Random: Retro Studios Clashed With Metroid Producer On Halo Influences

Art imitates art, isn't that the old axiom? I think it applies to videogames even more than art, to be fair. We are all the sum of everything we've experienced, so I don't think it can be helped to be inspired by other games if you're making videogames. It's part of what makes us Human.

Actually agree with the producer, stop comparing games to other games. Biggest example, "smash clones".

I don't disagree with either, both approaches have produced excellent games in the past. I don't think making a game correctly is a matter of whether you take inspiration or not, but what your game has to offer in the end.

It's kind of near impossible to make a game that has no influences from others, regardless of how they think they are making their games. Same with films. Popular music is just rehashed trash with different voice filters now.

Everything has been done before.

I find this insular approach to game design more frustrating than not.

It's important to look at other successful pieces of art and take away what works; doing so does not take away from the quality and ingenuity of your own project. They weren't trying to copy Halo, obviously! It's so weird that the old-guard at Nintendo seems to pretend that other games don't exist.

Like others have said, I think that approach has its strengths and its drawbacks. It's clearly shown itself in the past with the ways that Nintendo have come out with something unlike what anybody else is doing on the market and it's successful because of that.

At the same time, it likely does stop them from taking note of positive examples. It probably explains why they sometimes end up leaving out positive aspects of previous games even when the sequels should arguably build on them.

@Slinkoy1 Yeah I think the biggest thing is how many cloned games have been called an "X Killer" ever actually surpassed the thing they copied?

You can't trailblaze from behind the pack.

We use examples to help convey an idea. Using a game as an example is no different from using a genre or design pillar.

"I want this Zelda game to have more freedom to explore"
"I want an open world Zelda game"
"It's Zelda meets GTA"

It's all the same idea, just conveyed in different ways. This is just Nintendo being overly closed off and blinkered.

Given MP3 is by far the weakest of the trilogy, I would venture to say the less Halo influence the better.

Nintendo's approach was right. Prime started to feel less like a Metroid game after the first Metroid Prime and more like a generic western shooter. Not paying attention to other software keeps Nintendo's games unique.

Nintendo is brilliant but also exhausting.

That kind of thinking is also the reason why the switch has specs of a 10+ year old console, terrible joycon design and a really poor network for a lot of multiplayer games.
It sure produces a ton of great games by trying to be unique but sometimes they're riggid way of thinking is really holding them back.

Please don't deliberately put any Halo in Metroid. Thank you.

Nintendo knows its culture and core business is related to innovation. It was since the NES era. It doesn't make sense to have an innovative mindset while going around comparing and copying others. When they avoid comparisons, they aim to be not influenced by current standards.

While I understand that many people complain about nintendo IP not having better graphics, do we really need another developer making The Last of Us, GTA, Call of Duty-esque games?

Would the Wii or the Switch exist if Nintendo wasn't like that?

It takes a lot of courage to have the positioning they have, they see looking for copying and comparing yourself to others as the easy way out. They want the blue ocean strategy where nobody competes, instead of navigating the red sea of bloody competition of games and hardware that deliver almost the same things.

You already felt it in the opening-theme from Metroid Prime 3...sounds very similar to Halo. Ironically Prime 3 is the weakest of the 3 Prime games (still a great game though).

The intro was my least favorite part of MP3, with how there were so many cutscenes taking you into a third perspective and way too many characters talking to Samus, which made it feel less isolated and immersive. Last year I ended up finishing it and loving everything after the intro, but at least now I know why the intro is my least favorite part.

I wonder if this is at least partly why MP3 is the weakest of the bunch?

I don't remember the particular Dark Samus battle this guy is referring to, but his comment did bring to mind a late game encounter in the cloud world that was truly awful. Wave after wave of enemies come at you and it's difficult to manage with the way Prime's combat is designed. It was very un-fun and un-Metroid

Tozour explains that western developers have a tendency to compare their ideas to existing franchises, something that Nintendo wouldn't tolerate in pitch meetings

Interesting addendum to KateGray's article this past weekend.

I feel like we need to have a canvas and frame of reference far broader than gaming itself to make this medium all it can be. I believe Nintendo has even mentioned that their hiring practices of recent years have this need in mind - I remember reading that they look for candidates with arts backgrounds beyond gaming to inform their work. And wisely so.

Nintendo's approach is actually the correct one, if your pitch meeting starts with "It's like X meets Y" your project is doomed from start because the very base is just a jury rigged copy.

Not that you can't copy what other games did, far from that, but if don't have a solid identity of what your game should be and what you want players to experience then your game will be just another clone in the wall.

I mean, no one calls Hollow Knight a metroid clone or Shovel Knight a Ducktales clone, despite those games being heavily inspired by said games.

Keep Halo the F**k away from Metroid, thankyou.

Halo is just an FPS right? Honestly Metroid Prime 3 kind of failed exactly because it felt like it wanted to be a Action FPS too much and move the exploration/adventure aspect of Metroid to the wayside. It's just not what Metroid is about at all.

If it’s between Halo and a product like Federation Force, I’ll take the Halo influences any day..

it's a way the American film business often talks about new scripts ("Mad Max meets Gone With The Wind"), especially when pitching, and i ***** hate it (i work in that industry). it's so limiting to think that way and points to the very finite imagination of American entertainment execs.

so i sympathize with tanabe here, especially as they're talking about an IP retro didn't even create. and although i do love everything retro does including prime 3, i think the weakest parts of that game are the ones most derivative of other franchises like halo and COD.

For me, the timing of this article is mad. I was just reading though the comments of the old NL Metroid Prime 3 review earlier today, and someone was talking about how they didn't like the Halo style opening.

