4 ideas for fixing open world games

I have a confession to make: I don't like open worlds. Not to be confused with open world games mind you. I can enjoy an open world game decently well if it manages to overcome its deficiencies in enough ways, but that's the problem. If I'm able to enjoy the game at all, it's always in spite of the open world; never because of it, and this isn't even to say that I don't like the concept of an open world in theory. Obviously the idea of wandering around and exploring a vast landscape discovering hidden secrets and stumbling upon pleasant surprises can be quite tantalizing. The desire to explore and discover is in our nature as human beings; most of us are curious creatures after all. We want to feel like explorers.

The problem with open world games however is that they rarely seem to tap into this desire and actively work against the concept's main strength, instead replacing it with mundane checklist fulfillment. Head to this location here and acquire this thing, traverse across a bunch of copy-pasta buildings and trees, then head to that marker on the map over there so you can kill that guy. Check it off your list of arbitrary and repetitive things to do; rinse and repeat. There's no discovery there. I wasn't just wandering along the road at my own pace, going wherever I want and doing whatever I feel like before suddenly happening upon a treasure and being rewarded. No, the game had to explicitly point it out to me and throw a dot on the map so I knew exactly where to go.

Developers don't seem to trust players to find things on their own. They feel the need to hand-hold you every step of the way or else you might miss something. But here's the thing: you probably should miss things on your first playthrough. With many of these open world games clocking in at 60+ hours of content, it's not as if you were cheated out of any of your value even if you end up finishing the game having only experienced half of that. And don't forget that it's not hard to start up another game and begin anew again, or just keep trekking onward on your current save file after you've beaten the main quest line. It's not as if all this missed content suddenly disappears forever just because you didn't do it at the right time, so don't be afraid to let players miss things. That's part of the fun to discover it all.

Going beyond exploration, there's also the issue of the quest objectives themselves feeling like afterthoughts, as if they're just there to pad the game out and give you something to do in order to justify all the wasted space in the world. There isn't as much attention to detail and variety put into them as you might find in a more linear focused game. Open worlds present many technical challenges for developers; much of which I feel are never properly addressed, and now with Horizon Zero Dawn just on the... horizon (OHHH HO-HO +20 WIT), Zelda: Breath of the Wild launching with the Switch next month, and Hideo Kojima just recently confirming that his own latest project (Death Stranding) will be open world as well, it seems unfortunately that the open world trend isn't going away any time soon. Thus, I would like to take a moment to offer up a few ideas that could possibly help fix the common pitfalls of open world games.

1. Get rid of quest hubs.

Part of how we end up with this pile of quest markers all over the map and discouragement of actual exploration is that open world games tend to always have towns and cities that serve as "quest hubs" for players to pick up a bunch of new objectives. Instead of heading out into the world and happening upon various points of interest on their own, players simply scoop up all the neatly-labeled quest markers strewn about the city, and then proceed in a systematic mechanical fashion to check them off in rapid succession. While in one sense this could be construed as a convenience, in another this serves as the primary source of deflating the excitement and mystique of exploring an open world. When you know exactly where to go and what to do, it starts to feel formulaic and perfunctory. There's no surprise to be had, and if there's nothing to discover or explore in this world, then why have it be open at all?

Imagine if towns served mostly as places to restock goods and supplies for yourself, and as you're traveling along in the wilderness, you suddenly stumble upon a band of thieves robbing an innocent merchant. You can choose to hide somewhere nearby and wait for the thieves to carry out their crime so as to avoid an unnecessary conflict, or you can help the thieves in exchange for a cut of the loot, or of course you can play the hero and save the merchant. In a more traditional open world game, this scenario would likely instead play out by going to a quest marker in a nearby town at which point one of the locals expresses concern about their shipment, and they slap a new marker along the road where you'll find the thieves. Not only does this setup take away the sense of discovery from running into it on your own, but because it's all neatly wrapped up in the form of a quest objective, your course of action is already made up for you as well. In order to complete the quest, you need to save the merchant. In the former scenario however, since you were never told this is a quest objective that you must complete and you just stumbled into the crime, it's completely open-ended for how you want to tackle it, if at all. Now this is a fairly rudimentary example, but imagine if the whole world was littered with "events" like this that players just run into on their own through exploration rather than because a generic NPC was standing on the street waiting to tell you a rigid quest objective to follow. Imagine that the player's main motivation for progressing through the game is not driven by constantly rummaging their quest log and overworld map to make sure all the markers are checked off, but rather that they just want to keep exploring further into the wilderness and checking areas that they haven't been to before to discover something new, whether that something is a hidden treasure to be found or a conflict between the world's inhabitants that unfolds in the heat of the moment. By eliminating quest hubs and forcing players to have to explore in order to find things to do, you can ensure that your open world actually feels open.

