— With this being the first new numbered entry in 18 whole years, did the change of the times influence development in any way?
Development Team: At the start of this project, maybe due to the influence of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, we noticed quite a lot of opinions on the Internet along the lines of “I want to try an open-world Metroid”. However, Metroid’s core principle of “acquiring new abilities to expand the explorable space” didn’t mesh well with the “go anywhere you want from the start” promise of open-worlds. Because of that, we decided to restrict the freely-explorable space, and make it a hub that connects the other areas between them. We also figured that, by allowing players to comfortably traverse that area with a bike, this could make exploration less stressful and add some variation to the game’s overall pacing. Consequently, completing the game took longer than expected, and we could see that players’ opinions of open-world games were starting to shift, but nonetheless, (at the time we restarted development with Retro Studios) we couldn’t see ourselves going back to the drawing board after development had already been reset once, so we decided to stick to our guns and complete the game according to the initial concept. During that time, shooters and action games evolved, especially when it comes to game speed, but following those trends would have made it difficult to maintain the pacing of an adventure game, so we deliberately ignored them. In other words, this is a game that is nearly unaffected by the change of the times.
