

In any case this is bad news for the Metroid series. A development reboot is costly. They had people working on the game for about two years now with no results. The game needs to be very successful to get these costs back in. And considering that both the Nintendo 3DS Metroid games combined couldn't even sell one million copies, we're possibly looking at a dire future for Metroid.

Well, let's hope for the best. Let's hope that Metroid Prime 4 will be a tremendous blockbuster for the Nintendo Switch in the end.