Retro Talk About Metroid Prime (NintendoLife)

[R.O.B.]

Highly respected American developer spills the beans

American developer Retro Studios has broken its silence about working with Nintendo on the critically acclaimed Metroid Prime franchise.

The Texas-based company worked closely with the Japanese giant to craft what many gamers regard as being one of the finest FPS adventure series in existence. In a recent interview with Next Gen, company president Michael Kelbaugh and game director Mark Pacini give some interesting insights into working with such a high profile videogame company.

You can check out the interview by clicking the link below.

Read more about 'Retro Talk About Metroid Prime'

[dk_xcalibur]

DANG! I'm blocked by Websense.

[ZueriHB]

For you, dk_xcalibur:

Metroid producer Retro Studios talks about the experience of working on one of Nintendo’s prestige franchises.

ImageSince being handed the license to make Metroid games in 2000, the Texas-based Retro Studios has quietly worked on the franchise and only rarely granted interviews. However, after the release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Retro’s final Metroid game (for the foreseeable future), we took the chance to speak with company president Michael Kelbaugh and game director Mark Pacini.



Exactly how does Retro Studios interact with Nintendo?

Michael Kelbaugh: There’s a tremendous amount of dialogue between us. Via email, telephone, video conferences and visits to and from them, we have a lot of face time.



On the Metroid Prime titles, we were one team – part of which just happened to be in Japan. We work with Kensuke Tanabe, of Nintendo’s Software Planning Division. He helps us to ensure we’re making Nintendo-quality games and had a tremendous amount of creative influence on the Metroid Prime titles. We also worked with Yoshio Sakamoto. Metroid is his ‘baby’ and he made sure that we realized his vision.



Mark Pacini: Sakamoto didn’t have a lot of day-to-day interaction with us, but he was the sounding board if we wanted to add anything that would affect Samus as a character.



MK: If we came up with a new feature, he might say: “She would never do that.”



MP: We work extremely closely with Tanabe, however. I think that’s why we’ve received comments from Japanese developers that our games feel like Japanese games in terms of attention to detail. Tanabe helped!



MK: The Metroid Prime series would not have been the same without him.



So Nintendo is involved in every design decision Retro Studios makes?

MP: It’s more granular later in the project. If we show them something and they say, Meh, it’s OK,” we know that’s way too early for them to want to look at it. As we get later in a project they get more detailed, because polish is what makes a Nintendo game. They hammer the game from every possible angle. It can be literally as small as moving a box one centimeter to the left. They can spot these little details that are so important to game flow.



Image



Talking about flow, many people found the difficulty spikes of Metroid Prime and its sequel off-putting.

MP: When we started the first Metroid Prime we analyzed what makes a ‘Metroid game’. We had to capture that essence.



One of the aspects that we thought about was the difficulty and how you’re never worried about dying until you get to a boss battle. And that’s key, because the player shouldn’t be afraid to explore. The challenge of the game was finding your way around, but the ‘physical dexterity’ part was the boss battles. We tried to make the boss battles puzzle-like, so if you knew how to fight the boss it might be easy, but if you didn’t it’d be real hard.



The mistake we made in Metroid Prime 2 was that we made the whole game far too difficult. For Corruption we re-evaluated and moved back to the true Metroid philosophy.



How did you find designing a game for the Wii Remote and Nunchuck?

MP: The main concern we had was that we had too many functions for the amount of buttons. Even though we ended up using every button on the controller, we didn’t have to drastically simplify the game. We used techniques like a stacking system for beams. We originally discussed not having any elemental upgrades, but Tanabe felt that limited choice, so we left that in. What really helped was freeing things from buttons, like using Nunchuk flicks to grapple.



There was some debate about whether firing missiles on the D-pad felt right, but to be honest we were out of options. Visor selection was a big deal as well. At one point the D-pad was to be used to select the visors, but we placed a visor select option on the Minus button. We were able to simplify, but Metroid Prime 3 isn’t a casual game, and there is a learning curve to the controls.



Do you feel that the Wii Remote is beneficial to the game in the end?

MP: There’s no question. I think it’s the most fun game that we’ve made.

Source: Next-Gen.biz

[dk_xcalibur]

Thank you