Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Could Have Been Open World If Wii Were More Powerful

Bryan Walker, who was director of development and producer at Retro Studios until 2012, revealed that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption could have been an open-world game that featured a heavier gameplay focus on Samus’s ship if, among other reasons, the Wii was a little more powerful.

As reported by VGC, Walker detailed these development stories in Kiwi Talkz and shared that Metroid Prime series director Mark Pacini had much more ambitious plans for this third entry than what ended up being the game shipped. Unfortunately, some of the ideas were too big for the time.

“Mark presented an interesting twist on the vision and some of the formulas for Metroid Prime 3, compared to Metroid Prime 2,” said Walker. “We wanted to heavily leverage the ship as a playable asset, and we had it to some extent in Prime 3, but Mark was thinking much more ambitiously.

“There was also an open world that was much less linear than what he proposed and the team was excited. We weren’t able to prototype many of them because they were really big. We had some prototype ships, but the open world one was much bigger.

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“In fact, Mark printed this origami boat Samus as one of his visual aids. He had taken the mesh from the Samus ship and used a program that basically unfolded it into what he could then turn into a paper model. So we had this cardboard Samus boat that he had painted on and it looked great! I think we could sell it today. “

He went on to say that the specifications of the Nintendo Wii, which lagged behind those of the PS3 and Xbox 360, could also have been one of the reasons these great ideas never saw the light of day.

“We knew what the Xbox 360 was going to have, when we found out what the PS3 was going to have and the initial specs that we were looking at. [for Wii] they weren’t competitive from a hardware and memory standpoint … there were all these downsides, “said Walker. “We were a little worried, to be frank, and then they threw out the Wii Remote and in unison the team said, ‘ah! Ok’.”

Despite this, Walker is proud of what turned out to be Metroid Prime 3. At IGN, we shared that sentiment, as we gave it a 9.5 / 10 and called it a “must-see spectacular experience and one of the defining games on Wii.”

“We may not have reached our goals with Prime 3 by not being able to expand the formula a bit,” concluded Walker. “We are still very, very proud of Prime 3, it turned out to be a fantastic game, but I would be very interested to see what the response would be, especially the fan community, to the expanded ship and the non-linear experience that we were playing.”

Will any of these ideas end up in Metroid Prime 4 when it finally launches on Nintendo Switch? While that question may not be answered for some time, fans only have a few more days to wait until Samus’ new adventure in Metroid Dread begins.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and in Twitch.