It’s Too Late For Metroid Dread’s Rookie Mode
The people that would have benefited the most from Rookie Mode surely won’t be coming back four month later.
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One of the surprise announcements from this week’s Nintendo Direct was the news of Metroid Dread getting three new game modes. Boss Rush Mode will be added later this year, but today players can try out Dread Mode, an ultra-challenge mode that restricts Samus’ health to one HP, and Rookie Mode, an easier option that provides Samus with passive healing. The two new modes serve opposite audiences. Dread Mode is an opportunity for hardcore players to test their mettle in a game they’ve undoubtedly completed multiple times already, and Rookie Mode is away to encourage lower skilled players to push through the difficulty spikes and hopefully, finally, finish the game. While challenge modes like Dread Mode are often added to games post-launch, it’s less common to see easy modes get added so far after release.
On the one hand, I’d like to think that additional difficulty options are better late than never. There are copies of Dread that have yet to be sold, and I’m glad those players have the option to lower the difficulty if they’re not having a good time with the game. I can also imagine someone out there played Dread at launch but wasn’t able to finish it, and upon hearing about Rookie Mode, might be motivated to pick it back up. I’m glad developer Mercury Steam is thinking about those players and is using valuable dev time to accommodate them, but I also can’t help but feel like it’s too late to make any real impact – at least compared to the difference Rookie Mode could have made had it been there at launch.
Metroid Dread launched with two difficulties, Normal Mode and Hard Mode, but realistically those options could have been called Hard Mode and Harder Mode. Dread’s combat is demanding and fairly unforgiving, particularly compared to the rest of Nintendo’s selection of first-party games. The reception to Dread was overwhelmingly positive – it was nominated for Game of the Year at The Game Awards – but there was a noticeable contingent of players online who expressed their dissatisfaction with the difficulty.
It would be easy to write of the criticism of Dread’s difficulty with an unempathetic “git gud’ sentiment, but consider context. 19 years have passed since the last installment in the Metroid series, not including 2017’s remake of Metroid 2, Samus Returns. For many people, this would be the first Metroid they’ve ever played, and so wouldn’t have known what kind of difficulty curve to expect. Even as a lifelong Metroid fan, I found Dread to be particularly challenging – especially compared to Samus Returns. This isn’t like Dark Souls that has a reputation for being punishingly hard. No one – not even fans – knew exactly what to expect from Dread. On top of that, Nintendo isn’t exactly known for its hard games. It’s understandable that a lot of people who played Metroid Dread found it to be too hard.
The problem with introducing Rookie Mode now, four months after launch, is that those players have already moved on. Dread may have had a great launch, but single player games almost never stay in the collective consciousness for long. A few weeks after release, no one was really talking about Metroid Dread anymore, and anyone that felt burned by it has either traded the game in or put it away for good. I hope some people will give it another shot now, but I expect the number of returning players to be exceptionally low.
It’s disappointing, because we could have had a whole other conversation about Dread had it released with Rookie Mode. It would have been celebrated for being inclusive in a way that no other Metroid game had been before, and countless more people would have tried it and likely finished it.
I’d like to give credit to Mercury Steam for listening to feedback and responding to it, but the studio should have been able to anticipate the negative reaction and build better difficulty options into the game from the start. If only two difficulty options were on the table, then the game would have been better off with Easy and Normal rather than Normal and Hard, with Hard Mode patched in later on. Some would have been disappointed by the lack of real challenge at launch, but the alternative is customers that aren’t able to finish the game they paid for. I’d like to see games that cater to the strugglers before dishing out harder challenges for those that are gluttons for punishment. It’s great that the option is getting added now, but it would have been infinitely better had it been there four months ago.
Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/metroid-dread-rookie-mode-easy-too-late/