Metroid Prime 3 was originally going to be a non-linear open-world title, according to former Retro Studios director of development Bryan Walker. Released on the Nintendo Wii in 2007, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption served as the final chapter in Retro’s trilogy of Metroid first-person shooters and pitted heroic space bounty hunter Samus Aran against her shadowy doppelganger Dark Samus and a dangerous mutagen called Phazon.
Metroid Prime 3 received near-universal acclaim at the time of its release for its story, visuals, and imaginative gameplay, which allowed players to use the Wii's motion-controlled remote to aim and fire Samus' signature Power Cannon. Since its release, the Metroid series has experimented with 3D third-person action gameplay in 2010's divisive Metroid Other M and multiplayer team-based combat in 2015’s critically panned Metroid Prime: Federation Force, but one genre the series hasn’t explored yet is that of the open-world sandbox made popular by the likes of Grand Theft Auto and Insomniac’s Marvel's Spider-Man games among countless others. However, it seems like this wasn’t always going to be the case.
As reported by VGC, former Retro Studios director of development and producer Bryan Walker spoke with Kiwi Talkz about the various projects he worked on before he departed from Retro in 2012. This includes Metroid Prime 3, which Walker says was originally planned to be an open-world title where players could explore space in Samus’s ship. “We wanted to a great degree leverage the ship as a playable asset, and we had that to some degree in Prime 3 but Mark [Pacini, Metroid Prime series director] was thinking much more ambitiously,” Walker explained during the interview. "There was also an open world that was much less linear that he was proposing and the team was excited about.” Sadly, these plans proved too ambitious for the relatively limited hardware of the Wii, and Samus’s ship only appeared in a few heavily scripted sequences in the finished Metroid Prime 3.
Watch the Kiwi Talkz interview with Bryan Walker on YouTube here.
Fans might get another chance to relive the Metroid Prime series sooner than they think, as rumors suggest that Nintendo is looking to remaster the original 2002 Metroid Prime for the Switch next year. Additionally, Retro Studios is currently working on the long-awaited Metroid Prime 4, though it’s unclear when this new game is coming out. In the meantime, players can look forward to the 2D-style Metroid Prime Dread, which is set for release alongside the new Nintendo Switch OLED model later this month.
The idea of an open-world Metroid game is certainly an interesting one, and fans are already speculating that Bryan Walker and Mark Pacini’s unused Metroid Prime 3 concept could be re-explored in the upcoming Metroid Prime 4. In the meantime, players will have plenty of great new Metroid games to enjoy in 2021 and beyond.
Source: VGC, Kiwi Talkz/YouTube
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