In an interview with Famitsu, an anonymous Nintendo spokesperson revealed that the inclusion of an open-world area was conceived during the first phase of development under Bandai Namco, based on the fan reception to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The spokesperson explained that both Nintendo and Bandai Namco struggled to balance open-world game design with the Metroid franchise's core focus of unlocking exploration by collecting power-ups, and thus limited it to the hub area of Sol Valley. Complications arose when Nintendo restarted development under Retro Studios (the developer of the previous mainline Metroid Prime games), as Retro lacked the infrastructure to make a new installment from the ground up and had to rely on what had already been completed by Bandai Namco. This meant that they were unable to adapt to the decline in popularity of open-world games and the rise of faster-paced first-person shooter and action titles during the 2020s. Additionally, the team worried that attempting to integrate these changing trends so far into development would disrupt the game's pacing. Consequently, the spokesperson described the game as being "pretty much divorced from the changing of times."