2. Reduce or remove quest markers.

Keeping in line with the train of thought for quest hubs, devs should be reducing reliance on quest markers as well, but this isn't to say that these games can't have more traditional quests and perhaps even a quest log to keep track of them. In the real world, not every job or task that people pick up is something that you can simply do on-the-spot. Sometimes that means traveling to another location to deal with the issue, and since the task can't be done right away, it would be nice to have it logged somewhere so that you can revisit it later and have a general sense of what you need to do when you're ready to return to it. The key words here though are "general sense", as I still think the game shouldn't just spell out exactly where you need to go. If somebody gives you a quest to deliver a message to another person in a different town for example, don't just slap a marker on the map and make the player go to it. The quest log could just state that you need to go to such-and-such town to deliver the message to so-and-so, but beyond that there's no marker on your map for it, and once you arrive in the town you might need to actually use a little detective skills. Ask around the locals for directions or if they know / might have seen the person you're looking for. Maybe use a special skill like Assassin's Creed's "eagle vision" to find clues, or insert whatever random ability your game decides to invent for the protagonist. There should be some sort of thought put into it that makes the player feel more like they're discovering rather than merely referencing their checklist.

There is a delicate balance to consider here though as of course you don't want to end up on the opposite extreme where quests are too vague to be able to figure out and it feels like they're just wasting your time, as I saw this with Xenoblade Chronicles X wherein a quest would have you acquire a certain item with absolutely no explanation of where to find it, and considering how absolutely massive Xenoblade's world is, you could easily spend an entire evening scavenging the countryside only to come up with nothing. It just became an exercise in googling the location instead of challenging myself to find it on my own, so players should be able to find things within a reasonable time frame with the tools at their disposal and enough due diligence.

Hey Siri...

Ultimately though if a quest log or markers are to be used at all, they should be utilized conservatively. Players should always find themselves running out of markers before being able to advance to the next major segment of the game, as once the objectives dry up, the only way to advance is to shift focus to exploration, which again is the entire attraction of an open world and should be the goal to encourage after all.

3. Reduce or remove fast travel.

I know this is more of a hard sell, because backtracking can be tedious at times and you just want to get to where you're going, but part of appreciating an open world too is actually being required to traverse it and really take in just how large in scale it is. If you're just teleporting around from point A to point B like you're Mega Man, then once again you have to ask yourself if the open world setting is really necessary. You're just skipping over most of the landscape and not really taking in the scenery. If you don't actually care to traverse it, then why does it need to be there?

We don't often stop to think how little conveniences and streamlines can make larger impacts on our gameplay experience than we realize; impacts that go beyond saving us a few minutes of riding a horse across the road. They change our larger perception of the game as a whole, sometimes in negative ways. This was especially made evident to me over the years with Blizzard's famous MMO, World of Warcraft. As the game streamlined itself over time, they provided more and more ways for players to get around, but as we were repeatedly given more and faster options, the world continually kept feeling smaller even though objectively it was getting bigger with each new expansion. As a result, the sense of scale was lost, and you don't feel like you're part of a big living and breathing world anymore, but a series of isolated zones that you teleport to on-command. More importantly, these changes also make real impacts on player interactions. I belonged to a PVP server, and during the early days of Warcraft it was a fairly common occurrence while traveling with my group to prepare for a dungeon that we would encounter a band of opposing Alliance faction players and engage in small skirmishes or games of cat and mouse. Sometimes these skirmishes would prove to be frustrating, other times they would be satisfying, but in almost all circumstances it helped build a sense of camaraderie with my team, and the dynamic nature of these encounters made the world feel more exciting regardless of outcome. Yet after Blizzard introduced the dungeon finder system that not only automates assembling a group but also teleports you directly into the dungeon, suddenly all of these encounters were taken away, and as more systems were introduced to teleport around the world at will, you were less and less likely to find players wandering along the landscape from both factions, increasing the feeling of emptiness and decreasing the spontaneity of gameplay. These are just some of the ways how simple little changes can have costly rippling effects that should be taken into consideration.

