So yeah, Those new Prime 4 Previews

Why does this happen to me all the time. Recently, it seems every time I start wanting to get into a new fandom to a game franchise, the latest entry always poisons the discourse. It happened with Zelda, it happened with Monster Hunter, and now it’s happening with Metroid. The previous two fanbases were ruined for me because of all the constant complaining about their latest entries. If you liked BOTW or TOTK or Wilds, you will get ridiculed by the purists and be seen by the fandom as why the series died. Any defense of the game, any nuance instead of just blind hate, you’re immediately a shill. Now the same thing may happen to Prime 4, only this time it’s for a more stupid reason.

The open world Zelda games and Monster Hunter wilds have new gameplay systems that fundamentally change the feeling of the game series. Zelda became an open world, Wilds has the focus mode and a huge amount of QOA that removed some of the friction of the series. Prime 4 is not like this. The core gameplay and systems looks the same like all the other prime games, even the bike is not that big of a departure because prime 3 has something similar from what I heard. Peoples many contention are the companions, specially the first one. Companions that are with you for only 5 to 10 minutes, who have voice acting like in previous games, and whose voices can be turned off. These guys don’t tag along with you through the whole game, at most they may speak to you occasionally via comms, which prime 3 apparently also has. This isn’t a problem that permeates the whole game like the above examples with wilds and Zelda.

Despite that, the Doomers come all the same. At this point I’m just no longer excited to dive into new fandoms of video game franchises because it will always devolve into “new bad old good”. Maybe this will be different and the fanbase fights back against the doom, but I don’t know.