Nintendo said early development was shaped by online sentiment following the success of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Speaking in an interview with Famitsu, the studio said: “At the start of the project … we saw a lot of comments on the internet saying, ‘we want to play an open-world Metroid.’”

That ambition clashed with what Nintendo describes as Metroid’s defining mechanic.

Nintendo said: “Metroid’s core element of ‘increasing the amount of explorable areas by unlocking powers’ is not very compatible with the ‘freedom to go anywhere from the beginning’ of open worlds.”

The much-debated desert hub was designed as a compromise - a limited space that could be freely explored and act as a connector between more traditional, ability-gated areas.

Nintendo said the bike-focused hub was also intended to ease pacing.

The developer said: “We thought that if one could move around on the bike in a satisfying way … it could be a segment that mitigates the tension from exploration.”

However, the company acknowledged that player attitudes shifted during the game’s unusually long development.

Nintendo admitted: “In the end, the game took much longer than expected to finish, and we realized that players’ impressions toward open-world games had changed.”

Despite that, it ruled out major redesigns.

Nintendo said: “Development had already been reset once before… so backtracking development again was out of the question, and we resolved to move forward with our original vision.”

That reset came in 2019, when Nintendo restarted development at Retro Studios after pulling the project from Bandai Namco.

Nintendo also confirmed it deliberately avoided chasing faster modern shooter trends.

The studio said: “We actively chose to not take them into account”, adding that Prime 4 was designed to be “divorced from the changing of times”.