There are ways you can mitigate the feeling of "been there, done that" though when forcing players to have to backtrack through previously-explored land. One such way is introducing more quests and events that weren't previously accessible at an earlier point in these areas, as now that you've progressed further in the game, changes in the story have led to new situations arising. You can also take a page from open world games' older sibling, metroidvanias. Games like Shantae and Metroid are fantastic at actually making you want to go back and re-explore areas because as players acquire new items and abilities throughout the game, these tools can be used to access previously unreachable sections of zones that you've already explored, sometimes providing a way to more quickly traverse back to a certain area you're trying to get to, or other times provide you with even more juicy loot and treasures to be found. By incorporating a similar mindset to modern open world games, you could design old areas to include more routes and shortcuts to your destination that you're trying to backtrack to, but these routes are only accessible once you've obtained a new item that can help you access them.

Fast travel doesn't necessarily need to be eliminated entirely. If the world is large enough that always making the player travel back and forth will inevitably become laborious, you could still allow fast travel with compromises like placing it on a cooldown that you have to wait to expire before you can use again, or make it cost some sort of in-game currency that is just pricey enough to make the player consider whether it's worth the expense. Whatever the case, fast travel is a feature that on its surface seems like a nice convenience, but if overused, it goes against the point of having an open world and makes the size of it lose its impact and significance. It should be used sparingly.

4. Make it linear first, expand it to an open world later.

Possibly the biggest problem of all with open world games is that the quests can often feel very cut-and-paste, as if the developers slapped some NPCs around a certain area without much thought or consideration behind their placement, and then they give you some kind of basic objective as a justification for why you need to interact with these NPCs; that interaction usually consisting of shoot everything that moves. Part of the reason for this is that open worlds obviously require exponentially more development time than smaller and more linear environments, yet the dev times for these games are rarely adjusted enough to account for this so that developers can put the same attention to detail in every area as they normally would with a linear game. To a certain extent this is unavoidable due to the limitations of time and budget, but another reason for this apparently lackluster quest design is that developers often design the open world first without consideration of the quests until later, so what if we reversed this process? Instead of developing the whole world first and populating it with NPCs and things to do later, we strictly design the main quest first and approach it as if you were playing through a more linear game with more thoughtful consideration of NPC and environment layout, how these things will interact with each other, and how we can incorporate exciting setpieces into it. Then with the time left over, we go back through these levels and remove all the invisible walls and conveniently-shaped cliffsides, expanding them out into more open environments and connecting them together. This approach ensures that at the very least if the player only chooses to stick to the main quest line, they'll be guaranteed a very tight and polished experience, and they can do side quests that aren't as engaging at their own pace until they get sick of them.

Of course, there is the possibility that with this approach the devs could spend so much time wrapped up in polishing the main quest and inserting setpieces that they run out of time to actually make the open world, and you end up with something more closely resembling the Tomb Raider reboot than Horizon Zero Dawn, but if that's the case, you know what? Good. Your resources were still well-spent, because Tomb Raider was a blast to play and a damn sexy game anyway, and I'll take that any day over another 50-hour snoozefest of mundane tasks and checklists, which is exactly what you would have gotten if that's all they truly had time for in order to cram that open world in. If you don't have the time to properly flesh out your open world, you probably shouldn't be making one in the first place.

Anyway, these are my thoughts on how open world games could help improve themselves. Now if you'll excuse me, I have another arbitrary fetch quest to get back to.

The Error Report: Capcom shocked that game they are famous for does well

After a recent earnings report, Capcom CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto expressed bewilderment at the success of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.

"I thought there wasn't a market for this anymore," Kenzo said. "Why would anyone want to buy a game from a franchise that has sold millions of copies in the past? Why would they still play a game that returns to what made it famous? I mean that was then; this is now. We can look at market trends, and the trends show that people want action, not horror. So you're telling me when we just let our developers make something they are passionate about and experienced in, it produces a good game? Preposterous; that hasn't been substantiated by the pile of spreadsheets and statistics I have sitting here. This must be an anomaly."

Mr. Tsujimoto had previously just returned from a visit to the Louvre museum in Paris where he had some controversial remarks about the famous Mona Lisa painting. "I can't believe the number of people coming here. Do people really still care about this stuff? Current market analysis shows that the population desires easily-discernible and distinctly feminine facial features. You can barely even tell she's a woman, and it's only thanks to the cleavage. At least da Vinci was able to understand the market that much."

