Mr Khan said:
I would agree with all of that, except that control options are unlikely to be an issue because my money's on the next Metroid being a 2013 game on 3DS. My other concern is nonlinearity, because only the original Metroid had that level of nonlinearity. The franchise at its best (Super and Prime) has had "hidden linearity," where, outside of unintentional sequence breaking tricks, everything had to be found in a certain order, but finding it in that order felt organic and not forced. "Oh, now i have the grapple beam that i can grapple these little nodes, i remember these little nodes back in that room, now i can go that way," sort of thing. |
Hmmm... this is going to be tougher than I thought..
Reading your main points made me realize that I might not have enjoyed Other M as much had it been a much more difficult game. I am indeed a relative newcomer to the series; played zero mission, parts of prime 1 on my brothers gamecube at the time, and completed corruption on the wii. This game has however made me curious about the older games, and I'm even looking into getting the trilogy when I have the money, since I'm sure it will provide a much meatier experience, but on the other hand I'm not sure if I would have gotten into the series as much as I currently am if it wasn't for other m.
For me, as a relative newcomer to Metroid and Nintendo in general (only ever owned a DS and now a Wii), the more streamlined parts actually helped me get into the experience more easily, and relate to it quicker. I may indeed look back in a year or two and say that the sense move, concentration, auto aiming and acrobatics were too shallow, but on the other hand I may not have wanted to experience the more difficult metroids of it wasn't for this game...
For the same reasons I guess the method of control was appealing to me... there's something about playing complex games with the wii-mote only that feels incredibly progressive and more intuitive to me, and this is a direction i've wanted to see explored ever since playing endless ocean:blue world.That game made me feel like I was an explorer unearthing forgotten civilizations a lot more than corruption for example... and gave me a vibe much closer to that of zero mission to be honest.
Obviously splitting the user base is a problem with any long-running franchise in which skill is required to progress...I'm not sure what should be done about this though:
maybe the next game can use the vitality sensor to change the difficulty of enemies and the complexity of the environment on the fly according to the user's level of excitement?
another option is to split the franchise (and the timeline with it), like in mario and zelda's case... though this being a smaller franchise makes it seem less likely...
It does seem however, after thinking about your points, that no matter what they decide to do, having the story play such a large part has the potential to seriously burden them down the line...
I hope Nintendo can figure out a good way to deal with this one because eventually it will become impossible to please everybody... Personally I like to think of this problem on a deeper level pertaining to how games adapt their skill-level and story to a fluctuating user base without loosing their uniqueness... but that's more of a long term goal of game development than something to fix for the next metroid. For what i's worth Nintendo is making an effort this generation to deal with these kinds of issues via the super-guide, vitality sensor and probably other unannounced research projects...
I hope they can also come up with some good short-term solutions as well...
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