Topic: Metroid NX should borrow from BotW

So like most (I assume) I'm very impressed and excited about Breath of the Wild. However I also can't help but think about what Nintendo can take from it and apply to Metroid. The large world, the open endedness, the feeling of being alone (At least in the demo area), the item and weapon collecting etc... would also translate very well to Metroid. I'm going to play game developer for a minute.

Open the game with Samus on a military base orbitting a planet or moon (turning in a bounty or something). The base is attacked and destroyed (either by Ridley and space pirates, a rogue military group or completely unknown aliens). Samus finds herself on the planet/moon, alone and without her armor. The player now has the entire planet to explore as they see fit. Wild-life as well as more organized enemies (pirates, aliens or military) to fight or avoid. For the first 1/3 of the game Samus is only in her Zero Suit and the player has to collect guns and/or ammo from enemies (as Link takes weapons to replace his broken ones) and evenutally she starts to piece together her armor. I would guess that the master sword is an unbreakable weapon for Link in BotW, the arm canon could/would be that for Samus, once she gets it she has a reliable weapon.

They've said that in BotW Link won't just pick up money from the grass and will have to find and make food to recover hearts and brew his own potions. A Metroid game could/would include these systems but with a tech. spin. Instead of just picking up rockets and energy tanks Samus has to build her equipment and medicine from things she finds.

Finally, Anomuna has said that you don't have to 100% BotW to beat it, that its possible to beat the game without finding out the story behind Link's awakening (apparently you can go straight to the end boss once you start the game). I would do something similar with Metroid. Have the bad guys wanting to mine or collect something from the moon that will power a new weapon or something (why they attack the military base), and Samus has the potential to discover this during the course of the game, the game ends when Samus finds her ship and escapes the planet. So while the player can discover the larger mining/collecting plot and stop it (along with other, smaller objectives - possibly saving other survivors, maybe saving less advanced natives etc...) its possible to beat hte game without discovering it or even skipping it.

@Canadian_Ronin I am personally hoping for a cerebral 1st person investigat-a-thon / shooter where you have to track bounties across a galaxy from one planet to another. Exploring a solar system and stumbling on space raids, criminals, federation bases, areas in trouble, floating debis in space and some main metroidy storyline underlining everything. I want to have to leave the ship and space walk to areas and quickly have to get back to the ship because I am suddenly under attack etc etc. I don't want Zelda in Space. I want Metroid to expand Primes concepts...not just copy Zelda BotW's. (But ye...BotW was amazing )

I'm not sure BotW's improvements would translate well into Metroid without it feeling too similar to Zelda. They were both item based exploration games that required gaining new abilities to progress, I feel like this could blur the lines again to the point where Metroid just becomes Zelda with guns. Now there are some lessons they could take from BotW, but I think Metroid might want a different approach.

For one, they should probably keep the room based design to keep it distinct from Zelda. I'd like to see more open endedness in the design, maybe larger rooms and more paths, but I don't think it'd be a good idea to break away from the traditional design.

What I think would be neat is if you could combine beam abilities with more of your weapons. They experimented with this in Prime 2, in the game's beta we see that they originally intended to have beam combos with the Power Bombs, so if you had the ability to customize each of your weapons with different beam abilities, that could make the combat much more interesting. They might also draw from FF's ability customization here as well.

I love this idea, but I feel like that might creep into Star Fox territory.

@Bolt_Strike I am sure Fox McCloud wouldn't object to a Metroid Prime game where you can get in your ship and fly / plot courses through space and investigate claustrophobic areas in space or on terra firma etc Star Fox should stick to being an arcade shoot'em'up with no second screen

I'd like metroid NX to be a badass action sci-fi FPS. With gyro controls.

I'm hoping it'd be more like Corruption than the previous 2...I just couldn't get into the previous 2 but Corruption I really enjoyed...the irony is the retro-fit motion controls for those first two seemed to work much much smoother than they did with Corruption...

...I had the Trilogy but sold it and bought a copy of Corruption. :0/

That idea certainly could work, but it would be a departure for the Metroid series. To me, one of the hallmarks of the series is the feeling of being alone and isolated. Flying around the galaxy and tracking people down wouldn't fit that at all. The series has always been more like the Alien movies then Star Trek or Star Wars.

I think that galaxy wide set-up would work better for Star Fox.

