Metroid Prime 4’s New Producer Comes From GTA, Overwatch Teams
Retro Studios has hired a new producer for Metroid Prime 4 who has a background in GTA and Overwatch development. This way, the team has secured another high-profile personality to work on the game that’s been restarted for a clean development from scratch.
Back at the beginning of 2019, Nintendo shared discouraging news that the development state of Metroid Prime 4 was dissatisfying. Unfortunately for all the fans that had been waiting for any fresh information regarding the game since E3 2017, that particular prototype was cancelled. In order to stick to the quality guidelines, Nintendo made a difficult decision to completely restart the development process involving Retro Studios, the creators behind the original trilogy of Metroid Prime.
Considering that Metroid Prime 4 was restarted in 2019, the game still has a long way to go and to ensure that it lives up to highly raised expectations, Retro Studios continues hiring industry veterans to work on the project. According to VGC, the latest addition to the team is Marisa Palumbo who’s spent years working for Blizzard on Overwatch, and for Rockstar on the GTA series along with many other games. Retro has been in search of an appropriate applicant to take the role of Metroid Prime 4’s lead producer since August when the studio announced a corresponding job vacancy, and Palumbo feels like a natural fit with her rich expertise in producing AAA-titles. Moreover, her background includes games with living and detailed open worlds, established shooting mechanics, and strong narrative, all of which is a great sign for Metroid Prime 4.
While Marisa Palumbo is the latest new talent at Retro Studios, the team has been expanding with industry veterans for quite some time. Jon Marcella, who worked on God of War 2018, has recently joined the team as an environment designer. That’s a solid hire considering just how amazing and stunning the level design in Sony Santa Monica’s game was. Another renowned personality is Dylan Jobe who directed the development course of PS3 hit shooter Warhawk. At Retro, Jobe is now occupying pretty much the same role being responsible for the whole process of creating Metroid Prime 4.
Although Marisa Palumbo is a part of a series of high-profile hires, her expertise and background might hint at a direction the development of Metroid Prime 4 has taken. It will probably be a huge and sophisticated open-world title of an ambitious scale with a solid shooter element to it. Hopefully, Retro Studios knows exactly what it’s doing with the game - otherwise, fans won’t be able to withstand another round of news regarding restarted development.
Metroid Prime 4 is in development for Nintendo Switch.
Source: VGC