Trusting my gut instincts and how abandoning core elements of a game alienates core audience
When a game a has troubled development cycle and stays in that dev hell for extended period, the end result is often a kind of polished turd. Either the dev team didnât manage to overcome some obstacle, either in code or design, or something kept rebooting. Metroid Prime 4 is an early Switch game that got canned when Bandai Namco was developing it, but got a restart at Retro Studios, where very few who worked on the first games work anymore. MP4 never had a chance in hell to be on the same level as the first two Prime games.
I tend to trust my gut feeling when it comes to games. It comes from lifetime of playing games. When recognize trends in game design, you can make deduction and inferences on how a game plays just from the footage. For an example, I was sceptical about New Sakura Warsâ play after seeing the initial trailer. It had a certain kind float to the action, which made it clear that it wasnât going to be very intensive action. The point where a Koubu rides alongside the wall was the biggest hint. I had seen the exact same action in 3D Sonic games. Thus, I prejudged the game to be a mix of dating VN elements with Sonic-like 3D action. Something thatâs not exactly people would expect from a Sakura Wars game, especially when it went through the genre shift from a strategy game to action. The gameâs sales reflect its reception; not exactly encouraging toward a sequel.
I could see the issues from that initial trailer. It wasnât engaging enough for action players. There was no reason the action couldnât have more depth, even when it was running on the Hedgehog engine. Nevertheless, the dev team didnât push it to its limits to be like the opening of Sakura Wars 3: Is Paris Burning? they wanted to replicate. It was too slow, too mulling. They didnât hit the mark, and the Sonic-ness of the engine came through too much.
As for the long-term fans, the change from strategy to action was an odd one. Sure, we know the justification for it, but changing a game seriesâ genre like this will always alienate parts of the core audience. Of course, the change was also made to align with the trends of the time, where slow-paced RPGs went under genre shift toward action. This was done to compete with other anime-action games on the PS4, meaning it was intended to grasp new audiences instead of catering to the core fans that still held Sakura Warsâ light. The game had sold 300 000 copies worldwide, with no sales numbers after that. Iâd estimate that Japan carried about 70% of those 300 000 copies sold, with North America and Europe filling rest of the majority and other Asian markets following that.
Itâs six years after the gameâs release, and thereâs no word on a sequel. While New Sakura Wars revitalized the series for a short moment with a media blitz, it didnât have a long-lasting effect on the seriesâ future. For the past two years there has been whispers about a new game being in development, but nothing solid has formed. The new audience the action approach was supposed to bring in new audience, but there seems to be no demand to see this continuing. Whatever fans came with New Sakura Wars are either silent or have moved on. As it often happens, game companies canât seem to take advantage of the situation and have something to keep the fans occupied while working on a real sequel. Six years later and theyâve lost whatever momentum they had gained. Now Sega has to contend placating Classic Sakura Wars fans and the New fans. Not an enviable situation.
Metroid Prime 4 is in a similar situation, where the game has been made to appease a new audience which never engaged with Metroid before, while most long-term fans are rejecting the new framing-narrative driven direction⊠which arguably already started in Fusion and at latest with MP3.
I understand the argument that MP4 has gone through Zeldafication, specifically copying the model from Breath of the Wild. The whole wasteland and dungeons underline this. I wouldâve argued that the two series have always been brothers in terms of non-linearity, with emphasize on Metroid being one large dungeon while Zelda was many small dungeons. Neither games did not do growth through stats, but via items and equipment necessary to continue. Both games originally allowed sequence breaking. Both then branched to different direction, Zelda removing the non-linear adventure aspect in favour while Metroid went to slumber after the 16-bit consoles were over. Metroid Prime is largely Metroid in 3D, and it worked. Of course, when something works well, the follow-ups want it to be polished, but sadly more often that not devs and publishers fail to understand these play-driven games stand apart from story-driven games, and we see the framing taking more and more space. Metroid Prime 2 had to set up the whole split Aether thing, and the exposition sequences were kept at relative minimum. MP3 went to the grand-ending route, meaning more characters, more story, which is why that game was universally regarded as the weakest in the trilogy. The DS game is often forgotten, but its pretty damn nifty, and the stylus controls work better than youâd expect.
Thus, we get to MP4 and weâve got talkative side-characters keeping you company in a game that requires you to farm crystals like in a Zelda game.
To wind back to the experience thing, I said I would give the game a pass for at least a year after we saw the initial footage. The gameâs visual design was no better than what was in Metroid Prime Remastered, and the psychic powers gimmick felt out-of-place, extremely odd. The gameâs whole atmosphere and design felt awkward, which I put on the long development period and multiple ideas mangled together. Thus, I concluded that initial reviews would be positive, and social medias would have a blitz of people both bitching and praising the game. Didnât know how right Iâd be after we saw the reveal for the talkative support characters. At that point I knew this game wouldnât be for me, and the devs were tone deaf about Metroid as a whole.
