Metroid Prime 4 being announced during last year's E3 was definitely one of the most hyped up announcements coming from Nintendo, and it almost srteals the show with a 42-seconds-long teaser of the logo.
Sadly, the
Metroid Prime 4 announcement did not give us an information regarding the game, the current state of its development, or even a provisional release date; regardless, it was still reassuring to finally know that Nintendo were, indeed, working on the long-awaited sequel to the
Metroid Prime series. It was even more devastating to find out that
Metroid Prime 4 was nowhere to be seen during this year's E3.
During a recent interview with Mashable, Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aimé briefly talked about the game and that it is currently in development, although he can't really share much about the project.
"Internally, we have expectations about when [Metroid Prime 4] is going to be released. We haven't announced it, but yeah, the game is well in development", said Fils-Aimé while also adding that the company usually has a time window in which they announce certain titles and when these come out, although some projects may end up taking a bit longer.
It is worth mentioning that he means they have expectations about the release but Nintendo of America is not involved in developing the games, they're only in charge of marketing and sales of Nintendo products, so Fils-Aimé knows the game is in development but may not really know how long it could take for Nintendo to finally release the game.
"Typically six months to maybe a year out is what we like to do, but there are times for strategic reasons that we believe it's important to message that a game is coming. We did that years and years ago with Zelda. We were messaging a new Zelda experience back during the days of the Wii U... It really depends on the game, it depends on the type of development that it's going through, and it depends on how we feel the consumer is going to respond to the particular message".
For reference, The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild was announced in 2014 and would not see the light until March of 2017, and the final product was a game that ended up winning the Game of the Year 2017 award, as well as getting perfect scores from almost every video game outlet. The same could end up happening with Metroid Prime 4, and we should patiently wait for Nintendo to surprise us with yet another quality product.