Topic: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond

@Bolt_Strike I'd disagree with your analysis about Metroidvania concepts not working in an open world. This simply isn't the case. You can see it in BoTW itself - parts of the map are soft locked (or even in a few cases hard locked) behind particular armour sets. Of course, in theory, you can beat everything in Death Mountain without flame breaker armour by making lots of elixirs or constantly eating food but that's only because it's soft locked. Super Metroid - the platonic ideal of what a Metroidvania should be - is exactly the same and you can get through the Norfair caverns without the Varia suit if you're determined enough.

Open world and Metroidvania philosophies can be incredibly close. I think you're misconstruing what open world games are about. They aren't about "going and doing whatever you want at any point" - that's just the illusion they want to generate. They do typically utilise more soft locking than more linear games and they punish you less for deviating from a given path but with very few exceptions they are not free for all's.

As to why Prime 4 isn't moving big numbers I can't say since I've not played the game yet. Slightly mixed critical reception is probably the biggest reason. No-one has come out and said "this is a must play genre defining experience get it NOW" - they've generally said "it's really good but there's a few things you might not like". They might have got a better critical reception by doing what you'd suggest and picking one lane and doing it extremely well.

I suspect (and again I've not yet played the game) that the bike sections exist because they realised that designing an interesting and tightly interconnected map in 3d is extremely difficult; many players find it hard to navigate and the benefits in terms of what it actually gives to players turns out to be negligible when the game is actually designed around smaller discrete "levels" built in the world anyway. This is very obvious in some Metroidvania's (Metroid Fusion for instance or Shantae and the Pirates Curse) and less so in others but it's usually a feature of the genre to some degree.

I'm looking forwards to playing the game at some point - even knowing that it might not be the "out of the park 10/10" that Metroid Prime 1 was (I'm not a huge fan of 2 or 3 in the same way but they're both good games).

I do wonder if this game was just "More Metroid Prime", if people would be complaining as much because it HASNT changed much from the last entry.

Then again, saying what Metroid Prime is....is a bit hard as each game structures itself somewhat differently but also with similar elements.