"Thank God I convinced them to include the first person view," Kenzo concluded. "That's probably the only reason the game did any good. Maybe I'll try that with Mega Man next."

[DISCLAIMER: The Error Report is a fictional publication produced for fun and not a real news source.]

In Defense of the Other M

Hey guys, remember me?

Not content with only burning bridges with multiplayer gamers everywhere, I now set my sights on shredding my reputation with single player gamers as well. Let's get started, shall we?

It's one of the greatest and most critically acclaimed game series of all-time (that nobody plays because it's a more mature property owned by Nintendo). It established the strong female video game trope decades before third wave feminists started pretending that it doesn't exist. Its protagonist is so badass that she single-handedly thwarted a viral outbreak that wiped out an entire space station and she took on a space pirate army that culminated in the destruction of a whole planet. Yes, today we are talking about Metroid.

Metroid has undergone many evolutions throughout its existence, starting from its humble beginnings as an open world sidescroller that was too cheap to animate a crawling sprite, so they invented a random bullshit ability called the morph ball. And since then, our heroine Samus has acquired numerous new abilities and upgrades over the years, from grappling beams to obnoxiously huge shoulder pads. Not all of these changes have been welcomed by the fanbase however. When Metroid Prime launched as the first 3D Metroid game, it was met with heavy skepticism from the decision to switch to the first person camera angle. As fans had a chance to sit down and experience it though, most in the end came to accept this change, as the game managed to retain many of the elements that players have come to know and love from the series, such as its incredibly immersive sci-fi horror atmosphere and its labyrinthine open world level designs.

The most recent mainline Metroid release however has been met with massive scorn from the fanbase, and to this day, years later, it continues to be maligned as one of the worst Metroid games in the series. While some of the reasons for this are understandable to a degree, most of them I find to be hugely overblown, and as a result, I feel this has become an incredibly underrated Metroid title in an already incredibly underappreciated franchise. So today, I'm going to defend the allegedly indefensible, Metroid: Other M.

Without further ado, I have conveniently numbered key points which definitively prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Other M is 10/10 Adam Certified Approved Game.

1. Boobs

Boobs are a quintessential component to any successful game, especially when said game has no interesting ideas or quality gameplay to bring to the table. That's why Other M never misses another opportunity for Samus' suit to malfunction, even if it kinda makes no sense that solid metal material randomly disintegrates into pure energy stuff upon impact, or apparently when... Samus has a mood swing? I... I dunno how that--whatever. The point is boobs. This game has them. And Samus has a fairly respectable C cup if I may so. Speaking of cup sizes, want to know a fun fact? The reason why A cups are the smallest is because the more flat-chested you are, the higher value you're worth. It's true. Flat is justice. Don't try to argue it. I've done the research.

2. Lasers

It has frickin' lazer beams. Lots of them. And as Michael Bay has proven, if the boobs alone aren't an effective enough distraction, lots of lasers and explosions will be. No sharks yet though. I think they were saving those for the sequel.

X. ?????

What number was I on again? Let me get back to these after I ask my good friend Gaben.

If you were starting to think this is going to be a joke blog then SHAZAM, joke's on you, because no seriously, I really am going to defend this game. In order to make my case for Other M though, first we need to understand what is so hated about it so that we can begin to deconstruct it.

So what supposedly went so horribly wrong with Other M for it to be met with such contempt? Well it starts with Other M's opening cutscenes, revealing right off the bat that Samus' voice is as stiff as a federation soldier who just had his life force sucked out by a metroid. To make matters worse, she's mysteriously developed an odd obsession with a baby metroid despite that it's supposed to be the other way around. And she has a daddy complex with her former commander, Adam Malkovich. And she let's him order her around as his submissive subordinate. And she has a complete mental breakdown while encountering Ridley despite that by this point in the timeline she's already fought with him on at least four different occasions. OK... so there's more than just a few problems with the characterization here.

I'm not going to make any excuses or defenses for all this. After all, much of this does fly in the face of what we've come to assume about Samus as a character. Though it was never technically stated in previous entries, one could reasonably assume from her numerous encounters with giant horrific space bugs and her brief and scattered monologues that she was clearly a strong-willed and level-headed character that certainly wouldn't lose her cool at the first sign of stress. It's just bad writing, and there's only so much BS you can invent to plug the plot holes before you just can't ignore them anymore. Other M has many narrative problems, but there's also a major problem with using any of these criticisms as the central basis for your objection to it: nobody has ever played Metroid for the story in the first place.

