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Nintendo Gaming / Re: Metroid Prime 4: Beyond [Insert thinly veiled Back to the Future reference here]
« Last post by Evan_B on November 21, 2025, 07:37:50 PM »As surreal as it feels to say this, we’re less than two weeks away from release and I personally haven’t wavered in my excitement. I wanted to pivot from the silliness of this one conversation and talk about another: environment design and scope.
What made Prime 1 feel like a good 3D representation of Metroid was the way that the environments were interconnected. I mean… yeah, okay, the elevators going from one place to the next doesn’t feel spatially plausible, but it did evoke that traditional Metroidvania map in how many environments felt connected to one another by multiple elevators.
I wonder if Vi-O-La is going to impact that sense, somewhat. Don’t get me wrong, I think the increase of scale warrants the inclusion of a fast-er travel system, but Sol Valley being “Hyrule Field” means that environments have fewer places to cross-cross with one another. What with all the talk of teleportation (and a rather explicit teleport occurring from one place to the next happening in the early hours of the game), one could argue that teleporting from region to region could add to the interconnectivity of the world in a way not too dissimilar to the elevators of Metroid’s past.
On the other hand, Prime 3 was a much more straightforward and much less interconnected game from an environmental standpoint, and due to the game’s context, that makes sense. Perhaps we will see a similar “chunked game world” philosophy in Prime 4, which might beg the question: how essential is the Vi-O-La?
Based on some preview videos, which I won’t really spoil, it seems that the Vi-O-La is not simply “Epona,” but has additional versatility/use even in each particular region. Which is good- I did feel that the gunship was a nice concept that could have been improved or a bit less context-specific.
What made Prime 1 feel like a good 3D representation of Metroid was the way that the environments were interconnected. I mean… yeah, okay, the elevators going from one place to the next doesn’t feel spatially plausible, but it did evoke that traditional Metroidvania map in how many environments felt connected to one another by multiple elevators.
I wonder if Vi-O-La is going to impact that sense, somewhat. Don’t get me wrong, I think the increase of scale warrants the inclusion of a fast-er travel system, but Sol Valley being “Hyrule Field” means that environments have fewer places to cross-cross with one another. What with all the talk of teleportation (and a rather explicit teleport occurring from one place to the next happening in the early hours of the game), one could argue that teleporting from region to region could add to the interconnectivity of the world in a way not too dissimilar to the elevators of Metroid’s past.
On the other hand, Prime 3 was a much more straightforward and much less interconnected game from an environmental standpoint, and due to the game’s context, that makes sense. Perhaps we will see a similar “chunked game world” philosophy in Prime 4, which might beg the question: how essential is the Vi-O-La?
Based on some preview videos, which I won’t really spoil, it seems that the Vi-O-La is not simply “Epona,” but has additional versatility/use even in each particular region. Which is good- I did feel that the gunship was a nice concept that could have been improved or a bit less context-specific.
