Metroid Dread Director On Samus Losing Her Abilities: "Yes, It Has To Be Like That"

You know what? I feel like they could shake things up a bit but I’m always entertained so I don’t care. Keep doing what they’re doing

@Ooyah You are not alone.

For the Metroid series that makes complete sense, but I think for many other games as well ... Imagine starting at max level, or with a fully powered Master Sword.
I like my games to be challenging. So the more "work" there is, the better. A game where you'd be almighty from the start is completely pointless imo.

Honestly I'd love to see a game where you start with all abalities and during the game you lose them while you progress. It would seem more fair, since your skill level in playing the game increases.

Totally agree. A key element to Metroid is getting upgrades. Wouldn’t be very fun to have every item right from the start, and that’s part of what I didn’t enjoy from BoTW and ToTK.

«Would you really want everything from the beginning?»
Why not?

Exactly why BOTW and TOTK suck

Imagine a game where you start with everything and then as time goes on you lose abilities.

The formula is what it is and it's fine but that comment shows a startling lack of design knowledge, or drive for innovation. There are plenty of ways to do interesting and new things with Metroid.

@Ironcore Honestly as a base
concept, that seems like a good starting point. In my opinion, good designers typically think along those lines.

@Poodlestargenerica That would also be an organic way to increase difficulty over time. It would be like animal well where lots of the puzzles could be solved in a variety of different ways.

@Poodlestargenerica To be fair here, they're a third-party studio, working on an existing franchise. Maybe they wanted to change the core gameplay more than they were allowed to. For better or worse, the increased focus on boss fights makes Dread stand out from the other entries in the series.

@sanderev
Tunic kinda does this and is pretty nasty about it, without warning you’re forced to complete a difficult stretch of the game with your stats stuck at 0 and any items you missed before this point are unobtainable so it’s very possible to be stuck and forced to resort to the god mode accessibility setting as the combat and camera simply aren’t good enough for the gauntlet it throws at the player to proceed.

They should make a Metroidvania where you start with everything unlocked at the beginning and the big boss has already been defeated and the galaxy has already been saved and you just sit around at home drinking tea because there’s nothing else to do.

…Sounds quite nice actually.

@Ooyah Yeah, same. I love the Metroid games (it's probably in my Top 3 favorite Nintendo franchises), but Dread was just brutal. I've never had such difficulty beating a Metroid game before. Not even that spider boss in Metroid Fusion was as tough as the bosses in Metroid Dread! Don't get me wrong; I still love the game, but it was just way too punishing, even for veterans of the series.

She could at least give us a ‘Not again…” when it happens…

@sanderev NGL that sounds like a terrible idea for me ^^ regression instead of progression would have to be highly motivated and rewarded with something else imo

Maybe not, but if the series was competitive, that’s where you’d expect to have a fully capable Samus or Federation type from the get-go

"Otherwise, I think you would be disappointed. It’s like, what? You get everything from the beginning? It can’t be!"

He is wrong because I don't talk this dramatically about games.

I’d like a Metroid where you start out as Samus without the power armour (maybe an emergency catches her off guard) and you work your way up to getting it. I think that would be a nice narrative explanation for why she’s missing her moves. I don’t really care either way. Getting bonked on the head and losing all her moves works too.

@DiggleDog I've had the same idea in mind. Only I was thinking we'd built it through out the course of the game in which the abilities are tied to the pieces of the suit for progression. Samus being vulnerable in appearance but mechanically naked as well. Not quite like how we did it in Zero Mission.

@Ooyah same here, absolutely loved Dread but my GOD did I suffer.

Hmph. He's so right. There's no point playing the game if you don't get more powerful as you play. It simply wouldn't be Metroid anymore. The series has always thrived as a power fantasy and there's absolutely no need to change something that works well other than improving things here and there, like the brilliant melee counter.

Metroid Dread isn't just difficult, it's also immensely fun, and the clever increase in powers as the enemies grow stronger is a core part of that. Taking away powers as you play is essentially punishing the players for playing the game, an absolutely ridiculous concept. Even Soulslike games aren't that senseless.

How about giving you all of the old power ups at the beginning...and get this...coming up with new ones to discover! No, that would require original ideas, which most developers are in capable of.

@PROPS yes, I was thinking the exact same thing but without a negative comment about game developers!

@KidSparta Yeah, I'm not a fan of negativity, but it's true. Most game developers lack originality and so they milk the original ip to death and sometimes cheapen the overall experience with predictability (I'm looking at you Dread, with all of your color coded doors). The only upgrade or advancements they can come up with, are better graphics and new level design.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have an enemy that's studied Samus so that her arsenal is less effective against them, so she has to find new enhancements and technologies to tackle them? I'd rather this than the standard story of her armour just breaks but miraculously exact replacements are found on nearby planets anyway

Honestly wouldn’t mind a twist where she depleted her abilities over time so you have to find new ways to solve similar puzzles and it feels more like a survival to the end.

Any game that relies as much on backtracking as Metroid basically requires that you lose all or most of your abilities at the very beginning so that not everything is accessible to everyone immediately.

So surprised everyone says Metroid Dread was so difficult. I've never been a Metroidvania-player but I found Dread to be super easy up until the last boss (so difficult I haven't finished it yet). One of my favorite games of all time, even tried to understand "sequence breaking" which was a completely new concept to me.

@Tyranexx Agreed, I hated the EMMI sections. So frustrating and unfair.

Shake it up! Start with all your powers and every boss you beat you lose one, but you still have to beat the boss.

@sanderev With each boss you defeat, you have to choose one of your character's skills or abilities to sacrifice!

A reasonable argument, but has he considered that you could instead just keep adding more weapons and gadgets with every game to become an ever more laughably overpowered and horrifically unwieldy walking armory?

@Yoshif3 we get it, you don't like the new Zeldas.

Yeah I mean the entire point of a Metroidvania game is you have to unlock new abilities in order to give you a reason to backtrack through older areas and discover new paths and areas.

Sure they could give you everything from the previous game from the start, but you'll have to get new stuff that renders all that moot anyway. And if they give you everything you'd have by the end of the game upfront and never take it away...well then it's not a Metroidvania it's an open world.

I'm indifferent if they did or didn't. Another wrinkle they could do is let her have all of her powers, except she'll find out quickly that the power she came into a world with won't help her navigate it properly, so she'll have no choice but the power up in a new way. I always viewed it as one of those big deal, not so big deal, things.

@Fiskern Good, point is coming across then. No signs of stopping though.

Zelda should be a Zeldavania ALWAYS, except for the occasional spin-off.

@sanderev I have actually been actively looking for a game concept similar to this - a reverse Metroidvania, where perhaps you have a certain amount of abilities and are able to access many areas, only to - for story reasons - start to lose certain abilities that beings to limit where you can go. I imagine that a clever game designer could do this in a creative way.

I did end up finding one game on Steam that was advertising itself as that concept, but it was stuck in development and the screenshots at the time didn't look too promising.

What a shocker!