Yes, Metroid Prime 4 is still in development, according to new job ad

A recent job posting from Metroid Prime 4 developer Retro Studios reminds us that the game is indeed still in development. It's now been roughly three years since the elusive Prime sequel restarted development at Retro Studios, being handed over from Nintendo's previous in-house efforts.

The job ad comes directly from Retro Studios itself, specifically its official Twitter account. The studio is now looking for a tools engineer and a technology engineer to aid the continued development of Metroid Prime 4.

We still haven't even had a glimpse at what Metroid Prime 4 is shaping up to be, and it's up in the air as to whether it'll even maintain the first-person perspective that made the original trilogy stand out. 

To both Retro Studios' and Nintendo's credit, both parties have managed to remain agonizingly tight-lipped about Metroid Prime 4 since its announcement all the way back in 2017, but we do wish we knew more.

It's been about half a decade since the game's original announcement, and a whopping fifteen years since Metroid Prime 3 launched on the Wii in 2007. Thankfully, after a run of intensely mediocre entries in the interim, Samus picked up the slack once more in 2021 with the release of the fantastic Metroid Dread.

Metroid Prime 4 is currently slated to launch on the Nintendo Switch, but we can't even be too sure of that anymore. It's been almost five years since Nintendo's handheld hybrid hit store shelves, and it's a safe bet that the company is hard at work on a next-gen console, whether that be in the form of the Nintendo Switch 2 or something else entirely.

At this point, we wouldn't even mind that. Metroid Prime 4 has no small legacy to live up to, with all three titles in the Metroid Prime Trilogy being arguably some of the best games on their respective platforms. 

We'd love to see the new game land on entirely new hardware, preferably one with 4K capabilities to grant Samus a visually stunning adventure. In any case, we're at least happy to see even a blip on the Metroid Prime 4 radar.

• Nintendo Switch Online just got a whole lot better at emulating N64 games