Metroid Dread producer and longstanding series contributor Yoshio Sakamoto talked about how the production team decided on the game’s complexity in a prior interview with Japanese magazine Famitsu.
Despite the fact that some players find it harsh, Sakamoto noted that E.M.M.I.’s punitive nature and the way players progressively learn to avoid it over time were intended to mimic Samus’s progress as she accumulates power-ups throughout the game.
Sakamoto’s thoughts about Metroid Dread’s difficulty
The game now proceeds at a faster speed thanks to the additional elements. Was it something you wanted to achieve?
We’ve developed a lot of Metroid games at this point, and we’ve given a lot of attention to what the right pacing is for each one. We made the action in Metroid Dread as fast as possible. Each Metroid’s game design compliments the action, and this time, it’s very simple to manage, which I like. I believe this is the most action-packed Metroid game ever.
I believe you built something that is both swift and simple to manage. In comparison to earlier games, how did you balance the difficulty?
During development, we were used to the difficulty, making it impossible to imagine how a new player might feel. Balancing is challenging in any game, but Nintendo and MercurySteam were both anxious to make the action seem fluid. E.M.M.I. is unlike anything else that has been done before, and we had a lot of people play it so that we could fine-tune the balance for an action game. One of the things we worked on was making sure that when a player gets a game over, they knew what to try next time.
Players were motivated to seek vengeance because of the game’s balance.
You can’t effectively portray the fear of E.M.M.I., which is a major component of the game, if you design it such that E.M.M.I. doesn’t capture a player very frequently, or if they can escape fast when they are caught.
About Metroid Dread
Take on the unyielding E.M.M.I. robots.
In Metroid Dread for Nintendo Switch, join bounty hunter Samus Aran as she flees a terrible alien land tormented by a mechanical threat.
Following the events of Metroid Fusion, Samus travels to the planet ZDR to investigate a mystery signal delivered to the Galactic Federation. Violent alien lifeforms and terrifying mechanical threats have taken over the distant world. Samus is more nimble and skilled than ever, but will she be able to defeat the inhuman menace lurking in ZDR’s depths?