Most Metroid games historically have contained almost no narrative whatsoever beyond very rudimentary conveyances through the visuals, as well as some scattered Samus monologues and space pirate data logs here and there. Moreover, video games in general are far more dependent on good gameplay to carry them than good stories. I would argue that a game can't survive with a good story but mediocre gameplay, yet it can survive a mediocre story with good gameplay, especially when we're talking about a series that has never traditionally focused on the storytelling to begin with. Yet despite these considerations, the vast bulk of fan critiques focus almost exclusively on this singular point, and in some instances even acknowledge that the gameplay isn't that bad, but still perplexingly conclude that Other M is a terrible game.

Some critics can't stop themselves from bashing the story even when they say they're going to talk about the gameplay. Instead, they unknowingly fall back on criticizing the story again without even realizing it. In a YouTube video entitled Does Metroid: Other M Still SUCK? by user TheGamingBritShow, the critic begins his commentary by noting that people have already thoroughly dissected Other M's narrative, so instead he is going to primarily focus on gameplay critiques. He then immediately proceeds to scold the game's narrative choice to require Adam's authorization for use of new abilities on Samus' power suit; the irony here of course being that he just got done saying that he wasn't going to focus on the narrative.

While it's true that this plot point is a departure from previous Metroid games that creates some unnecessary narrative contrivances, it is largely inconsequential where gameplay is concerned; though our aforementioned critic tries very hard to insist otherwise. Regardless, the end result for the gameplay is still the same: Samus gains a new ability after reaching various progress points throughout the game; just as in many Metroid games that have come before. The contention however is that this narrative change forces the gameplay to be more linear, removing the ability to sequence break that was previously possible in other Metroid titles. Unfortunately, there's several problems with this assertion. First, it should be noted that sequence breaking typically requires more advanced mastery of gameplay mechanics to pull off; mastery that most players won't have reached anyway until at least one full playthrough of the game, and even then, sequence breaking for the purpose of speed runs is still only a feature that concerns an exceedingly small portion of the playerbase. Your average gamer tends to pick up and play through a game only once and then move on. Hell, according to Steam's statistics, most gamers don't even accomplish that much. What I'm trying to say here is, to claim that this feature carries such a significant impact on the gameplay experience is to cynically inflate the severity of its omission. Lacking a feature that really only comes into play after you've already beaten the game hardly constitutes a grave indictment against the gameplay overall. Moreover, it's just wrong to begin with, as there's been plenty of games over the years that have allowed for nonlinear storytelling so that players don't have to follow a specific order of events, and Other M could have just easily followed this route if it wanted to as well. In all likelihood, Other M's linearity was an intentional design decision to make the game more accessible to wider audiences, not a necessity created by the Adam Malkovich plot point. Furthermore, this ignores the fact that previous explanations for why Samus always needs to regain her abilities were often just as contrived, whether it be Samus' suit being damaged in just the right way so that it loses a bunch of functionality but not all, or the fact that the Chozo somehow anticipated all this and planted the same abilities for Samus to acquire; sometimes twice on the same planet, or even just not bothering with an explanation at all, such as during the transition from Metroid 1 to Metroid 2 where Samus mysteriously loses all her powerups with nary a hint as to why. Now look, when it comes right down to it, I'm actually partial to hunting and acquiring gear myself rather than waiting for someone to authorize it. However, I do still feel like a lot of the outrage surrounding this has more to do with story objections and precedents established by previous Metroid titles rather than the gameplay itself being fundamentally flawed, because this isn't far removed from what other games like the Mega Man series or Shantae do, where simply by reaching various progress points, they just give you certain upgrades without making you have to "discover" them by exploring around the level. If you tell me that Adam's authorization takes away a degree of satisfaction from finding stuff on your own, then we're having a conversation here. If you tell me that the whole game is ruined just because Adam activates my gear now, then I think we've gone overboard with the nitpicks. And finally, all of this is to completely neglect the fact that Metroid Fusion was nearly just as linear in its structure as well, yet curiously this criticism isn't cited as a deal-breaker for that game, which brings me to my next point.