It's hypocrisy. Even if you're not openly talk about something, if you experience it, it can someway influence you. How can you play a good game, and make a new game with the same basics (an armored character, in a futuristic FPS, against aliens...) And not be influenced?

I really like what happened with Tomb Raider/Uncharted games: Uncharted is clearly based on pick the Tomb Raider bases and take at to a new level (way better the the last games) but the Tomb Raider reboot take the ideas os Uncharted and expanded it too. It's like a brainstorm based on finished products instead a preproduction meeting

@Yodalovesu Said battle must be in Prime 2. If I remember correctly, the only time you directly confront Dark Samus in-game in Prime 3 is at the end. Unless he's referring to the cutscene where she corrupts the hunters at the start of the game.

I always wondered if it was just me with the Halo similarities. To this day, I'm not sure what to think of them. Regardless, Prime 3 is still a solid game. It was nice to see a game defy the growing conception of games that are too brown and instead get something that's too blue. I wonder if the Halo influences are also the reason for that.

Prime 4 cannot come soon enough though.

@Collinhall I think one area it really shouldn't be is from a tech perspective of how can you efficiently make use of hardware (or go about online infrastructure) that isn't what defines a games uniqueness and there is a lot more likely to be a one right answer. Pokemon for example feels like it's missing basic industry standard ways of increasing performances sometimes (albeit not 100% first party) and nintendos online is a mess often

LOL, Meanwhile in Kyoto:

“in the past, I didn’t play many video games [...] nowadays, I actually play a lot of overseas titles. [Far Cry series, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim] [...] while playing those games, I do find some ideas, but it’s not that it connects directly to Zelda to where I would take something and use it in Zelda, but it’s more of something I keep in the back of my head while developing the game.”
-Eiji Aonuma

We can definitely see the Halo influence in Metroid Prime 4, very strongly. It's been 5 years, there's no game, and there's no word of the game other than that development restarted at least once. It's as though 343i is working on it themselves!

@HammerGalladeBro yep, Prime 3 was totally awesome. ...just the weakest among its stellar peers, imo.

That’s a very Japanese answer lmfao

“No, we do it this way.”

We don’t talk about Halo, no, no, no.

How ironic that the third Prime (while not terrible), is really rather forgettable when compared to the previous two. Maybe if they tried copying a good shooter, like Half Life 2, then they would have had been success.

Jokes (or are they?) aside, I think Nintendo's philosophy is a really good one, and we probably wouldn't have gotten a lot of games if it weren't for this tactic. There's a reason Pikmin is an RTS, but nothing like other RTS games. There's also a reason Splatoon is a shooter, but unlike any other shooter. Keep this type of design going Nintendo!

There's only one battle against Dark Samus in Prime 3 and it's before the finale against Aurora Unit 313 on Phaaze. I'm assuming Tozour meant Metroid Prime 2 when talking about the Dark Samus battle, which is one of my favorite parts in the game.

Metroid Prime 3 in my opinion wasn't influenced enough by Halo, as it doesn't share the multiplayer progression of the releases around it. Prime 2, Pinball, Hunters and Federation Force all have a multiplayer mode, so Prime 3 is an odd one. Considering Prime 2's local multiplayer and then Hunters' online multiplayer less than two years later, one would think that Corruption would've had an online multiplayer at least as good as Hunters. It's a missed opportunity that I think harmed the series for the rest of the Wii era and into the 3DS/Wii U generation. Hopefully, Prime 4 delivers.

@inenai This is a great answer

Sounds like a bunch of corporate BS. Seeing how BotW was influenced by Skyrim, maybe it’s a dated design philosophy

American game developers are always like "oh it's Call of Duty meets Halo with the weapons of Final Fantasy", or whatever, right, "it's Fortnite meets Minecraft"

Well this is certainly true. Even our names for genres have this kind of mentality baked in. We say Metroidvania with a straight face - a classification so vague and useless that no-one can even agree what it means (despite using it to seemingly describe every other new release).

Some say Metroidvanias have to be retro-influenced 2D/2.5D exploration games. Others say that the terms applies to anything with ‘gating’ and ‘backtracking’. Which could describe anything but the most linearly structured game.

Now every open world game called is ‘Breath of the Something’. And before that it was ‘Skyrim but with…”.

While I don’t think taking inspiration from other games is a bad thing, if relied too heavily upon, the result is… well, the current western AAA scene. The fact that Nintendo is putting out stuff like Splatoon and… Labo is - for better or for worse - a sign that they’re definitely doing something differently.

@SteamEngenius "there's nothing new under the sun" is how the Bible puts it.

Metroid Prime’s magic came from its massive influence from 90’s FPS like Quake, Unreal and Turok, in 3 they finally had a control setup similar to those games where you didn’t need to rely on lock-on and could generally be a lot faster paced but you had the Halo/COD influence sweeping in resulting in a focus of trying to be more cinematic which meant pushing players down a lot of corridors while NPCs bark orders are you.

I'm not surprised. Halo 3 and Prime 3 came out a month apart from each other in UK. Even the first two weren't all that far apart from each other (ish).

Haha, great to hear. F**k Western developers.

I think they do it this way, not because they don't want the games to turn out like Western games, I think its more about keeping a team thinking about the game they are making as exactly that, the game they are making. If you are constantly thinking, okay, I am making Dark Souls meets Metroidvania you will putting constraints on the ideas you have for the game.

I think it is a good mindset to have.

Sure, you may have thought of a game that melds a few genre's or types of games together but you shouldn't carry the philosophy of the game based on that. The game should be able to breathe with your creativity along the way.