If you’d been looking forward to Metroid Prime 4 being released sometime in 2018 on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo has some bad news for you. Metroid Prime 4 development is being scrapped due to poor quality, and will be starting over. No updates will be forthcoming for a good while before release.
Metroid Prime 4 was originally announced over a year ago at E3 2017 at that year’s Nintendo conference. However, since then the game has had absolutely no news released about it despite multiple rumors, and a video handily released onto the internet by Nintendo explains why. Despite a year of development, Nintendo believed that what they saw of Metroid Prime 4 wasn’t up to their standards.
Instead, they will now be working with Retro Studios in the West to restart Metroid Prime 4 development. Retro Studios was the studio behind the original three Metroid Prime games, which gave them a great deal of clout especially since those three games were critically acclaimed. Nintendo putting Prime 4 back in their hands hopefully means that the fourth Metroid Prime game will be just as good.
Originally, the game’s development was supposed to be done by the Singapore division of Bandai Namco, though the man behind the original three Metroid Prime games, Kensuke Tanabe, would still be working with them. Tanabe will now be heading back to Retro Studios, and hopefully the team will make Metroid Prime 4 the same labor of love that they used with the other three games.
It’s no surprise that Nintendo wants to make Prime 4 high quality like the original games. All three of the Metroid Prime games not only had enormous sales but also critical acclaim, making them one of the benchmarks for the Metroid series. Dark Samus, the antagonist for the Prime games, even became popular enough to become Samus’s Echo Fighter in Super Smash Bros Ultimate.
Hopefully now that Retro Studios is back in charge of Metroid Prime 4 development, the game will come out at just as high a quality as the last three games have.
