For a few years now, fans have been hearing rumors of Metroid Prime Trilogy being ported over to the Nintendo Switch. These rumors have continued ever since, despite the port never being officially announced. And it hasn’t helped that fans are also still waiting for more news on Metroid Prime 4. Although Metroid Prime 4 news is still slow in coming, there has been a bit of news about Metroid Prime Trilogy.
Michael Wikan is a former dev at Retro Studios that had been a lead designer on all 3 original Metroid Prime games, and he even ran the Trilogy compilation project. Wikan explained in a Facebook post reply to a fan that porting Metroid Prime Trilogy to the Switch “would take a lot of effort, so I am pretty skeptical it will happen. It was straightforward to update MP1 and 2 to motion controls, but converting MP3 to normal controls would be a herculean effort, as it is scripted very specifically using volumetric triggers to detect the motion in precise manners to do specific switches, and the bosses are tuned to take into account the ease of gestural aiming”.
Wikan also said that he doesn’t think the Switch’s gyro controls could work for the Metroid Prime games, and that “Retro no longer has functional editor tools to work with the Prime code base, so everything has to be ‘brute force’ hard coded. Rebuilding the hundreds of interaction sets in MP3 alone, not to mention returning the game play to take in the slower engagement pacing of conventional controls would probably take a year with a 4-5 person team full time by itself”.
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