Metroid Dread: Free Updates Announced

Metroid Dread got its first free update today with the 2.0.0 version, which first and foremost contains two new difficulty modes:

• In Rookie Mode you get more missiles from the start (30 in total), you will replenish more energy with every health pick-up, while bosses do less damage, some of their projectiles are easier to destroy, and you also get a larger window for their finishing counters.
  
  
• In Dread Mode you will die instantly when anything hits you. The Phantom Cloak and lava will still drain your health normally, though. This new mode only unlocks after beating Hard Mode.

There are also new statistics on the results screen for newly started games, but Nintendo hasn't clarified what those are yet. (I bet it now shows you the number of deaths so people can brag about doing a deathless run in Dread Mode.) 

Update: the new statistics contain the following (thanks to Decapre on GameFAQs for already beating Dread Mode):

• Difficulty
• Clear Time
• Total Play Time
• Item Collection
• Energy
• Missiles
  
• Power Bombs
• Times Defeated
• Total Damage Received
• Bosses Defeated
• Times Saved
  

So, yeah, this does include the number of deaths, but also how often you've saved for some reason. Energy, Missiles, and Power Bombs are simply your total at the end to get a better view on the item collection if it's not 100%. Clear time and total play time get differentiated now, where the latter includes the time spent with your failed attempts, which gets subtracted for the clear time.

There are no new ending screens for the gallery or anything like this. Beating the game in Dread Mode will simply give you the endings of Hard Mode.

My Opinion:

Well, you don't look a gift horse into the mouth... Still, this is quite the curious gift horse. When it comes to Zelda games I've been an advocate of free updates as long as they were a possibility. A Cave of Ordeals for Ocarina of Time 3D? Gimme! A Boss Rush in A Link Between Worlds? Gimme! More content for the Chamber Dungeon in Link's Awakening? Gimme!

News like this would have gotten me really excited in those cases, but Nintendo has never done any major updates for these 2D games, much to my disappointment. Now, with Metroid Dread on the other hand this is a game that felt very much complete. There was nothing really left to desire here, where the new difficulty modes feel somewhat unnecessary and for me personally also unwanted, because after beating the game four times in different ways I really came to a closure here. And Dread Mode doesn't seem like much fun... more like a crazy hack.

The Rookie Mode is fine, since the Normal Mode can already be very challenging, so this will make the game more accessible to some players. But of course this isn't of any interest to those who've already completed the game on the original difficulties. Interestingly, playing in Rookie Mode and scanning the new amiibo is the only way of having a total of 300 missiles at the end of the game.

The Boss Rush mode, which will be added in a later free update in April, sounds more interesting on the other hand. The bosses in this game are all excellent, where it will be nice to have a way of replaying them at any time and one after another. So, this is actually a welcome addition. It will be interesting to see how this gets implemented. Will this be a separate mode or something accessible in the game world? Will there be any unique rewards or is this just for high scores? We will have to find out in two months...

Well, until then the Dread Mode will certainly be a good training to truly master all the bosses, where in most cases you should be good enough to beat them unharmed already if you have beaten Hard Mode before. But I absolutely dread fighting against Experiment No. Z-57 in this one... Dodging all of its attacks and hazards was far from easy, which will only lead to some frustrations.

In the same vein, the Boss Rush mode could also turn out to be very frustrating, because those bosses were all designed to break and challenge you, where playing them all in a row might be too much, unless there is some sort of recovery. So, while these updates are free, they don't really feel like something that will be super fun, unless you were waiting for something like the "Rookie Mode".