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A remaster of Metroid Prime Trilogy for Nintendo Switch has already completed its development and is awaiting release, it has been claimed.
That’s according to respected VentureBeat reporter Jeff Grubb, who claimed on a Giant Bomb show this weekend (pay wall) that Nintendo was delaying the release and announcement in part due to limited QA resources during the pandemic, and perhaps to align it more closely with the release of Metroid Prime 4.
This matches the claims of another key industry reporter from 2019, as well as what VGC has been saying independently.
“The game is over and Nintendo is holding it,” Grubb said on his Giant Bomb show. “I think the Metroid Prime trilogy is over and whether or not Nintendo releases it now or later depends on other factors.
He added: “I think this game is in their pocket whenever Nintendo decides it’s a good time, and Nintendo has been doing it a lot lately, so it’s not unusual, it’s not the a sign that a bad thing is happening, it is not a sign of a lack of confidence in Metroid… Nintendo can afford [to sit on it] and that’s how they treat it.
Grubb went on to say that one of the main reasons for the supposed delay in Trilogy’s release was due to restrictions on Nintendo’s quality assurance testing processes during the pandemic.
“I think a big issue for Nintendo for a while during the pandemic was quality assurance… I think Nintendo was focusing their QA resources on one or two big projects at a time and that meant some games that were basically done sitting on the side as they had their lockdown secure QA processes focused on one or two bigger games, ”said Grubb.
“Japan is still grappling with these issues, so I don’t think these processes are going to open anytime soon.”
He added, “The other factor for Metroid Prime Trilogy is that it will definitely be a marketing pace for Metroid Prime 4, almost certainly. So right now we’re getting Metroid Dread this year and I imagine the Metroid Prime trilogy is something that they’ll be releasing near the release of Metroid Prime 4, when it does.
The Wii version of Metroid Prime Trilogy, which added Wii remote aiming controls to the first two games, was released in 2009.
A former head of design at Retro Studios who worked on the Metroid Prime trilogy recently said he was skeptical about porting the games to Nintendo Switch.
Mike Wilkan, who was responsible for the design of all three Prime games before leaving Retro a few years later, made the comments on Facebook. The designer’s skepticism involves the complexity of translating Wii motion controls from the third Metroid Prime game to the standard Switch setup, which he said would require “Herculean effort.”
Nintendo recently announced Metroid Dread, the first main 2D installment in the series in almost 20 years, for release on Nintendo Switch in October.
And in 2019, Nintendo announced that it had decided to “resume development from scratch” for Metroid Prime 4, with producer Kensuke Tanabe tapping Retro to take over the project from its unannounced original developer. Since then, Retro has been hiring for Metroid Prime 4.
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