We've been over this before, Khuutra, I know. Expectations are dangerous, but you have to account for them. Many a great game has been brought to its knees by expectations, and much hate has been rained unfairly on games for not being something they were never intended to be. It's far simpler to just avoid that problem altogether and make something which doesn't mess with expectations.

Right, but that doesn't result in better games, and Metroid has never been one of Nintendo's "big appeal" franchises. it sells to a very specific niche, whose expectations were filled very nicely by the original Prime.

Now, as to the expectations of the average consumer? No, that doesn't work, I agree, and it's going to require a shift in the entire perception of what it means to play a game in the first person.

But I'd rather see the birth of First-Person Adventures as a proper genre (instead of just being Metroid Prime) instead of Metroid being adapted towards consumer expectations. I want new expectations.

The best way to make new expectations is to abandon old ones by making them impossible to apply. That's how new genres are born.

I really could care less in what prespective its in, be that 1st or 3rd, as long as the game plays like your traditional Metroid game. Thats why MP3 is my least favorite Metroid game, 3D or 2D. To many enemies (not really a bad thing), and too small a world. The narrative doesnt really bother me (only when the AU occasionally tells you where to go when your tring to explaor on your own).

A 1st person Metroid game is still capable of working, but its the content and game itself that needs to be Metroid-ified. Prime 1 did a hell of job in my opinion.

This idea is intoxicating and I hope they run with it for the next metroid game, at least for a portion of the game large enough to advertise.

At this point, the best thing they could do for Metroid is introduce some feature that's absolutely central to gameplay, entirely foreign in concept compared to what any other game does, and has just enough potential to let you make something grand without having so much potential that it blows away all possibility of keeping up with it. How complex the idea is overall doesn't matter, just as long as it can be introduced gradually enough that mastery never feels entirely beyond the player.

Hey, it worked for Portal.

Expectations aren't the problem. When Metroid Prime was first shown, the Super Metroid fans were shocked and thought they had destroyed the franchise, but when it came out, it blew both the fans and the reviewers out of the water. And so it became the best selling game in the franchise. But Nintendo failed to build on this new, bigger, fanbase.

I do not believe Metroid is too inaccessible, is it so much harder to play and understand than other "hardcore" games? Is it proof that the hardcore has left Nintendo? I am one of the Nintendo players that grew up with the NES and stayed since then, are there so few of us left? The artistic direction of Wind Waker was even more controversial than Metroid going first person, but Wind Waker still sold great. In fact, it only sold 60 000 less than A Link to the Past, on a userbase that was much smaller!

Where did the +1 million people that bought MP1 but who didn't buy 2 and 3 go? Did they read the reviews of MP1, thought it would be great, but bought it and didn't like it? Did they all start playing Halo instead?

If u include europe for hunters it is probably 1 mln + for each game, not exactly low.

I think environment interactions via the visor were a first step towards something like that, actually, but they weren't quite central enough to the core of the gameplay.

The best new gameplay mechanics start simple and stay simple. Where they grow is in the limits placed on them, not in the complexity of how the overall system works.

Take Portal, for example: they could easily have made it so that portals can be formed anywhere, so there were far more colors of portals, so that you could use portals to go back to any point where one had been placed no matter how long ago it had been put there, and so many other things. But they didn't. They set very clear limitations (no portals on metal, surface has to be big enough, only two portals, new portals erase old portals of the same color). And those limitations refined the system to the point that it was a solid, workable system with understandable mechanics that could be picked up quickly and applied in a dozen different ways with less than an hour of practice.

If they can find a way to have a similar impact with some existing Metroid sub-system, that'd be great. But I suspect a new sub-system entirely may be a better move...