Metroid Prime 4

[TedEH]

I wonder if it would change very many people's perspectives if they knew how many games got half made or even mostly-made and then cancelled when faced with the "delay or release very broken" question. Or cancelled sometimes for stupid-er reasons. I ain't sayin' it's a wise move, but it happens.

I worked on something once that was around a week away from being released when suddenly the IP owner clued in what we were making, went "you know, this product doesn't make a whole lot of sense competitively, does it?" and just canned it, seemingly on a whim, despite it being basically done already.

Edit:
I guess to loop it back around - I can't help but wonder if the time it's taken to get Prime 4 is a result of an actual long dev time, or if this has been cancelled and resurrected a number of times. I could definitely imagine them building the game, deciding "this sucks" or "we don't want this right now", binning it, then trying again later. If it was anything other than Nintendo first-party I'd be very concerned about such a long dev time.

 

[brector]

Hell, Nintendo cancelled Star Fox 2 for SNES. Which was finished, but they were afraid it would compete with N64 game sales

 

[Demiurge]

To @TedEH's point (the quote system isn't working for me), Prime 4 was announced with Bandai-Namco attached in 2017 and whatever they were doing on it got scrapped and the project was moved back to Retro. So there's an explanation of the delay for the past several years. It would be interesting to know if anything was attempted in the decade after 3. Given 3's ending, there was clearly a plan for more.

 

[lattjeful]

I guess to loop it back around - I can't help but wonder if the time it's taken to get Prime 4 is a result of an actual long dev time, or if this has been cancelled and resurrected a number of times. I could definitely imagine them building the game, deciding "this sucks" or "we don't want this right now", binning it, then trying again later. If it was anything other than Nintendo first-party I'd be very concerned about such a long dev time.

It was publicly rebooted at least once, when it changed hands from Bandai Namco to Retro.

Honestly, I think Nintendo doing that teaser all those years ago is the only reason we're even seeing MP4. I bet if they had used their current strategy of waiting to announce a game until it's close to completion, it would have been quietly canned because we wouldn't even know about the project. Not until a game journalist says that "Bandai Namco was working on a Metroid Prime game for Switch," in 2030 or whatever.

 

[Cannibalcricket]

How funny will it be that the second iteration of the Switch will release and Prime 4 gets bumped back again? Is this just a carrot on a string forever? At this point I wouldn't be surprised.