The World Design of Metroid Prime | Boss Keys

It was easy to be sceptical about Metroid Prime. Our beloved side-scrolling adventure series was being transformed into a first-person shooter? By some dudes from Texas? That doesn’t sound good. Uh. No offence to any Texans watching, of course. But - credit where credit is due, Retro Studios did a bang up job. Metroid Prime captured the essence of the classic games - the isolating atmosphere, the lock-and-key structure, the interconnected world design - and effortlessly turned it into 3D.

And while it had first-person combat, this wasn’t some brain-dead shooter. It was less about precision aiming, and more about movement, weapon choice, and flipping between different visors. About outmanoeuvring your foes, not just outgunning them. So there’s lots to love about Metroid Prime. But this is Boss Keys - a video series about world design in Metroidvania games. How does it stack up in that regard? Well. It’s a good attempt - but I would argue that the game suffers from various issues in structure, layout, and design that can make it quite tedious to play through.

And we might end up learning more from Prime’s mistakes… than its successes. So without further ado. Let’s take a closer look. Just like Super Metroid, Prime kicks off with an opening section that doesn’t take place on the main map. In this game, it’s the cramped corridors of a space pirate frigate. It’s part prologue, part tutorial, and part preview of what Samus will be using later in the game as she starts all kitted out with her iconic Varia Suit, and tonnes of gadgets like the Morph Ball and Grapple Beam.

But then, just like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, those powers are stripped away. Samus gets hit with an electrical blast and is reduced to her most basic gear. She then hops in her ship and chases Ridely to the planet Tallon IV. It’s here that Metroid Prime starts properly. And from this point on, the game works like a typical Metroid game. Your path through the world is stymied by locked doors and blocked off paths - so you’ll need to hunt around and find new upgrades, which allow you to retrace your steps, get through those previously inaccessible areas, and move on.

And so, like other Metroid games - as well as similar titles that were starting to crop up at the time - the main gameplay challenge is about trying to keep the game’s world in your head. About juggling the locations of dozens of dead ends, and the twisting pathways that connect them. And the test of that knowledge happens right here: the second you get a new upgrade. Because as soon as you pick one up, you’re forced to ask yourself a critical question: “where can I use it?”

Whereabouts in the world have I come across a dead end, which I’ll now be able to overcome with this new item? But while that’s all part of the challenge for the player, it’s actually more of a challenge for the designer. To help the player keep all of this in their head so they feel super smart when they figure it out. And Metroid Prime shows us a few clever ways to achieve this. One way is to make the dead end memorable in some way.

Take, for example, the crashed frigate. This place is flooded with water and you can’t climb up this shaft because your suit is too heavy to swim up. So when you finally get the gravity suit, which lets you jump in water, you’ll know to return here. It’s memorable because you can see exactly where you want to go, but you’re held back by the water. And it’s really easy to make the connection between the gravity suit, and this room, once you grab it.

Adversity is another good way to make things memorable, like the super hot rooms of Magmoor Caverns which quickly sap your health bar if you try to explore them. When you finally find the Varia Suit, which lets you resist hot temperatures, you’ll know exactly where to go. Another trick is to have a copy of the dead end, near the power-up. So when you get the Boost Ball in Phendrana Drifts, you need to speed up this half pipe to get out of the room.

This isn’t just a quick tutorial on how the new item works - like the Morph Ball trap in Metroid 1 - but it should also bring to mind the other half pipes in the world - the one in Chozo Ruins and the one in Tallon Overworld. It’s also generally a good idea to try and make sure the player sees the dead end before they get the power-up. Metroid Prime’s designers often do this by giving you a power-up, leading you down a path, and then quickly hitting you with another dead end.

Like, after you get the missiles you’ll immediately want to use them on the door in front of you, where you’ll get an energy tank and find… a hole you can’t squeeze through yet. But now you’ve seen it, and will hopefully remember to come back with the Morph Ball. So Metroid Prime is pretty good at making its dead ends memorable. But not always. One example is how doors opened by missiles, the wave beam, the ice beam, and the plasma beam are simply drawn onto the map as different coloured door icons.

This means once you get the relevant beam, the game becomes “open the map, find a nearby door you can go through, and walk over there”. That’s not using your brain, that’s basically just following an objective marker. Other dead ends just aren’t very well communicated. Straight after you get the power bomb, you come to this room. A Metroid quarantine area. And it’s clear you can’t get across the room because it’s covered in deadly Phazon.