Most of Other M's gameplay criticisms also apply to past Metroid games in some fashion. The game only uses the D-pad and a couple of buttons? So does most of the classic sidescrollers. Linear progression so that you'll play through the story in the desired order? Hello Metroid Fusion. Lacking weapon variety because Samus just combines all her beam upgrades into one? That's also pretty much par for the course for Metroid games outside of the Prime series. The environments are bog standard? So was arguably the case for the first Prime game, and while Echoes may have had a more unique setting, its uniformly dark presentation and dreary landscapes made its environments even duller than Other M's anyway. It wasn't really until we got to Metroid Prime 3: Corruption when the Prime trilogy started offering both unique and attractive architecture, such as the fantastic floating city design on the planet Elysia. But what about missile expansions? Aren't they largely rendered pointless because of the concentration mechanic? OK, in fairness here, this mechanic is new to the series, but it should be pointed out that previous Metroid games increased your missile capacity by 5 per expansion, and as a result, it wouldn't take long before you could find yourself with such an abundant supply that unless you just got careless and constantly had them equipped all the time, you really didn't have to worry about running out either. Other M at least tried to mitigate this by making missile expansions smaller, but the inclusion of the concentration mechanic (which allows Samus to regenerate missiles anywhere as long as she can stand still long enough) only ends up worsening the issue regardless. Ultimately concentration is one of Other M's features that just outright doesn't make sense and should have been removed. Nonetheless, often times the missile expansions do become superfluous in other Metroid games anyway, but once again, this is not considered a noteworthy criticism of these games. To be clear, none of this is to say that all of these criticisms aren't valid. I think there is a lot that Other M could have done better. My objection here is in the insinuation that all of these criticisms suddenly add up to being deal-breakers where they weren't previously for other Metroid titles. It comes off as a double standard that is overcompensating for a lack of real major criticisms of the gameplay. If anything, Other M's gameplay is more of a throwback to the look and feel of its sidescrolling predecessors rather than something that fundamentally reinvents the Metroid formula, so unless your only experience with Metroid is the Prime trilogy, most of the core gameplay should come as no surprise to longtime Metroid fans.

Speaking of longtime Metroid fans, now would probably be a good time for full disclosure. I'm a huge Metroid fan. Samus is my all-time favorite video game character, and Super Metroid sat for many years at the number one spot on my all-time favorite games list. I love the series' foreboding and immersive atmosphere, the skin-crawling creature designs, and the iconic power suit which deceitfully hides an ass-kicking female underneath. At this point, you might be gleaning from me that I'm just a fanboy getting defensive about a bad apple in the franchise, but you would be wrong. I give no free passes just because of an established pedigree, and I have no qualms about eviscerating works from some of my most beloved universes. In fact, I have quite a few choice words for how much I find Metroid Prime 2: Echoes to be a convoluted, frustrating, and largely dull affair, but that's a story for another time. Despite these occasionally harsh criticisms towards my own favorites however, I know at the end of the day it's all in service towards making their successors better, provided that these criticisms are constructive and accurate.

My concern with Metroid: Other M though is that many criticisms leveled against it are not accurate or constructive. Instead, fans have painted a picture of Other M being an absolute mess on every level of its design, from its controls to its mechanics to its story, and as a result of this broad sweeping condemnation of the game, I feel it is sending the wrong message to the developers; that message being that we just need to go back to doing more of the same with the Prime series. This is not the right course of action for the franchise. Metroid needs to continue to evolve if it is to remain relevant as a series. While the Prime trilogy has received high critical acclaim, this has not been reflected equally in its sales figures, with the first game grossing a respectable, but modest 1.49 million units sold, and that's the highest selling in the series. Despite some of my cheeky jabs earlier, I do think this goes beyond just the fact that Metroid is a Nintendo-exclusive franchise that doesn't target their typical demographics as well. The Prime trilogy did get a lot right, but there are aspects of its design that feel dated, and over the years gamers have come to expect more from their games. We want more involving stories, we want well-paced gameplay, and we want satisfying mechanics. Yet in many instances, Prime just settles for a straight translation of its predecessors in 3D, and even takes a few steps back in other areas.

