The controls for the Metroid Prime games were certainly solid, and I really loved the Wii pointer aiming implementation in Metroid Prime 3, but I can’t say the controls of the franchise are perfect. Some controls worked amazingly. I still have no idea how they made platforming work so fluidly in a 1st person game. But other controls were a bit iffy. For instance, it’s a rare 1st person franchise with shooting that doesn’t use dual analog controls, so there is no way to walk and aim at the same time, or even like, peek around a corner or anything (at least, before the pointer controls in Metroid Prime 3, but I suspect they won’t use pointer controls this time around.) Should Metroid Prime 4 have dual analog controls? Maybe? I’m not sure what the best solution is, I just want the aiming to be quicker and easier, and not require me to stop in place to aim, if possible.

The original Metroid Prime nailed the world design. Aside from the space frigate intro segment, which worked well to get players accustomed to the controls and general gameplay mechanics, the rest of the game played out on a single planet, where each of the areas had several connections to the others, and in the natural progression of the game you never quite knew where you would end up next. I would often leave an area only to arrive back in it in a completely different place, opening up a lot more of the map than I originally suspected existed in the process. For example, early in the game you find the wreckage of the intro section frigate in the Tallon Overworld area. But by the time I had the required upgrades needed to get into the crashed frigate, I was arriving at it from a completely different direction, using an elevator I found hiding behind a save station in the Chozo Ruins that brought me to a clifftop near the frigate. This is just one example among many. Heck, the Magmoor Caverns basically have connections to every other area.

Just look at this map!


This, for me, is the ideal Metroid experience. Unfortunately, the sequels fell further and further away from this ideal. Metroid Prime 2 had a single planet location with connections between the areas, but the connections were limited, and outside of connections to a hub section, usually not related to the way you progressed through the game itself, but existed more as an optional way to quickly travel back to previous locations to look for more missile and health upgrades. And Metroid Prime 3 almost completely moved away from the interconnectedness by taking place on many different planets, with the only way to travel between them being Samus’ ship.

Sometimes franchises change for the better, and it’s not bad to mix things up, but in this case I really feel like the first Metroid Prime had not just the best world of the three, but the one that was most true to the definitive Metroid experience II would love to see Metroid Prime 4 go back to this deep and interconnected way of exploring. Speaking of the map...

This is a tough one for me, because exploring the world is a huge part of the Metroid experience, and often while travelling back to a place I had already been is when I would stumble upon the correct way forward, or find various upgrades that I either didn’t see my first time through or didn’t have the right power-ups to obtain yet. I don’t necessarily think Metroid should move away from this kind of progression and have fast travel spots all over the map per se. But I do find it a bit tedious when I want to get from one side of the map to the other and have to run all the way there. A few options to get around the huge map quicker couldn’t hurt. Maybe some conveniently placed morph ball speed tunnels or something that can shoot you across the world at lightning speeds.

Metroid Prime is an amazing game, but it does feel a little bit dated in some ways in 2020. We have seen the rise of procedurally generated gameplay over the last ten years or so, and even games that don’t use it still try to make their moment to moment interactions feel more varied and dynamic. Meanwhile, most every room that you travel through in the Metroid Prime trilogy is fairly static. There will occasionally be triggered events that change things, but nine times out of ten when you travel through a room that you have already been to it has the same enemies spawning in the exact same locations as before. For a game that has a lot of backtracking, and a lot of rooms you will be going through four or five times or more, things can get a bit predictable over time.

Metroid Prime 3 came out in 2007. It’s been over about thirteen years since the last mainline Metroid Prime game, and it will probably be closer to fifteen years or more by the time Metroid Prime 4 releases. There are a lot of games that can act as blueprints now for making your game areas more varied and dynamic when traversed multiple times. I don’t think the Metroid Prime games should go full-on procedurally generated or anything like that, but not having everything feel so static in the areas I continually traverse would be a big step up.

This is maybe just a personal taste (ok my whole list is made up of personal tastes, but this really is) but I love the isolation and horror elements of the Metroid series, and this is an area where I think the origins of Metroid should be studied hard when designing Metroid Prime 4. The first few Metroid games were all about exploring an isolated environment alone, in settings that often contained subtle or outright horror elements. One of the early areas in Super Metroid particularly plays up the creepiness factor, slowly building tension in a seemingly abandoned set of rooms before an explosion of aliens finally pop out and attack.

Metroid Prime did a fairly good job at the isolation, though it doesn’t have a whole lot of horror elements. Metroid Prime 2, on the other hand, has one of the scariest intro sections in any Metroid game, where you explore the aftermath of an ill-fated marine expedition and find countless corpses strewn around, which eventually arise as possessed zombies and attack you. I legit can’t play that section alone at night! That’s good stuff there. But by Metroid Prime 3 the sense of isolation was more or less minimized, and it contained fairly regular meetings with a large cast of characters. There was still a bit of horror (especially as your previous compatriots fell to the corruption one by one), but not really at the level of some of the previous games.


I want to see more isolation and more outright scary sequences. This is a game series inspired by the Alien franchise, after all!