Iâm not surprised the game has found its place among people who didnât enjoy Metroid before.
The long-term success path for media has always been to first become a cult hit. Gain a strong, loyal following that will spread good about your piece by mouth. This is free and natural PR thatâs not muddled by marketing people forcing something unto people. Customers are surprisingly good at sniffing out fake praise and black marketing. Then expand the product. In games, this would mean polishing the mechanics and improving the code. Make it run better, prettier, all the while expanding on what the first game was loved for. Maybe do a spin-off comic or some other cross-media thing to draw more eyes on the main thing, the game. Continue doing this bit by bit and the IP will have a strong base to built itself on.
However, when you make drastic changes to the product in order to attract customers that werenât there before, you risk alienating the people in that cult following. There is a golden path this can be done in, but itâll never net you the Call of Duty audience. You can never appease everyone, and when you try to appease multiple audiences at the same time, you end up appeasing nobody. Worst, you might find yourself with a new audience that applauds and promotes your thing but never puts money into it.
Another recent example of games being made for new audiences, games cleaned for modern audiences, are the Saints Row reboot and Dragon Age: The Veilguard, both of which effectively dug a grave for the IPs. The less I say about those, the better. Iâve got other dead horses to kick.
Long running game series like Metroid always have to balance between making the game easy to approach for the new players and something the veterans could appreciate. Sometimes this is done via Difficulty selection, sometimes thereâs an extra mode that teaches you the controls and the overall flow of the game. Other times a company will make an insult easy game because they think a country doesnât understand the genre. Looking at you, Mystic Quest. Then you have the times when a game just changes the franchiseâs style and direction altogether, which rarely works.
Mega Man arguably did this successfully a few times around by making a new sub-series. Battle Network was divisive and a more than a few curses were flung at the game when it was first revealed. However, it wasnât either Classic or X-series, so it was mostly fine. Turned into one of the more classic entries in the whole IP.
Oh yeah, Other M exists. Was that intended to be a soft reboot or something in the end? That game feels like a fever dream afterwards.
Nintendo hasnât gotten Metroid since the SNES. The people making decisions never understood why it was more popular in the West than in Japan, which also happened to MetaFight, or Blaster Master. Itâs shows that a series that built itself upon player-driven story, play-driven motion isnât compatible with developers who want to make scripted events and have the framing narrative as the main story element. This kills whatâs now called emergent storytelling, replacing it with static scene that isnât worth replaying. These are the moments players talk about with each other, the ones that stay in your mind as challenges and lead to different approaches. If the player isnât allowed this, then all you can talk is the framing. This means the agency emergent story-telling offers is missing.
I donât see or hear people talking about Metroid Prime 4âs emergent moments. I mostly see people bickering about the character writing, which has become the gameâs most recognized element next to the desert area. In a yearâs time, when things have levelled out, we see whatâs the actual reception for the game without spin.
As for me, I think Nintendo knew very well the issues the game had. All the previews we saw were carefully curated to showcase the best parts of the game rather than the whole of it. However, experience taught me to keep it tight, something was off. Thereâs a certain level of polish or approach how a game is presented that I know will hit home. MP4 never did during this preview era, and while I didnât notice what was missing, my brain kept saying somethingâs incomplete. Now that Iâve see the actual game, with its uninteresting desert and crystal farming, with its NPC support that donât shut up, with its world being built on disconnected dungeons that have hallways for loading times combined with archaic non-linear adventure upgrades, Iâm good. They knew what wouldâve been controversial about the game and decided to dance around it.
I donât need to spend my time or money on the game. Maybe Iâll buy it from a sale down the line or used. How can I come to this conclusion without playing the game, how can I say definitive things without having spent any time with it? Because of experience. When Metroid Prime was coming out, I knew this game would be something special based on the prerelease footage and materials at hand. Bought the game on the 19th, a few days earlier than the actual release date on the 21st. The manual cut my hand; Iâve bled for the IP.
This isnât the only time I trust my gut when comes to games. Nowadays I can put more things into words, like how the new THPS remakes feel like corporate cashout because theyâve cleaned the games of their style, of their visual edge, and how porting mechanics from newer entries to the older games messes with the play design. Can the gut feeling be wrong? Yes, one time out of ten it misfires. 7 Blades on the PS2 is an example where it misfired.
Consume whatever media long enough and read on its history and trends, and youâll find yourself seeing patterns form. The same thing applies to video and computer games. You can tell a lot about a game whatâs in the footage, and often just as much whatâs not in them.
Have you ever looked hard at book covers? The trends there are depending on the genre across the decades, what sort of styles appear in what kind of works and how they depict the content. Experience and pattern recognition, those are the keys.
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