For a few years now, fans have been hearing rumors of Metroid Prime Trilogy being ported over to the Nintendo Switch. These rumors have continued ever since, despite the port never being officially announced. And it hasn’t helped that fans are also still waiting for more news on Metroid Prime 4. Although Metroid Prime 4 news is still slow in coming, there has been a bit of news about Metroid Prime Trilogy.
Michael Wikan is a former dev at Retro Studios that had been a lead designer on all 3 original Metroid Prime games, and he even ran the Trilogy compilation project. Wikan explained in a Facebook post reply to a fan that porting Metroid Prime Trilogy to the Switch “would take a lot of effort, so I am pretty skeptical it will happen. It was straightforward to update MP1 and 2 to motion controls, but converting MP3 to normal controls would be a herculean effort, as it is scripted very specifically using volumetric triggers to detect the motion in precise manners to do specific switches, and the bosses are tuned to take into account the ease of gestural aiming”.
Wikan also said that he doesn’t think the Switch’s gyro controls could work for the Metroid Prime games, and that “Retro no longer has functional editor tools to work with the Prime code base, so everything has to be ‘brute force’ hard coded. Rebuilding the hundreds of interaction sets in MP3 alone, not to mention returning the game play to take in the slower engagement pacing of conventional controls would probably take a year with a 4-5 person team full time by itself”.
Then make the team. Especially if MP4 is still years away. I’ll gladly take the first 3 games in a year. (Should have thrown the team together the very moment MP4 got restarted from the ground up.)
Former Employee, in other words he doesn’t know if they made one kr not
Didn’t The legend of Zelda Skyward Sword use volumetric triggers and that’s getting ported
No, Skyward sword used pure 6 axis motion controlls like woth the Switch, ot completely ignored the sensor bar just to show off the wiimote plus. Which is why it desynced constantly. Metroid Prime 3 actually used the sensor bar, so that’s what is used to calculate it’s precise movements.
Didn’t seem like a problem on the Wii U (which I still have).
And I don’t even care about Metroid Prime. I only bought it because it was $10.
Well that was different. That was straight up just the Wii game on the Wii U. Same controls and everything. Keep in mind MP3 was built with motion controls originally so they would need to rework that entire game, in addition to everything else that goes into porting stuff.
Well, if Prime 4 is anything like the first 3 then maybe they can do full remakes of the game using that engine.
If Nintendo wants to make money and build more hype for the game theyll release the trilogy. This has been rumoured for a few years now already and I believe it’s in the works.
With such a large switch fan base and so many newcomers that haven’t experienced the prime games, the trilogy is a sure fire fitting to get everyone primed for prime 4 and yes I myself, like all Metroid fans will definitely revisit these games on switch. It’s doable and profitable ( no excuses )
It’s funny how I can configure Dolphin on my phone and get all 3 games running flawlessly, attach a controller grip and now I have a PSP-sized portable Gakecube and Wii and I don’t have a programming degree.
Somehow I don’t think adding touch and motion controls is that much more difficult. I call BS.
This game has been rumored for years now and Nintendo would most likely put way more than just 5 people onto it to get it finished. So that 1 year to get it done has been finished multiple times over. All this is really saying is that if it is real, expect it to be $60 and not $40.