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Frogger on 25 September 2017
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MTZehvor said:
Snoorlax said:

I don't think it needs much explaining, it should be made clear that Samus has become an enemy of the Federation and the hunter has become the hunted later throughout the game we get "reminded" of why Samus decided to go against them and their it follows with history of the Chozo, the Metroid etc. That is more than enough to keep the game interesting as long as the gameplay is tight.

While scanning was fun in Prime not everybody is interested in scanning and reading everything they find. Besides by implementing this way of storytelling the story will automatically be dumbed down because it should not hinder the experience. That's why i feel that it should be explained with cutscenes, text or voice acting but it should be skippable and not too heavy for those who don't care and just want to enjoy the game.

Going into moderately heavy spoiler territory for the unlockable memories in Samus Returns, so avoid if you haven't finished the game.

I'm working off the assumption here that the story will have something to do with the rebel Chozo faction depicted at on the "2D/10" panel. In other words, if Nintendo wants to make a story revolving around this faction, I think a Prime style game would be the best choice. The biggest reason why is that this is a narrative that will inevitably involve a lot of backstory. Samus having a questionable relationship with the Federation is easy enough to explain in an opening Super Metroid-esque monologue. But if the game wants to tackle this group of Chozo, there's going to be a lot of backstory that the player is going to have to be supplied with. Who are these rebels? What caused them to split from the mainline, peaceful Chozo in the first place? Who is the leader that executed the SR-388 elders? What caused them to suddenly disappeared from the galaxy? What exactly do they think they can accomplish with their violent methods that the other Chozo were unable to accomplish with peace? Do they know what happened to the rest of the Chozo, and if so, what? This is the type of story that a Prime style game is better prepared to address than a 2D game; the heavy emphasis on discovering what has happened up to this point and learning about what a seemingly lost civilization did are hallmarks of the Prime series. I'll grant that not everyone enjoys scanning that much, but that's a non-unique issue; plenty of people didn't like Fusion's and Other M's stories being delivered heavily by dialogue and cutscenes as that breaks the sense of isolation (not to mention that Nintendo doesn't exactly have a great history of delivering well executed story heavy cutscenes in Metroid). Inevitably, someone's not going to be happy with the method of story delivery. But that's how it goes with video games; you're never going to be able to please everyone, and enough people seem to enjoy the Prime games that if we're worried about how much people like it, a system based off Prime seems to be the best bet.

There's a couple arguments that seemed kind of contradictory. Firstly, sure, you can make every cutscene skippable, but if you're trying to implement a story that's basically optional to players having a good time with the game, scanning seems like the surefire way to go. Prime scanning set the benchmark for stories that are entirely optional; you don't have to scan any of the lore in Prime if you don't want to and you can still enjoy the game while having a general idea of what's going on. If the idea is to create a story that people don't need to be informed about to enjoy the experience, scanning seems like the obvious choice.

Secondly, I'm not quite sure I understand the comments about "dumbing down/hindering" the experience. I'm assuming the argument is that since scanning isn't something all people enjoy, that the enjoyability factor will be lessened for people that don't want to scan? If that's the case, then they can just opt to not scan and proceed as before, same as they could with skipping cutscenes. 

Metroid's original design philosophy was to be like a silent movie. That's why "environmental storytelling" is such a treasured aspect of the series, a description I still don't like btw. Either way, it was never meant to be a literal communication of story, and Prime is not understandable at all without scanning. As much as i hate scanning, Prime is a demonstrably worse game without knowing whats going on. It has terrible narrative conveyance.

At all. Something like Ori, Teslagrad, or even Hyperlight Drifter are more in tune with the way metroid tells its stories ideally. It's not just environment. It's dialog-free action and motion unobstructed by cutscenes. I think Limbo and Inside are the same, but i haven't played those or seen gameplay.