Metroid Prime 4 will be the first game in the franchise on the Nintendo Switch 2, releasing on Dec. 4. While Metroid Prime 2 and 3 aren’t on modern consoles for us to warm up for this first new series release in 18 years, an interesting story about these games was now shared by a former developer.
Destructoid spoke with Kynan Pearson, level designer on Metroid Prime 2 and senior designer on Metroid Prime 3. After these games, he’s worked with Discord as a creative director for seven years and is now actively in gaming development as a creative consultant for multiple titles.
Scrapped Metroid mechanics might never see the light of day
We asked Kynan about what could have been in the Metroid Prime series. More specifically, what game mechanics were created for previous games but ended up being removed from their final versions.
“On Prime 3, there was some early exploration around expanding Morph Ball abilities,” Kynan told Destructoid. “I worked on prototypes for a bunch of different abilities that never got used.”
Morph Ball is Samus’ armor augmentation that allows her to turn into a small ball to roll through tight passages and tunnels to access rooms she can’t otherwise.
Kynan explained the scrapped Morph Ball abilities were essentially elemental traits. “You would have an ice ball with a frozen, icy shell that expanded the circumference of the ball. You could roll it along twin rails that, as it melted, you would eventually fall through,” he explained. A Fireball was also removed from the final game, which would allow players to ignite the Morph Ball and burn other surfaces to unlock new areas.
Another discarded augmentation, the Digital Ball, would let Samus project herself onto a monitor and have the player control her in a short, 2D side-scrolling segment, much like in the retro Metroid games. “The ball would get scanned, and then all of a sudden you would see it projected on a monitor, and you would roll the ball around through configurations, from wire to wire, and monitor to monitor,” he said, comparing it to Tron, as if Samus suddenly entered a digital world parallel to the standard game universe. Several other ideas, like a transparent Glass Ball, might never be used again, Kynan said.
“A couple of them were really, really cool, but just stuff that ultimately wasn’t going to work out for various reasons,” he explained. “They were just cool experiments that never made their way into the games.”
Metroid could go open world with more Samus transformations
Metroid Prime 4 trailers teased a wide-open desert area that Samus will have to traverse using a motorcycle. This sparked discussions about whether the game could fit into an open-world logic, similar to Breath of the Wild.
Kynan believes Metroid could support an open world perfectly. “It just takes [developers] a sense of understanding and an attention to detail to make sure that it still retains the elements of exploration, discovery, isolation, and ability expansion,” he pointed out, breaking down how all these elements in an open-world Metroid game are possible in the same way as they work in Zelda.
Extra Morph Ball transformations like the ones scrapped would be “just one of what I think are hundreds of options” to make the Metroid series open-ended.
“It is actually just the format of gating what abilities you’re able to gain at any time,” Kynan said after saying the differences between Metroid and Zelda are “nuances in the formula.”
“[Metroid] is a hundred percent compatible [with open world] in the exact same way that Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild are,” he noted. Kynan even suggested you can literally palette swap Link in modern Zelda games with Samus, along with some characters here and there, to make a great open-world Metroidvania, if developers wanted to tackle this challenge.
I want to play this Metroid game that doesn’t exist yet
I’ve forced myself to play Metroid Prime Remastered because I didn’t have fun with it at first—but loved it in the end. However, while I listened to Kynan’s ideas for making the Metroid series more open-ended, he outlined what I can only describe as the Metroid game I want on my Switch right now.
“One of the things that I’d love to see expanded is Samus’s transformations and unique and surprising ways that she could transform to use new and unique abilities to overcome obstacles and explore,” he said, using Cappy’s possession mechanic in Super Mario Odyssey as an example Metroid could follow.
All of Kynan’s ideas involve Samus taking a new form with a big upside attached to a limitation. “So if you transform into a Metroid, it gives you the ability to fly around, but every time you’re using a Metroid, it can be frozen,” he suggested.
Other funny ideas would be letting Samus be like a centipede that can crawl up walls but is vulnerable to knockback, or letting her slow time but preventing her from running. As long as there were some limiting mechanisms, this would open up a world of multiple solutions to a single problem in Metroid. “You could allow it to be open-ended. You can just solve things in unique and creative ways based on whatever feels best for you,” Kynan said.
And Nintendo, in Kynan’s opinion, is the perfect company to achieve such a challenging concept in Metroid. “Nintendo is a completely different beast in terms of game development philosophy,” he pointed out, explaining how their games let players interact with the world through their mechanics in countless ways.
“You can distill every experience down to that. You can have cinematic presentation and storylines that make you think that there’s greater meaning behind the things that you’re doing. But if your interactions aren’t satisfying, then no other element can band-aid that and fix a lack of solid mechanics.”
