What Nintendo plans to do with Metroid Prime 4, which was announced seven years ago (!), is suspicious, as its release window suggests more than the Japanese company has let on.

It’s worth summarizing the development hell the new Metroid Prime is going through. Originally announced by Nintendo at E3 2017, the game was NOT being worked on by Retro Studios, which created the original trilogy (only Metroid producer Kensuke Tanabe was connected to the past). The big N hasn’t confirmed this, but we did learn that it was being made by Bandai Namco’s Japanese and Singaporean studios, the latter team including ex-LucasArts developers who also worked on the canceled Star Wars 1313.

A year later, Nintendo’s then-US president Reggie Fils-Aimé said Metroid Prime 4 was in the works and on track, but didn’t show it at E3 with the capital N, saying they’d only share more information if it impressed people. In January 2019, Nintendo EPD general manager Shinya Takahashi announced that development had restarted at Retro Studios, with Tanabe still working on the project. According to Takahashi, the previous concept did not meet quality expectations, and it was not an easy decision to restart development…

But then we didn’t see anything from the game for years until yesterday’s Nintendo Direct. In the gameplay, Samus Aran fights space pirates from a first-person perspective after landing on a planet and encountering another hunter during the shootout, and a green planet also appears in the trailer for Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which also confirmed that it will be released on Nintendo Switch in 2025, so Samus won’t be returning this year.

We suspect that this also means that the Switch successor will get the game, as it’s supposed to hit stores in the first quarter of 2025, although the big N has only officially spilled the beans on the new hardware, saying that it will be announced by the end of March…

Source: Gematsu