Let's start with Prime's minimalistic story structure. Perhaps the biggest reason why there isn't much to criticize with Prime's story as opposed to Other M is because there isn't much story there to critique in the first place. I would describe Prime's logbook approach more as "info-dumping" rather than actual storytelling, and despite that there were numerous logs to be found about Luminoth history in Echoes, I couldn't tell you anything about Luminoth culture right now even though I likely read through it when I originally played the game. That's because reading a bunch of text about it isn't nearly as memorable or engaging as actually living it as other games with more involved stories would have you do. Imagine if the Mass Effect trilogy stripped itself of every cutscene and dialogue segment, and instead only let you read the Codex entries about its universe. Now sure, I might still be able to learn about the Rachni wars and the Krogans being used and abused by the Salarians, or the First Contact War with the Turians, or the role of the Citadel Council, etc, but none of that would be nearly as interesting--nor would I likely be able to recall any of it--without seeing how it all connects to the actual events and story playing out right as I'm progressing through the game. I think most players would conclude after experiencing this version of Mass Effect that even though there's plenty to learn in the codex, the game's story feels skeletal at best because you don't actually experience any of it. You're just reading about it. None of this is to say that Prime is a bad game for doing something like this, nor even that stuff like Mass Effect's codex or Prime's logbook aren't welcome supplements to the gameplay. They can certainly enrich the experience, but they're not substitutes for actual storytelling, and I think Metroid could stand to do better. Sure, there are some interesting tidbits and crumbs to be found in the numerous data logs and ancient inscriptions found throughout Prime's environments, but video games are a visual medium, not books, and you can only get so much mileage out of a few lines of text on a screen. We expect more from games now. This level of story engagement may have been sufficient for the sidescrollers, but modern Metroid needs to strive for more. Narrative can help break up the monotony of gameplay, invest players more in the characters, and increase their motivation to find out what happens next; to discover what secrets will be revealed beyond just another missile expansion in that wall with a crack in it. And if we can make an interesting movie out of Tom Hanks having conversations with a soccer ball, we can sure as hell find a way to make Metroid's story work while still respecting that feeling of isolation that the series is known for. Maybe Samus commenting on every random thing she sees in an awkward monotone voice wasn't the best way to go about addressing that, but Nintendo at least had the right idea with Other M in the sense that it's time for Metroid's storytelling to catch up with modern gaming.

Then we have Prime's gameplay. Retro's insistence on a first person camera angle was bold, and while they did an admirable job converting Metroid's formula to work with it as best they could, it still comes with an inescapable cost. In the original sidescrollers Samus' power suit was more nimble and frenetic, with Samus being able to jump swiftly and deftly from one platform to the next. It really felt like the suit enhanced Samus' physical abilities and allowed her to perform feats of speed and precision beyond the limitations of a normal human body. Yet in Prime, this sense of speed all had to be scaled back to accommodate the new first person camera angle, as it could get disorienting quickly to have Samus dashing around and scaling up walls so hastily while playing from that point of view. As a result, this really changed the overall feel of Metroid in a subtle yet significant way, slowing down the pacing of the games and also scaling back platforming sections so that they aren't as prevalent as they were in Prime's predecessors. Consequently, this overall slowed pacing can often lead to a sense of dullness and lacking motivation to move forward at times. These issues are further compounded by the controls, which while functional, aren't particularly engaging because Retro Studios opted for single-stick movement and aiming. That might work fine for a third person game because you can make the combat more focused on movement and positioning rather than aiming and precision, but as Prime is already a first person game, movement is slower and more restricted, so the skill and satisfaction in combat should come from pulling off precise aiming and a quick trigger finger. Instead, you simply press the L trigger to lock onto your opponent and the game does the aiming for you. It just isn't as satisfying as dual stick controls found in other first person games. Thankfully, Corruption added some much-needed depth to its combat with the new motion control scheme that it brought to the table, though this still doesn't alleviate the general sluggishness of Samus' movement as mentioned previously. What all this adds up to is that despite the Prime trilogy's unquestionable prowess at creating a sense of atmosphere and immersion that truly lives up to the Metroid name, I still often found myself struggling to bother completing each game. In fact, without exception, it took me literally years placing each game on hiatus before eventually coming back to complete them. If I--a die-hard Metroid fan whose all-time favorite video game character is Samus Aran--took years to complete each Prime game, how do you think these games would be received by mainstream audiences and non-Metroid fans trying out the series for the first time? My guess is for those who did bother trying, many of them just gave up or didn't care to invest in these games beyond a one-time rental.