And it’s very easy to assume that you’ll need to get something to withstand Phazon. But no. The Phazon suit is actually found beyond this area. Instead you need to find the X-Ray Visor which shows up hidden platforms. And by definition, it’s impossible to make these invisible platforms memorable to the player because, well, they’re invisible. That whole item needed a bit of a rethink, if you ask me. So sometimes you’re going to get a new power-up, and your answer to “where can I use it?”

is simply “I don’t know”. And so the the player’s going to need some help. Of course, there’s the hint system. Metroid Prime has a pretty heavy handed system that tells you almost exactly where to go, at all times. i don’t really care about this because it’s completely optional - unlike some hints - though, it’s a shame that it’s on by default. The other thing to do if you get stuck is to just wander off and explore.

See if you can’t find the dead ends yourself. And this needs a few things to work well. One is an abundance of optional goodies behind dead ends. Things that you can find while exploring so you’re constantly making small victories - rather than searching the entire map for the one single location that you can now explore. Prime’s definitely got this. There are charge combos, missile tanks, power bombs, and energy tanks scattered around the world.

You also need a good map that shows you where you have and haven’t explored. Metroid Prime does a pretty good job at this - orange rooms have been explored, and blue ones haven’t. But it sometimes falls apart. After getting the spider ball, the place to use it - here - isn’t shown on the map. Even if you activated the terminal. So you might write off returning to this room altogether. The final consideration is constraints.

You see, the more of the world you unlock, the more difficult and daunting it is to revisit each room in search of progress. Like: after you get the morph ball at the beginning of the game, you have access to about 25 rooms. It’s not impossible to simply check each room to see if you can make further progress. But once you have the grappling beam towards the end of the game, there are hundreds of rooms to go in. You can’t possibly check them all without getting bored and resorting to a walkthrough.

Some games try to limit your options. Super Metroid did this really well by trapping you in Norfair for a while, so you couldn’t possibly backtrack to Brinstar and - thus - limited your options to just one part of the game. Metroid Prime never really does this, so the explorable space simply grows and grows and grows. Okay. So let’s say you do know where to go. You got the Boost Ball in Phendrana Drifts and you say to yourself, “Aha!

I know exactly where to use that! To the Tallon Overworld!” The next question is: How easy is it to travel across the world, to where you need to go? Well. In some ways, I found Metroid Prime quite easy to navigate. Largely because the world is split into five distinct areas that were easy to tell apart, and organise in my mind. There’s the Tallon Overworld, which is grassy and Earth-like. The Chozo Ruins, which are dusty and ancient.

Magmoor Caverns, which are filled with lava. Phendrana Drifts, which are covered in snow. And the Phazon Mines, which are corrupted by deadly toxins. They’re so distinct that you could blur out a screenshot of just about any area and still know where you are based entirely on the colour scheme of each area. That’s really good design. But what makes life tricky is the way these places are connected. So the first three areas you visit, the Tallon Overworld, Chozo Ruins, and Magmoor Caverns are all connected to each other by elevators.

That makes it relatively easy to jump between these locations. But the other areas are a bit more isolated. The Phazon Mines are only connected to Tallon and Magmoor, which makes the mines slightly more difficult to get to. But the real kicker is Phendrana Drifts which is only accessible through Magmoor Caverns. So no matter where you are in the world… you’ve got to go through Magmoor whenever you want to go to Phendrana.

Which, as it turns out, is quite often! You need to travel through Magmoor Caverns after getting the Varia Suit in the Chozo Ruins. After getting the Boost Ball in Phendrana Drifts. After getting the Space Jump Boots in Tallon Overworld. After getting the Spider Ball in Phendrana Drifts. And after getting the Ice Beam in Chozo Ruins. That’s at least five trips through the same area. And there’s not even that much in Magmoor Caverns!

Just one item - the Plasma Beam. And two other things, which I’ll come back to in a bit. So Magmoor Caverns is basically just a subway station between two other areas in the game, and Metroid Prime’s structure would barely change at all if this entire place was removed - which is never a good sign. One thing Magmoor does have going for it is how the space becomes easier to traverse as the game goes on. The space jump boots let you leap over obstacles that, last time you came this way, you had to slowly crawl through.

