Nintendo has announced that the development of Metroid Prime 4 will be completely restarted from scratch and that they will also be working in collaboration with Retro Studios on the game going forward.

The news was revealed in a video update delivered by Shinya Takahashi, Senior Managing Executive Officer at Nintendo. He said that “the current development progress has not reached the standards we seek in a sequel to the Metroid Prime series.”

In a huge move, the team then decided that they would reboot the development of Metroid Prime 4 while also bringing Retro Studios, the original developers of the excellent Metroid Prime Trilogy, onto the project.

According to Takahashi-san, the decision was not made lightly by Nintendo, especially the idea of throwing out everything they have been working on so far. Considering Metroid Prime 4 was first announced for Switch back in E3 2017, that’s going to be at least two years worth of work cast aside.

Naturally, it could now be a very long time until we see or hear anything about Metroid Prime 4 again. While that is disappointing, it’s also good to see that Nintendo is taking the game extremely seriously and not rushing out an inferior title. The involvement of Retro Studios in the series once more can only be a good sign, too.

“We will continue developing the game so that when it is completed, it will stand shoulder to shoulder with the past Metroid Prime series titles,” said Takahashi-san.

We eagerly await future updates ourselves for Metroid Prime 4 on Nintendo Switch.