Metroid Prime 3 Box Art
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It's been revealed Retro Studios had rather ambitious plans to make the third entry in the popular Metroid Prime series an open-world game.

During an interview with the Kiwi Talkz, Deck Nine Games producer Byran Walker - who was the senior producer on Metroid Prime 2: Echoes and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, revealed how Metroid Prime’s series director, Mark Pacini, had an idea to make the third game an open-world title, and even feature Samus' ship as a playable asset. Unfortunately, the "open-world" idea was so big, it got scrapped.

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“Mark came forward with an interesting twist in the vision and some of the formulas for Metroid Prime 3, as compared to Metroid Prime 2, we wanted to a greater degree leverage the ship as a playable asset, for instance, and we had that to some degree in Prime 3 but Mark was thinking much more ambitiously...There was also an open-world, less linear... that the team was excited about. We weren't able to prototype a lot of those, cause those were really, really big - we did have some ship prototypes early, but the open-world one was much bigger...In fact, Mark had printed out as one of his visual aids, this origami Samus ship. He had taken the mesh of the Samus ship and used a program that basically unfolded it into what he could then turn into a paper model. So we had this cardboard Samus ship that he had coloured in and it looked great, I think we could sell it today, but he kind of had that as a Mascot...and that was cool"

Walker added how he felt Retro Studios may have "fallen short" of its goals, in regards to the open-world design being excluded from Prime 3, and the title not being able to "expand the formula". Despite this, the team is still incredibly proud of the third entry and thinks it's a "fantastic" game. Though, he still does wonder how fans would have received this "open-world" idea if it was released:

"I would be very interested in seeing what the response was - especially the fan community to the expanded use of the ship and the more open-world non-linear experience that we were touching upon with that pitch."

Would you be interested in a more open-world Prime game where you could possibly even use Samus' ship? How about one like this in the future? Leave a comment down below.