The grapple beam lets you swing over molten lava that previously needed to be carefully avoided. And so on. I also found the map quite difficult to read. This cute 3D wireframe map is real nifty when looking at what’s in your current location - but it’s pretty useless from a worldwide perspective. It’s hard to know where this elevator, which just says “Transport to Phendrana Drifts North” will link up without zooming out to the world map, finding Phendrana, and then making a decision about which spot that actually refers to.

And, ultimately, I think the disconnected nature of each area - the way you zip between them in an elevator cutscene - makes it harder to remember how everything links up. Especially when compared to something like Dark Souls, where having to physically move from place to place makes it easier to understand how the world is put together. Though, I appreciate that Metroid Prime was having to fit the technical specs of the Gamecube and these elevators are probably hiding a loading screen.

So, thus far, I’ve only been talking about upgrades. Stuff like the morph ball, wave beam, thermal visor, and gravity suit. The game’s got 17 of them to find and for the vast majority of them, the have to be acquired in the order set by the developer. As in, you need to use the missiles to get the morph ball, use the morph ball to get the bombs, use the bombs to get the varia suit, and so on - right up until Samus is decked out in a phazon suit.

But collecting upgrades is not actually what you need to do to get to the final boss and trigger the ending. Instead, you need to find 12 Chozo Artifacts that are hidden around the world. Getting the power ups, ultimately, just lets you get to these artifacts. So hopefully you’ll stumble upon this room and find these 12 statues. Each one is linked to an artifact and will give you a clue to its location when you scan it.

The highlighted word matches up to the name of a room somewhere in the game, and there’s maybe a small hint at what you need to do. I think this is really cool because while the power-up collection is very linear, the artifacts are decidedly non-linear. You can collect them in any order, and find them at various points in the game. You might religiously follow the clues, or just stumble upon them while exploring. I did both.

This does bear some resemblance to the entrances to tourian in Metroid and Super Metroid, which are accessible at the start of the game but, remain locked until you’ve finished off the game’s major bosses. But having them as separate objects to find, and not tied to the bosses that you’ll be killing anyway, makes Prime’s key hunt feel more exploratory and non-linear. But, as always, there’s a couple things holding this idea back.

One is that I don’t think it’s made super clear that finding the Chozo Artifacts is the ultimate goal of the game. Compare this to The Witness. When you finish one set of puzzles, a laser beam shoots to the top of a mountain. And up there, you can see that this has opened one of seven locks. i think it now becomes crystal clear that the ultimate goal of the game is to turn on seven lasers so you can open the lock on the top of the mountain.

The mountain and the lasers are consistently visible, and the size and central location of the mountain makes it feel obviously like the final area of the game. Metroid Prime doesn’t really have this in the same way. The temple with the artifacts is slightly hidden away, and i don’t think it fully explains that this is the ultimate goal of the game. Scanning the first artifact says collecting all 12 will “open a path to the centre of the impact crater”, but that doesn’t actually mean much.

The other issue is that the artifacts are all clustered towards the end of the game. You can get the artifact of truth as soon as you find the temple. The artifact of strength once you have the space jump boots. And the artifact of wild after the spider ball. But the remaining nine artifacts can’t be accessed until you at least have the gravity suit, way into the final hours of the game. And four different artifacts - world, sun, elder, and spirit - all require the plasma beam, which is the penultimate item you get in the game.

And I think this can leave players feeling like they’ve nearly finished the game only to realise that they actually need to go back through the entire map to find a whole bunch of keys. That’s one way to kill the pace. So, what can we learn about Metroidvania design from Metroid Prime? Well, for one: make your dead ends memorable. Give players that “aha!” moment of knowing exactly where to use an item. Some of Prime’s dead ends definitely stick in your brain, other’s just don’t.

Two: think about the space that players will have to traverse between items. Map it out, and look at what ground is covered. If, say, I dunno, the same path needs to be taken five times, maybe move some items around, or make more connections between areas. And three: make the player’s ultimate goal crystal clear, and let them work on it throughout the game. Prime’s chozo artifacts offered a wonderful way to mix linearity and non-linearity it one game, but fluffed it with the execution.

I’d say that these are the three issues that hold Prime back from true greatness, and stop it from eclipsing its predecessor. But Retro’s not done yet! Next time on Boss Keys, we’ll be scouting out temples, collecting loads of keys, and entering the dark world as we explore the Metroidvania design of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.