Topic: Metroid Prime 4: The Long(er) Wait

Eh, we haven't had much else lately, so why not discuss neat fan concepts like this? I generally like the effects shown off there.

Sucks that we're not gonna see this anytime soon. I'm guessing 2021 at the earliest

Still, I guess it's worth saying how important it is that Nintendo cares so much about quality. If they were EA/Activision/Bethesda, we would've got Breath of the Wild about a year and a half earlier and it would've been a massively inferior game (and they would've just released a 7/10 Metroid Prime 4)

I don't understand why they got a completely new studio to work on a series like this. It's such a specific kind of game that you really want people who've proven themselves capable of doing it.

@Dezzy While I'm inclined to agree with you how much of Retro that worked on the past games are even left there? That's my only concern going back to them.

@Spoony_Tech

There are probably quite a few people still there. Nintendo first party studios are quite stable jobs as far as I can tell. If it was an EA studio, things would be different.
The last game was a decade ago. For the sake of comparison, FF7 was 20 years old, and yet they managed to get quite a few of the main team together for the remake (that was part of their rationale for remaking it: they wanted to do it while the original team were still around)

@Dezzy That's a bad example lol. They've been working on that remake for what now 5 to 6 years??

@Spoony_Tech

Well that's still longer than 10 years though.
Seems like a fair comparison to me. It's between 2 AAA developers that are quite financially stable (and therefore don't have too much extreme turnover in their employees).

@Dezzy And yet we hear constant turmoil over at Retro and how they're managed. That has me worried more then anything. It has always been assumed that Retro has not been ran well over the years and you can find some good stories online based in fact.

We will never know what really goes on behind vlosed doors but I hope they will get the job done.

@Spoony_Tech

Problem is, you hear that about so many studios. I mean we've heard similar claims about both CD Projekt Red and Rockstar, yet they're arguably the 2 most highly regarded developers in the world.

When you're a large company, 5% of employees could complain and it'd make the news. Whereas the other 95% could be perfectly happy. News reporting does a terrible job of taking scale into account (especially gaming media, none of whom are trained in statistics)

Even if not many of the original people are left, I am much more confident in a new Retro team than a Japanese newbie team. At least the Retro people will probably try to hold themselves to the same standards of those before them, where I feel the Japanese team would have less of a framework to work within, and most likely would have been off the mark compared to the past games.

@PikPi

Right, and a lot of it isn't even game-specific. It's just about having a team of talented people who work well together.
Based on Retro's last game, they still have that.
It's the reason Mass Effect Andromeda failed. They gave a massive game to a completely unproven studio.

I still have confidence in Retro Studios. Their staff may have changed over time and we haven't heard of them for a while but they haven't released a bad game yet.

As far as I know, we don't know who were developing Prime 4 and how much experience they had. They might have pitched an idea to Nintendo and gotten a "go ahead" from Retro because their initial plan was good but then their plans changed, the game took a different turn or they didn't have enough experience. We don't know what happened.

The same could have honestly happened with Retro and the first Metroid Prime since it was their first time getting their hands on the IP. All of their other projects got canceled. I don't think handing Metroid Prime 4 to Retro Studios can be as bad as giving it to another company even if they don't have some of the people who worked on the previous games. They should still be aware of what made the Prime series a success and they have all kinds of material from earlier games that they can use as help.

@Dezzy By and large, the gaming industry (and tech industry as a whole) is generally a terrible place to work across the board. So I don't doubt any of the stories being representative of the whole. Retro is different in that the problems we hear seem to be about the entire organizational structure and stability. Much like another US based Nintendo owned studio. I get the sense the US shops don't know how to handle/interpret the Japanese oversight and it falls apart from there.

@NEStalgia

That's hardly true. The variance is massive depending on where you work and in what industry.
Different industries have very different business models which lead to different levels of stability and working conditions. I worked for a company that made 3D architecture simulations for about 5 years (I'm a graphics programmer) and it was incredibly stable and well paid work. 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. No "crunch".
It really does change a lot depending on the industry and the nature of the product they're selling. The game's industry is worse because it's one of the most competitive and constantly-innovating industries there is.

That's hardly equivalent to something like Microsoft (Windows) or Google, who basically have a guaranteed share of the market and can afford to chill out a bit. If Google did absolutely nothing to their search algorithm for 5 years, they'd still own most of the market (hence stability). That's not true with gaming. If you don't improve your games (e.g Bioware in the last decade), someone else comes along and steals your audience (CD Projekt).

It'll be funny if the next Zelda game comes out before this. Doesn't sound too unlikely.

Well considering the time line, I could see a year where a BOTW sequel releases with Metroid Prime, would be quite a good way to head into the Switch's later years

@Dezzy In fairness the UK industry is probably a bit different than the US live-to-work tech culture. "The people in India don't complain about 7 day 100 hour weeks for no money...they're grateful....you should be grateful we let you off easy with only 80!" is pretty much the US tech mantra.

It's basically like Japan....but worse. We just kind of laugh at the complaints of the Japanese Salary Man. At least when he leaves work he's not expected to be on call and checking email.

@1UP_MARIO

(edit: for anyone who can't clearly read the text, just right-click and select "View Image" to see a bigger version)

Sorry about that, @Octane...

And that's why you don't announce logos

Every time FF7 is delayed SE gets ripped, but this is fine. Well, I'm actually glad Retro is now involved. Yes, I do wonder how many of the original staff are left, but they haven't made a bad game either. I just wonder what was going with MP4 until now, why did it took them so long to realise it was going nowhere? Who was making it? I guess we'll never find out. And what has Retro been doing for all these years? Questions, questions, so many questions...

@ThanosReXXX lol. Yeah, Pikmin 4 or MP4, wanna take bets? What's coming out first at this point?