One of the game announcements that caused the most expectation at the 2017 Nintendo E3 was
Metroid Prime 4. The series has been pretty much missing in action since
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was released in 2007 and fans were extremely excited when
Metroid Prime 4 was announced last year. But this year,
Metroid Prime 4 was never to be seen during Nintendo's E3 Direct.
Today we got some new information on the reason why Nintendo didn't showcase Metroid Prime 4 thanks to the people over at
GameInformer who recently got to speak with Bill Trinen and Nate Bilhldorf—senior product manager and localisation manager respectively.
According to Trinen the game is still in development and that they want to show things when they think are ready to be shown, saying that "
when we think we're ready to show Metroid Prime, we'll show Metroid Prime". To that GameInformer asks them if there's more than the logo shown at the E3 2017 and Bill laughs and says:
"Last year was the first year for Switch at E3, so we took a bit of a departure from our usual approach to E3, which is to focus on more near-term stuff. Last year, because it was the first year for the hardware, we looked at things that were maybe a little further out. This year, you can see pretty clearly, we’re back to focusing on the near-term. We’ll have more to share with Metroid Prime 4 when we have something we think is going to wow people".
This also agrees with Nintendo saying that for this year's E3 presentation they would only focus on games releasing this year, which should've made fans happy due to
Smash Bros. Ultimate getting an official release date, and a bunch of new interesting details—especially because it meant that the game was indeed releasing this year. That said, Nintendo usually makes their own exciting announcements whenever they feel like it during the year when they announce Nintendo Directs that are streamed online every couple of months or so. It is likely that they will devote a whole Direct to
Metroid Prime 4 when they deem it's ready to be shown and not to meet a deadline—in this case the E3.