Another thing that is obvious when playing Metroid Prime in 2020 is that the enemy AI isn’t all that advanced. For many of the enemies, it probably shouldn’t be. A lot of the creatures you run into in the various ecosystems are not supposed to be particularly evolved, and it’s fine if they’re following relatively simple patterns. But the Space Pirates are highly intelligent creatures who do things like research technology and build spaceships and such, they should have better wiser tactics than wildly hopping around or running straight at Samus! I’m not expecting anything at the level of FPS that are built around combat, but I’d love to see the enemy AI advance a bit so some of the battles could feel more alive.

I feel like a large part of the Metroid Prime trilogy approach to suit powers involved taking established 2D Metroid powers and re-inventing them in 3D. A bunch of this took place in the original Metroid Prime: missiles and super missiles, the (limited) space jump, the grappling hook, the the morph ball, the spider ball, power bombs, etc. made an appearance. Metroid Prime 2 got the screw attack working and Metroid Prime 3 added wall jumping. At this point, most of the main suit mechanics from the 2D games have made an appearance. And sure, we have gotten some new stuff as well, especially in the various visor upgrades. But I want to see the next great suit power. A power that years from now will stand at the level of the morph ball, the grappling hook and the screw attack. What would this be?

I don’t know! That’s up to the game designers to figure out! I think that it would involve motion in some form though. A lot of the best suit upgrades have to do with how Samus moves around her environment, and I have to believe that there is still some untapped potential there.

One thing that I think I knew but forgot is that Kraid was originally planned to be in the original Metroid Prime, and a model was even created for the game.


Kraid obviously never made it into the final version of Metroid Prime, nor any of its sequels, nor any other 3D Metroid game. The only 3D Kraid I know of is in the Super Smash Bros. games.

But can you imagine? How cool would this have been?!

"I wish I remembered more. I just remember he was huge, that there were a bunch of jumping pieces, and that there was no way we were going to make it work in the time we had."

- Jack Mathews (formerly of Retro Studios)

Is it finally time to make that huge and epic platforming-centric Kraid boss battle? I think it is! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want Metroid Prime 4 to just be a cheap nostalgia dump. The game doesn’t need to be set on Zebes and rehash Super Metroid or anything. It should be mostly new stuff. But we did get Ridley in Metroid Prime, so I think that it is finally time for Kraid to get his turn.

And if we can’t get Kraid, at least bring back Crocomire? #crocomirefan4life

Some of my other opinions might be controversial, but I have a feeling no one will disagree with me on this one. I absolutely love the Metroid Prime trilogy, and have played through each game multiple times, and my least favorite part of each is always the late game fetch quest. Basically, for reasons that I can’t quite understand, when you are nearing the end of any given game in the Metroid Prime trilogy, the final area is locked out until you go collect ten or twelve or so random knick-knacks hidden scattered across the entire world. This exists in all three of the main Metroid Prime games, so momentum would suggest that it will also exist in Metroid Prime 4 unless someone stops and says hey wait, maybe just because the first three games did something doesn’t mean we have to do it in the fourth, right? It’s ok sometimes to admit that you made a mistake and make adjustments moving forward.

What is even the logic behind a fetch quest like this? From a developer perspective I can kind of see why you would want to get your players revisiting the map once they have all of the suit upgrades needed to pick up some of those power-ups that they couldn’t get their first few times through any given area, but just leave it up to players to decide if they want to do this. Most of us will naturally check our maps, see some areas with unfinished business, and be capable of deciding on our own what to do about it.

Either that or they are just trying to pad the run-time of the games, but these games are long enough as it is, they don’t really need any artificial padding. And this thought leads me into my final thought...

One common Metroid experience for me, which I’m sure others can relate to, is when I run into a secret that I can’t do anything about yet. It might be a small grate that I need bombs for, or a platform just out of reach, or whatever. The only thing that I can do is just hope that when I finally get the necessarily suit upgrade I will remember every little point on the map that it applies to. But I won’t remember! Yet, surely... Samus Aran would? She’s a bounty hunter, that is a job that requires keeping track of various things, she must have some system for doing so! Also, she has a high tech suit with all kinds of software built right into it. Surely she would have some sort of note-taking software installed, right? It’s common software on pretty much any OS.

I’m not sure what the best way to handle this would be. For common things, it could theoretically be as simple as if you scan something that needs an upgrade you don’t have yet, it appears on your map. For instance, in Metroid Prime “Bendezium” was a material that could only be destroyed with power bombs, so any time you scan an object made of “Bendezium” it could appear on your map, maybe with some indicator of whether you have ever destroyed it or not (many destroyed objects tend to come back in Metroid Prime games, though speaking of fixes, maybe they shouldn’t?)

But this way of handling things also has a pitfall, which is that it turns otherwise interesting and complex environmental secrets into merely checking off boxes. Also, not every secret is something that you can just scan and instantly know what you need. Often a secret involves looking at the screen, knowing something looks fishy and might be a secret, but not being able to figure out yet what exactly it is. So it might help to let users create their own notes as well. In handheld mode this would be super easy, you could quickly add notes with the touch screen. It’d be a bit tougher in docked mode, but still feasible. And better than nothing!