David Jaffe's take on Metroid Dread

[sc94597]

It really is his choice of words and tone that makes him an easy target. I don't think the hidden paths are as necessarily straightforward to a new player of Metroid as some are implying in this thread, but the fact that he can play a game for less than an hour and start commenting about "bad game design" without knowing what that game design actually is intended to be is why he is getting the pushback that he is getting.

Metroidvania games are about exploration and testing paths before and after getting power-ups. Think of them as advanced versions of the maze puzzle sheets where you have to find your path out . Making the progression explicitly obvious would undermine a large part of what makes Metroid games fun and challenging.

Bad game design is design that fails to achieve or detracts from the experience the game-designer is trying to instill. This particular method of mapping the world doesn't detract, but in fact adds to what makes Metroidvania's -- well Metroidvania's.

It is one thing to not like a Metroidvania game, and it is another to not understand the genre and then comment quite arrogantly about how the game you are playing is failing to live up to the experience expected in that genre.