Ok, so it has been 3 years since Nintendo transferred the Prime 4 project to Retro Studios and we haven't even got a trailer. I am no longer getting my hopes up that this game is still going forward for the following reasons:
1) I keep reading articles about Retro hiring a top engineer here, or a project supervisor, etc. I have been reading these articles for years now (including a posting for a tools engineer and a technology engineer just this week) and we as fans usually take this to mean something good about Prime 4. In reality this can mean two things: 1) the studio is expanding and building talent or 2) the studio is losing talent (not a good sign) and is trying to refill the positions. Given how far into the development cycle we should be for Metroid Prime 4 now, these announcements seem a lot more to me like the latter than the former and so I do not take these announcements as being good news in 2022.
2) Retro has produced nothing since Tropical Freeze on the Wii U. Back in 2019, I was making excuses for Retro's drought thinking that maybe the studio was being used to support BotW and Odyssey behind the scenes the way that Monolith was rumored to have been. That excuse no longer holds water. Retro has had three solid years to focus on Prime 4, there is no way that we shouldn't at least have seen extensive gameplay let alone a trailer at this point.
3) Finally, Dread turned out to be a really amazing 2D Metroid game. It didn't feel at all like an appetizer for an upcoming AAA 3D entry, it looked and played like a game that is meant to be a main course for Metroid fans on the Switch. I just don't think that Nintendo would have dedicated this much effort to making Dread the game that it was if Prime 4 was waiting in the waysides. Nintendo must know that Prime 4 is going sideways and that Retro isn't up the task and so they made sure that Dread would be enough to satiate Metroid fans' appetite.
What are your thoughts? Am I over-reacting here or is Prime 4 basically dead in terms of being a Switch title?
