What I Want to See With Metroid & What Could Push a Metroid Game to 20 Million Units?

[Jumpin]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Jumpin makes some good points.  What made Breath of the Wild so successful is that it actually got back to the roots of the first game in philosophy.  The first Zelda was an open world game about exploration.  BotW took this philosophy but applied it to a modern looking 3D game.  One thing that really showed this was the right move was the fact that Zelda 1 was actually the most successful Zelda game before BotW (in relative terms).  If you look at only Japan + NA sales numbers and adjust for population Zelda 1 outsold every game before BotW.

It turns out that Metroid 1 was also the most successful Metroid game going by that same standard.  The real thing to ask is what was the underlying philosophy of Metroid 1?  Then apply it to a modern 3D Metroid.

1) Make the game open world - It was possible to explore most of Metroid very early on.  Later Metroid games threw up obvious hard gateways too frequently.  Metroid 1 let the player explore a large area and the "gateways" that later opened up were not always so obvious.

2) Make the game claustrophobic - Instead of a huge sprawling world like BotW, make Metroid a more modestly sized space to explore, but then you have to keep retreading the same areas to find secrets.  If you've played Dark Souls 1, I am thinking of a level design more like the main castle area.  So many parts of the game come back to and connect to this area.  However in this Metroid game I wouldn't make these hard barriers so much as secret barriers that can be bypassed through a combination of exploration and sometimes a key power up.  

3) Make the game a horror game in space - This is the most important thing to get right.  The first Metroid game was based on the first Alien movie.  A lot of elements that were put into the original game were meant to be unnerving to the player to give a kind of horror movie feeling.  Over time these elements have been diluted or lost.  Here is what I'd suggest to put this back:
A) Make the game T rated or M rated.  If Nintendo can scare people with a T rating that's ideal, but if not then bring on the M rating.  If nothing else, the game would get a lot of buzz simply because Nintendo made one of their classic franchises M rated.
B) Make the game hard. Original Metroid was the hardest first party game on the NES.  A challenging and deadly game would add to the horror feeling.  The metroid in the game should be at least as challenging as the guardians in BotW and ideally more challenging.  Essentially, they should be making something like a Dark Souls game in space.  The constant threat of death adds to the horror feeling.
C) Make the setting a high tech ghost town.  The player should be exploring some type of settlement where every person was killed by Metroid.  The more advanced the human civilization is the better.  The metroid need to have killed a group of people that are seemingly unkillable.
D) Mess with the player's head. I've heard people say that Metroid is supposed to give the player a feeling of isolation.  This is true, but it's just one aspect.  Metroid is supposed to be unnerving, and the isolation is part of that.  Have aliens sneak up on the player.  Have the lights go out suddenly.  Have the floor drop unexpectedly.  Lead the player to an impregnable safe spot and then show a bunch of dead bodies.  Have Mother Brain lead the player into a trap.  Have the player keep discovering things that are the opposite of what they expect.  Put the player in a zone where they get lost.  Keep the player feeling like they are on edge.
E) Make resources limited. I think they should take a cue from Resident Evil 1 here.  Limited resources make the game more intense.  The original game made you manually recharge your energy tanks and missiles by grinding through enemies.  I wouldn't go that far anymore, but it did add to the feeling of scarcity which made the game scarier and more challenging.  Instead I would have one key recharge spot and that's it.  The further you get from this key spot the more likely you are to run out of resources.

I have one more thing which is more a matter of personal preference:
4) Make the game a third person shooter - I personally hate FPS games.  The biggest reason is that I feel the controls in all FPS games are clunky (even Mirror's Edge).  A lot of the power ups in Metroid improve your movement capabilities, and I think this would work better in third person.

That’s a very good point about relative franchise success. It’s also worth noting that Metroid and Zelda were relative unknowns at the time of their release, and there weren’t really many other games like them. Mario and Donkey Kong were the mammoth IPs in the early NES.

Anyway, most of the point below I’m relating to my personal experiences - so apologies in advance for all the anecdotes.

1. Agreed.

2. I like this point too, and really like the point about the locks on the critical path. Speaking from my personal experience: part of the “find the key to move forward” stuff - whether it be a key, switch, or special item, is one of the things I found off putting about the more modern pre-BotW Zelda and Metroid. Not that I’m against finding keys, switches, or items; only if they place a roadblock on the game’s critical path. So, while the original Metroid, Zelda 1, and BotW do have plenty of gates and such, it doesn’t prevent the player from going where they want and doing most of the enjoyable stuff in the game. While I did go to guides for secrets in the past, from Ocarina of Time onward I found myself going to a guide so I could continue playing the game. I did like Ocarina of Time in the past, but I wasn’t fond of this aspect.

3. I very much agree with the horror theme, and I think the idea of an M-rating might help more than hurt given that Nintendo’s Switch fans include a large majority of grown up people from the past generations.

I also like the idea of a hard game, but maybe not so punishing :D - the challenge of Metroid 1 was one of its big appeals to me, what I didn’t like was that there was a small number of energy-refill moments (was it two?) in the game, otherwise it was a mandatory 20 minutes of repetitious energy tank hunting purgatory (And I’m being generous here, I timed it once in my late playthrough, and it went over half an hour). Maybe a return to the main ship for supply replenishment. This scarcity of supplies element was also present in Breath of the Wild in the earlier parts of the game.

4. And very much agree with this. Third person has a wider appeal. I can’t speak much about FPS games as I’ve barely touched the genre since the N64. I have played and enjoyed a lot of third person shooting games, though. And the clunky controls of the first Metroid Prime game, even with the Wii remote improvements, didn’t match how much fun the controls of games like Scarface and Resident Evil 4 were on Wii (imo). In my opinion, the third person experience simply lends itself more to a more tense gameplay experience. It’s easier to care about the character and what’s going on. But, again, limited experience with FPSs on my part. Metroid Prime 1 is probably the one I played most post-N64.