A portion of a Joystiq interview with producer Yoshio Sakamoto…
J: Will there be any online component to Other M? And, if not, why isn’t online a priority?
YS:There’s no online functionality in this title, and the reason for that is that Other M does not rely on that as one of the core design ideas. They’re thinking more about the single-player style that you’ve seen in all Metroid games up until this point. And one of the specific goals here is to convey the charm of Samus as a character and to bring forth several perspectives on what kind of personality she has and how she reacts to situations. So online wouldn’t really factor into that kind of character development as a core idea. If they were going to design a Metroid game with an online functionality it really would’ve had to have come in at the ground floor, when they come up with the design of the game.
J: Speaking of the core Metroid development team that last worked on the GBA games: There have been rumors of a game known as ‘Metroid Dread’ — purportedly a 2D Metroid game for DS. Was ‘Dread’ a real project?
YS: It seems we get a lot of questions about Metroid Dread, especially at interviews following E3 for example. But nothing’s ever been announced about this game; it’s all just been rumors so far, so we never know exactly how to respond to questions like this.
J: Then where does 2D Metroid development stand on DS?
YS: While there actually was a point where some teams were meeting to discuss if it was possible to create a 2D Metroid for DS using a relatively small team size, it’s not something that we ever really announced or thought of as “Metroid Dread.” But whenever people bring out that idea, we recognize that the basic concept is something that we can’t say never existed. But at the same time, we can’t of course make any official comment about a Metroid Dread–like project coming out.
Our main goal here is to, as I said earlier, first raise knowledge about the Metroid universe, and the Samus character, before we start to introduce different elements like online, or even going back to another handheld game for the next in the series. So there’s nothing coming immediately. We want to think about these new challenges first.
But, of course, we never say never.
Full interview here
Continued here:
