[Opinion]I think people are overreacting over the whole Metroid Prime 4 NPC situation

[burninmylight]

Vodacixi said:

Norion said:

I do think people shouldn't give up on the game yet and wait and see how the overall implementation of the NPC companion aspect is like but it's completely understandable for fans who prefer games like Prime 1 and consider isolation a really important part of the series and dislike how it's shifted away from that to be very concerned by the direction Prime 4 is going in.

Prime 3 did have NPCs but if I remember right after the first 1-2 hours you were alone most of the time until the climax and there weren't any that were particularly annoying so those people were able to put up with it but here NPC companions look like they're going to be a thing that continually happens throughout the game and the first one people have seen is terrible so even if he's the worst it could still seriously drag the game down if some of the others are bad too. Even Miles alone is gonna be immersion breaking for many Metroid fans and his character really does feel out of place, like if there's any video game series I don't wanna see a character like that appear in it Metroid is definitely up there.

If he's only in it for a small portion near the start that wouldn't be too bad though still not ideal since the opening hours of a game are the most important but it's actually up in the air how much of a presence he'll have overall cause this Japanese commercial shows him appearing alongside a few other NPCs at a later point so he is actually not confined to the beginning. Hopefully his role after the start is tiny.

I will say to you the same I said to Pemalite. You would have a point if Metroid Prime 1 was the last game of the series before Prime 4. But we had two sequels to the Prime saga and while both kept the isolation in good messure (and everything seems to point to Prime 4 doing the same), they also combined it with a progressively more direct narrative and more involved and numerous characters. A similar thing happened to the 2D games. This has been going on for quite a while. It's not a surprise. If a nerdy NPC is all it takes for some people to throw the game into the garbage can maybe they weren't that interested in the first place or they haven't been in touch with the series for more than 20 years.

As for breaking the immersion, I would say that the Aurora Units and Admiral Dane in Prime 3 already broke the "immersion" by telling you constantly what to do, what your situation is and even giving you hints and/or marking on your map where to go if you took to long to advance the story. Again, while the format is more "personal", this is not a new thing. It's an evolution of an already stablished tendency in the series. You can dislike it and that's totally fine. But people can't act surprised by this. And again, even if some people find Miles annoying, I don't think his presence (which again, will be limited) should be a factor that ruins Metroid Prime 4 as a game. Plenty of amazing games have silly acting characters, even serious games.

I don't think having a moment in which all the bounty hunters (Miles included) work together with Samus in a big battle is something to be worried about. If anything, it seems like it will be one big epic moment.

I thought about it after my last post, and remembered that Prime 2 has U-Mos as an NPC that stops and gives Samus context, guidance and direction at points throughout that game. It wasn't as nearly as involved and overt as it was in other games like Fusion, Other M and Prime 3, but Retro was already laying that foundation in Prime 2. Despite that, it's every bit as "Metroidy" as Prime 1 and Super. You're still spending 99 percent of the game isolated in hostile alien environments.

People forget that one of the biggest complaints about Prime 1 was the sheer amount of scanning and reading of logs that the game contains, especially in the opening hours. Prime 2 isn't significantly better. I've seen people talk about the overuse of audio logs in modern games since the PS360 era; imagine that, but instead of being able to multitask while listening to an audio log, you have to constantly pause gameplay to read the same thing. Immersion is a word that I've used in my earlier post because it's a word that Metroid fans like to use; did it not ruin your "immersion" when you're in a room/environment with hostile life forms that politely waited for you to finish reading data on scanned objects before you went back to shooting them?

Without having read or seen developer interviews, I'm willing to bet Retro realized that and started looking into ways to expand the lore and worldbuilding of the Prime series without being so dependent on reading lore dumps and diary entries.