As you'll know if you've read our review, we adored Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, and consider it to be one of the highlights of the Switch 2's library.
However, with a Metacritic rating of 79 at the time of writing, it's clear that Samus' latest adventure didn't strike the same chord with many players.
It's certainly a different experience from prior Metroid outings, and it seems that Nintendo is willing to chalk this down to its protracted development period – lest we forget, it was originally announced in 2017 with Bandai Namco assisting, but was rebooted in 2019 with Retro Studios returning to the helm.
In a new interview with Famitsu, a Nintendo spokesperson (a name isn't given, it's worth noting) gives the following assessment of Metroid Prime 4's development period (thanks to Nintendo Everything for the translation):
“At the start of the project, perhaps due to the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we saw a lot of comments on the internet saying ‘we want to play an open-world Metroid’. However, Metroid’s core element of ‘increasing the amount of explorable areas by unlocking powers’ is not very compatible with the ‘freedom to go anywhere from the beginning’ of open worlds. Thus we thought to design a limited area that could be freely explored, and have that be a hub that could connect to other areas. Then we thought that if one could move around on the bike in a satisfying way in that area, it could be a segment that mitigates the tension from exploration, and paces the whole game.
In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed. That being said, development had already been reset once before (when we started again from scratch with Retro Studios) so backtracking development again was out of the question, and we resolved to move forward with our original vision. During this time, shooting games and action games went through evolutions, with an increase in game speed in particular, but taking in those changes would have made it difficult to construct the tempo of an adventure game, so we actively chose to not take them into account. Therefore, I think this game is pretty much divorced from the changing of times.”
As much as we (and many other outlets) loved Metroid Prime 4, it's fair to say that Retro Studios wouldn't have chosen to inherit a design template it had little influence or control over, and this surprisingly candid interview appears to back up this assumption.