Metroid Dread lead explains reasons for the game’s controversial difficulty
Yoshio Sakamoto explains the meticulously crafted difficulty of Metroid Dread.
During a recent interview with Famitsu, Metroid Dread producer Yoshio Sakamoto discussed the reasoning behind the game’s controversial difficulty.
In the interview, Sakamoto explains that one of the most fundamental elements of development was appropriately pacing the game. For Dread, the developers decided to build a title with high intensity and fast-paced action. As a result, they also put a lot of effort into creating fluid controls that new players could easily learn.
For Metroid Dread, we tuned the action to be appropriately quick. The game design of each Metroid complements the action and this time, this time it’s very easy to control, something I’m personally a fan of.
Yoshio Sakamoto
Sakamoto went on to discuss the challenges of balancing the difficulty of the game with its quick and easy controls. He explains that both Nintendo and MercurySteam focused on the goal of making the gameplay and action extremely smooth. According to Sakamoto, the biggest challenge of ideally balancing Dread was the teams’ keen familiarity with the game. This made it hard for the developers to experience it from a new player’s perspective.
As a result, one of the priorities in Metroid Dread’s testing phase was tweaking the difficulty. Nintendo and MercurySteam had lots of people play the game to get fresh perspectives on the action’s difficulty. Because E.M.M.I. was an enemy unlike any from the Metroid franchise, Sakamoto explains that seeing new players’ reactions was crucial.
E.M.M.I. is unlike anything that’s been done before and we got lots of people to play it so we could tweak appropriate balance for an action game.
Yoshio Sakamoto
Balance that makes players seek revenge
Sakamoto further elaborates that the goal was for the game to be difficult but not confusing. He and the rest of the team focused on making sure that when a player dies, they know what to do differently on their next attempt. However, while they wanted to ensure players could retry levels without confusion, they also wanted to make sure E.M.M.I. remained imposing.
If you make it so that E.M.M.I. doesn’t catch a player all that often, or when they are caught, they can escape quickly, you can’t really express the dread of E.M.M.I, which is a core component of the game.
Yoshio Sakamoto
Metroid Dread released for Nintendo Switch last October. It received high praise from fans and critics alike, both for its return to form as a 2D platformer, as well as its fluid controls and fast-paced action. Although some may not have been ready for the threat of E.M.M.I., Samus Aran’s latest adventure gave Metroid fans something both new and nostalgic.
What do you think of Metroid Dread? As always, let us know below!
