Then Nintendo said, "We're not making this game very well, RetroStudios did a good job with the Prime games so let's ask them for help." In doing this, they, and I quote the update video, had to "restart development from the beginning." If that's to be taken at face value, that means the project is being restarted from scratch, all old concepts, designs, and builds out the windows to be made again. Now sure, Bayo 3 had the same thing so maybe there'snothingto worry about. Though the warning signs were showing themselves when we got no gameplay footage and no release window. That's likely what happened with Prime 4. It's not till the game has a solid vision of what it'll be like that you might get a teaser trailer for it. See usually when a game starts development, no one outside the development company has any idea because we're talking early stages of planning and concepts. I'm not sure how exactly to explain this. Finally, they have to match the ridiculously high standards of both the Metroid series (which averages in the high 80s on Metacritic) and the Prime subseries (which averages around the low 90s), so they're basically forced to continue the development until something truly groundbreaking comes out.Ĭonsidering Retro Studios was still hiring key people for the game just a few months ago, I doubt we'll see the game before 2024, and it will likely be one of the last first-party games to come out on Switch, possibly the last big exclusive one. They also have to come up with interesting game mechanics to avoid creating a dull, boring or repetitive game, not to mention the massive lore that the Prime series is known for. Metroid Prime 4 is a tough nut to crack, and it's unsurprising that Bandai Namco failed at its first attempt: Nintendo has no first-person action game on Wii U or Switch, meaning Retro Studios have to work on an entirely new engine from scratch by themselves (in comparison, Zelda BoTW was developed in conjunction with Monolith that provided a lot of assets from their Xenoblade engine and still took 5 years to finish). Not to mention we went through a pandemic that slowed down every creative industry dramatically, and we're currently through a quite bad economic crisis. Game development has become more expensive and difficult: games are huge and take eons to develop and debug, users rightfully have sky high expectations from next gen hardware such as flawless bug-free graphics, facial animations, dubbing, 60fps fluid gameplay etc. And it's not just a Nintendo thing: GoW ragnarok took 5 years and it's basically a DLC for its predecessor, The Last of Us 2 took 6 years and recycled a lot of its gameplay mechanics from its prequel, Halo Infinite took 5+ years to develop, not to mention it was also not very good. That's just a fact, looking at games like Bayonetta 3 (5+ years in development), Zelda TotK (4+ years in development and still counting, for a sequel that's likely reusing a lot of the assets from its predecessor) or Pikmin 4 (6+ years in development and still counting). As many pointed out in the comments, the game development restarted from scratch in early 2019, meaning the game has not even been 4 full years in development.įirst-party, AAA games take longer these days.
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