Here’s a Metroid Prime Trilogy Utvecklare’s Take on Why Metroid Prime 4’s Bike Sections Were Disappointing

Metroid Prime 4 shines when it centers on Samus exploring themed biomes, solving puzzles, and blasting alien foes. It becomes a far weaker game when she’s stuck on a bike popping wheelies over sand dunes. In our review, Zack Zwiezen called the desert—known as Sol Valley in the game—”the most baffling part of Prime 4,” frustrated that the desolate area felt disconnected both mechanically and narratively from the game’s much cooler sections. In an interview with games journalist and YouTuber Kiwi Talks (via VGC), Jack Mathews, lead technical engineer on the original Metroid Prime trilogy, offered his take on why that is.

In the interview, Mathews explained that the knowledge and toolsets used to build dungeons in the original trilogy would have transferred easily to MP4‘s dungeons—Fury Green, Volt Forge, Ice Belt, and others—because they’re so similar. The team had ample experience creating that kind of environment and was plainly well equipped to do it again.

But Mathews described Sol Valley as the game’s “Zelda ocean,” referencing the vast open sea from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. He said it was the sort of thing that had never existed in a Metroid game before, and thus had to be built from the ground up, consuming time and developer labor that could have gone toward strengthening the game’s core.

“It’s just a waste,” he said. “It’s a split of resources that makes no sense.”

Beyond drawing focus away from other parts of Metroid Prime 4, Mathews also said creating such a novel asset would have posed a significant “risk” to the development timeline. Working on familiar elements like the dungeons, developers could have reasonably estimated how long those would take to build. Sol Valley, however, was a different story.

“With Sol Valley, it’s like,[…]You need to make this whole system, make it fun,” he said, noting that’d likely be a “challenge” for the developers because it’d all be new to them. “How do you clarify that risk? How do you know how long it’s going to take to build anything in that, to find fun in that, to know if it will be fun? And how do you schedule it?”

It’s worth noting that development on Metroid Prime 4 was rebooted, with the game changing hands from a team at Bandai Namco to Retro Studios, which developed the original trilogy. And it seems like, rather than letting the OGs cook, Nintendo forced them to work with what had already been done.

“If I am Retro, I’m trying to make as similar of a game as possible, have an understanding of what I’m making, and do what I think was and is fun,” Mathews said. “And Sol Valley just makes no sense.”