Metroid Prime Trilogy Switch Port would be tough, says former chief designer

Many fans are hoping for a Metroid Prime Trilogy port for the Switch as they wait for the highly anticipated Metroid Prime 4. However, the former senior designer of all three Metroid Prime games has explained why porting the Prime would be incredibly difficult. Trilogy to the Switch.

Mike Wikan, the aforementioned senior game designer, explains that Retro no longer has the Prime codebase editor tools. The gesture controls in Prime 3 would be difficult to translate to conventional controls.

I was a lead designer on all 3 original games, led the Trilogy compilation project, and was a lead designer on Donkey Kong Country Returns. The main problem is that Retro no longer has functional editor tools to work with the Prime code base, so everything has to be “brute force” hard coded. Rebuilding the hundreds of interaction sets in MP3 alone, not to mention retuning the game to accommodate the slower pace of conventional control involvement, would likely take a year with a team of 4-5 people full time alone.

I built all those games, lol, and the gyro can’t do it. I suspect the old GameStop entry was a mistake or joke.

That would take a lot of effort, so I’m pretty skeptical it will happen. It was easy to update MP1 and 2 to motion controls, but converting MP3 to normal controls would be a huge effort as it is written very specifically using volumetric triggers to detect the movement in precise ways to turn off specific switches and the bosses are tuned to account for the ease with which you can aim with gestures.

Michael Wikan via Facebook

It’s interesting to note that Skyward Sword HD has successfully mapped all gesture controls to sticks and button presses so it’s questionable as it’s a big deal for the Metroid Prime 3.

There is also a suggestion that the game can be easily ported via emulation and remapped controls.

I’m not a game designer though, so I’ll just have to take Wikan’s word for it, which is a sad prospect.

With that said, while it is difficult to achieve, it is not impossible. However, since Metroid has a smaller fan base than other Nintendo franchises, it’s up in the air whether it’s worth making a Switch port of the Metroid Prime Trilogy.

Metroid Prime 4 is currently in development and no details have been provided except that development under Retro Studios has restarted in January 2019.