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New Metroid Prime: Hunters Info
Written by Scott Armstrong on Thursday, July 14, 2005
If you liked the demo, you should be in for quite the treat
Nintendo of Europe recently had a chance to talk with the people behind Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS, and among the interview were a few tidbits of new information about the title.
Particularly, the mention of new characters and the different aspects of the multiplayer game were most notable.
"For the first time we're really expanding Samus' universe, and we're really showing that there are new characters out there," said Richard Vorodi, Game Designer at Nintendo Software Technology. "There are going to be six in total and they're going to be unveiled in time. At E3 we showed a character called Noxus, who's really cool. All the hunters have really interesting back-stories, and we want to leave most of that as kind of a surprise for the players."
Vorodi went on to describe some of the new characters we'll be seeing in the game, "Noxus is a kind of spiritual being who's trying to cleanse the galaxy of evil. But the character itself may be evil, so that's kind of interesting. Then there's Spire; Spire is one of the last of his kind, he's a rock-based creature, trying to find out the origins of the disappearance of his race."
"And then we have my personal favourite, this guy Kanden. Kanden is really cool because he was an experiment, he was designed to be an unkillable soldier who actually escaped the lab, and has since been out killing and doing bad stuff throughout the galaxy. He's a real evil bounty hunter. As for the other characters, that's a surprise. But they're cool, trust me."
With such a distinctly varied cast of characters, the need for balance within their combat capabilities would indeed be a vital aspect to the multiplayer game. When asked of this, Vorodi responded, "Well, in multiplayer we have a pretty big weapons system, and it's going to be interesting for players to learn how to use these weapons; we have primary fire and secondary fire functions on most of them. And then on top of that, the Hunters themselves actually have an affinity, so some Hunters use certain weapons better than others."
Then of course we come to the lingering question about the online play, and why the decision was made to keep Hunters offline. Kensuke Tanabe, Producer of the game shed some light on the topic, "Really, we could have made this game online. But Nintendo's vision of online play is different from that of other companies. We wanted it to be free, easy, and easy to access for everybody. To set up the kind of infrastructure that we needed, and to meet the launch date we have for this game, the two just didn't match."
Though even without the online option, Vorodi assured that the multiplayer mode would still be a blast through the system's wi-fi, allowing up to four players to battle it out amongst one another using a single Game Card.
Metroid Prime: Hunters for the Nintendo DS is currently scheduled for a North American release later this Fall. For the full interview, head on over to Nintendo of Europe's website.
