Shinya Takahashi, General Manager of Nintendo's Development Division, has recently updated us on the state of the
Metroid Prime 4 project — which has been in development for a few years now.
The good news is that we finally have an official update on the project, the bad news is that the game has officially been delayed and will not be seeing the light of day for a long, long while. The great news, however, is that Nintendo has contacted North America based Retro Studios to develop
Metroid Prime 4.
Retro Studios was the studio that developed all three of the previous titles in the
Metroid Prime series, but was not involved in the development of
Metroid Prime 4. Takahashi also mentioned that whatever progress they had made, will be completely scrapped in order for Retro Studios to start working on
Metroid Prime 4 from scratch.
Metroid Prime 4 was revealed in the Nintendo Direct presentation in June of 2017 during the E3. Ever since the game's announcement, today's message by Takahashi is the first official update we've had on the project since the game was announced almost two years ago, so it being delayed comes as somewhat expected surprise.
Take a look: