Metroid’s core element of ‘increasing the amount of explorable areas by unlocking powers’ is not very compatible with the ‘freedom to go anywhere from the beginning’ of open worlds
Oh okay so they just dont understand anything about what they were trying to do then. Because BotW has plenty of places you can’t get to from the beginning, either because it’s too high, or the rain makes you slip while climbing.
They could probably have reskinned the game as something other than Metroid and it would have been fine. The gameplay itself isn’t great, but it’s not bad. As a Metroid game it was mediocre at best.
They should just stop making Metroid games entirely until they have someone who actually understands the principles.
I thought the same thing. I would honestly argue that metroidvanias were open worlds before we had that term. There are some that are more linear than others, but many of them are very exploration heavy and don’t have a single order you must do things in.
I feel like people’s perception of what “open world” means has drifted. I see people claim that GTA isn’t open world because it has linear progression, or games where the world isn’t particularly big aren’t open world. Like, they think BOTW defines what “open world” means.
Do you have a seamless, interconnected world that is the primary place the game takes place? Open world.
I would bluntly state that Metroidvanias are open world, and also aren’t the only open world games that have been around since the NES.
“…Divorced from changing of times”
Because you fit Metroid in an open-world shaped hole instead of trying to make a good game that was divorced from cashing in on the latest trends.
Even Metroid Dread was trend-chasing.
Gamers are fine with well-made open worlds. This one would have been shit even 8 years ago.
We heard BoTW players say: Open world is soo much beter for exploration than a Hyrule field world hub.
Metroid is all about exploration. So we thought… why not a hub world? 🧠
To be honest I think BOTW has had a negative effect on Nintendos approach to game design. While BOTW had its highlights, TOTK doubling down on a very large empty world without real dungeons got boring fast.
Breath of the Wild was a mid game, and a bad Zelda game outright. It ditched nearly everything that players had come to expect from a Zelda game. Tears was way better, but still lacked the feeling of being a Zelda game. If you removed all the Zelda assets, would anyone be able to truly call it a Zelda game? With Link to the Past all the way to even Skyward Sword I certainly could.
But the effect the games financial success has had on Nintendo as a whole has been devastating. Nintendo is the kind of company that will learn all the wrong lessons and none of the right ones. They are literal Monkey Paw thinkers. They saw the PS1 outpace the N64 and thought “people want disks, okay lets pick this really odd format disk with a tiny storage limit instead of using normal ones.” And then when the Gamecube failed they said “oh, people must not want powerful hardware I guess, lets just sell people the same hardware again so its underpowered this time but add a motion control gimmick.”
So when BotW was a financial success, they immediately believe that all of their big games need an open world, or need to be vast departures from what players expect from each series. It is truly tragic.