I understand not wanting Metroid to become the Sci-Fi Zelda, however in the NES and SNES days the games did share a lot of design ideas and concepts (starting in the middle of a world, no direction, have to collect weapons and items, backtracking to use those items etc...) while being able to remain very different from each other. There is no reason why Metroid can't borrow a lot of ideas from Zelda: BotW while remaining its own thing.

And I think you got it right that it would be the dungeons/indoor areas that would very different and really set Metroid apart.

Eh, not really. The Prime games have done some similar missions before, so it wouldn't feel that out of place. I wouldn't want someone talking in my ear the entire game, but taking on missions and fighting hordes of enemies isn't something entirely alien (pun intended) to Metroid. At the very least, it'd make for a fun sidequest system.

Well I do think they can adopt some ideas from BotW, I just don't want them to go full on in that direction. The Metroidvania item system is a little more ingrained into the series' identity than Zelda, exploring levels for items (and sometimes even sequence breaking for items) has always been the focus of Metroid games whereas Zelda is more about pure exploration and puzzle solving. So I don't think a full departure from Metroidvania item collecting or the room design would really honor the series' gameplay, but I do think they could be more flexible about upgrades, allowing for more sequence breaking, and the size and open-endedness of the map.

[quote=Canadian_Ronin]

If we look at the original Metroid, which was similar in a lot of ways to the original Zelda, the natural, 3D version of that experience is something similar to BotW

@Canadian_Ronin Just to touch on your theme of isolation (which I totally appreciate), if you go to a crime scene e.g derelict spaceship or sieged outpost, I am sure it could build up a tense Metroid atmosphere

@Canadian_Ronin If we look at the original Metroid, we can see that its map consists of a series of claustrophobic maze-like caves. If anything, it's the polar opposite of what BotW tries to achieve, at least atmospherically speaking.

I'd explain my opinion on this topic further, but it overlaps with everything @Bolt_Strike has mentioned, so I won't repeat what has already been said.

Not really. Metroid has never had a freely explorable overworld like Zelda has, it's been entirely based on the room system. So BotW would be a departure from Metroid's roots, not a return to them. The natural, 3D version of the original Metroid would be relatively similar to Prime, except with open ended progression and maybe a little more platforming.

Yes, but when you are being called on a radio to go there, you aren't there very long, people will talk to you after etc... its different then 20-40 hours alone on a planet.

I think Nintendo should embrace the differences between all their different franchises, and that means with Metroid being alone and isolated. In BotW, for example, we've been told there are towns with people that you can interact with, an open world Metroid game shouldn't have that.

Yes, its not a carbon copy (as I said above, the interior areas is where the two would really be different), but you do just get dropped in the middle of an environment and are left to walk around and explore on your own. The current version of that game is BotW.

Now if a new Metroid game were take place on the station (in the story idea above) instead of being alone on a planet (just create a massive space-station with a varity of environments, and open it all up from the start of the game, while keeping all the game play elements I mentioned in the O/P)....that'd be awesome. I personally think its more interesting to go from indoor to outdoor, but the claustrophobia of being inside would be keeping with Metroids roots as well.

They've already done that. Twice in fact.

I really don't see much of a problem with outdoor areas so long as they fit the room design. If we just had space stations and underground areas from now until the end of time we'd see too many of the same kinds of environments repeated, it'd be better to have a mix of the two to make it easier to provide variety.

Metroid has a lot to borrow from the experience of BotW. I just hope that the game is going to be 3D and not first person.

While I really enjoyed the Prime games, I felt when they moved the franchise into first person.......they lost something. While Other M was no where near as good as the Prime games, there was something "more Metroid" about it.

Bolt-Strike and Marcee brought up good points about the room structure of Metroid, and while I would still like to see the game set on an alien planet, however it would be important for a large portion of the game play/enviornment, at least 50%, to be interior spaces - caves, buildings (built both by the enemies and from an extinct species).

I really don't think there is much to borrow, it would be nice to have some fresh air on the planet's surface much like in Super Metroid but Metroid is about the atmosphere and it's hard to achieve the solitude feeling when you are out in an open environment

Actually I find a big, wide open area with no one but you in it can feel much more lonely then being alone in a smaller space.

Each to their own

It is more about atmosphere and less about scale of the world. Skyrim feels like a full and busy world, but if you remove all friendly NPCs and had more exploration, it could feel like an empty world. Then set it on an alien world and I think it could make for a unique experience. Could even be closer to Metroid 2 but in 3D.