I mention all this not to divulge into a tangent about the Prime trilogy, but rather to illustrate the contrast where Other M succeeded, and perhaps why I find myself so much more forgiving of it than other Metroid fans. Other M marks the first game in the series of 3D Metroid titles that I actually found myself consistently motivated and engaged enough to play it through to completion in just under two weeks. That might sound like a silly achievement, but it bears significance given that the series had at least three other opportunities to accomplish this. It's pretty odd that this is the way my experience played out, as even I will acknowledge the Prime series succeeds on many technical levels over Other M, and yet if I'm being completely honest, I was still more consistently engaged by Other M, so it obviously must have been getting something right. But what is it? Well as touched on previously, I think the core of it lies in the controls returning to a more traditional third person view like the sidescrollers, granting Samus the speed and mobility she lost during the Prime trilogy. Now the gameplay feels more fast-paced, and Samus' suit is more responsive. Suddenly there's a sense of momentum again, and I can perform all the acrobatics I loved doing in the original games, along with even a few new ones, like the sensemove (dodge mechanic) and overblast (enemy pinning move). The frequently locked camera angles along one of the axes worked well in invoking the feel of the classic Metroid games while also helping make the D-pad controls feel more natural in a 3D environment. Switching between points of view was made seamless with the brief slowmo time effect giving you a chance to reorient yourself to first person while also serving as a cool visual enchancement. Despite claims of this feature supposedly being awkward and cumbersome, it really wasn't difficult at all to manage once you got used to it, so to the detractors of Other M's first person view, I have but one rebuttal. Git gud. Plus, I just love the Chozo power suit's design; it's one of the most iconic designs in gaming, and to finally be able to ogle at it again while I'm kicking space pirate ass is oh-so-satisfying.

Indeed, the worst offense you can truly level against Other M's gameplay is that it's just too much of a Metroid Fusion retread, but if we're being completely honest along that same vein, Metroid Prime was also technically just a Super Metroid retread in many respects. Of course, "well the other dun it tew" isn't an excuse for them to not try something more ambitious, but for me personally, I was just happy to finally play a 3D Metroid release that more successfully translates the feel of the sidescrollers' gameplay that I originally fell in love with; more so than the Prime trilogy was able to achieve, and that was enough for me, even though I certainly would have appreciated more. Not to say that Prime didn't succeed in its own right either; it worked well for what it was aiming to do, but much of the gameplay had to be reworked to accommodate that first person camera angle, and with that, part of Metroid's essence was inevitably lost in translation.

For all these reasons, I have concluded that the large majority of gameplay criticisms against Other M are ad hoc rationalizations in order to justify the visceral hatred toward its story. Because most players recognize that having a bad story alone isn't good enough justification to pan a game, yet when it comes down to it, mechanically 3D Metroid has never felt closer to its roots than in Other M, so unless you just never liked the Metroid sidescrollers or Metroid Fusion in particular, there really isn't much reason to object to it on such Earth-shattering levels as many fans would have you believe. And look, I get it, we all had our own perfect vision of our prized ass-kicking waifu pretty well-defined up until this point. I know we all envisioned Samus as a take-no-shit-from-nobody bounty hunter before Nintendo came along and told her to get back in the kitchen and make Adam a sandwich, but can't we just look past that for one moment and acknowledge that the actual gameplay was solid, and we could even glean from it some new features that could possibly be further refined in future iterations? I mean the dodge mechanic was pretty cool and satisfying to pull off, even if it was perhaps a little too easy. Maybe it could require more thoughtful timing to be effective with and be given its own dedicated button in the next release. And how about those enemy takedown moves, and the epic explosiveness of that diffusion beam? These are all great additions to the gameplay that I'd love to see in future titles.

It's really unfortunate that Metroid: Other M has received such a significant panning, because if you were to just strip out every cutscene where Samus has to speak, what you are left with is a surprisingly satisfying combination of Zero Mission's fast-paced gameplay coupled with Fusion's setting, perhaps reaching the closest Metroid has ever come to feeling like a proper recreation of its classic sidescroller counterparts in a 3D environment. If you're someone who has been holding out on trying this game after all the backlash, I recommend at least giving it a shot and making up your own mind. As for everyone else, I hope we can at least agree that whatever comes next, Metroid needs to continue to push itself forward and evolve with new ideas to rethink the formula, not just continually reiterate the Prime series.

That, and I'm sure we can also agree that AM2R was pretty fucking awesome. Just sayin'. Though we still have no sharks with laser beams. :(

[UPDATE 5/28/2017: Clarified and expanded a few points to this post.]