I don't know if this has been discussed before, but now that we know of Retros involvement in the reboot of MP4, what are the chances that this rumored Retro Studios game is finished and is just being held onto by Nintendo - much like Yoshi's Crafted World presumably is.
Do they have the resources to juggle two projects at once?
The Retro situation is hard to gauge because we've never had a real solid hard leak on their situation. But, based on what we do know;
1. Star Fox Grand Prix was cited by a handful of people, including frequently reliable sources at Eurogamer. By all accounts in the rumour world worth betting on
without visual evidence for ourselves, it probably exists. We've no indication of how far into development it was, but I think we can comfortably say that unless shit was seriously bad at Retro it
should be in late development.
2. There were secondary rumours that a smaller second team at Retro was prototyping another game, possibly an original IP, that they were struggling to get off the ground.
3. Nintendo shifts Metroid Prime 4 to Retro, apparently based on a tech demo they cooked up that impressed the producers, encouraging them to shift development from the multi-studio approach at Bandai Namco (like how Smash was made) to a largely in-house approach at Retro.
Here's my reasoning of the situation and applied logic; I fail to see how Nintendo would be
so disappointed with production and development quality at Bandai Namco that they'd be willing to pull the entire project out from them and restart from scratch, burning significant time, resources, and money, only to put it into the hands of an internal studio that hasn't put out a game in nearly five full years,
if that studio was also failing at seeing through production of their own titles in that period.
That's just a big red flag to me. If Retro were floundering for five years on failed project that speaks volumes of how much of a goddamn mess it must be there. Couple of years? I can pay that. But five years? A vast majority of AAA productions take that long
at worst, usually married with shorter production times. The notion of Retro pissing away development resources, time, money, and absolutely proving they're no longer able to see through standard software production cycles over an entire five years
and yet are still trustworthy with leading a project that has already cost Nintendo money at another studio is just illogical to me.
The only reasonable chain of events I can see here is that Retro was chosen as a confident, safe investment for restarting Metroid Prime 4. Something accomplished via the apparently impressive demo they cooked up, and I'm sure equal confidence in the quality and production pipeline of whatever else they've been working on.
Which, to me,
is going to be Star Fox Grand Prix, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it launch this year.