Samus is supposedly a bounty hunter, right? But in every Metroid game I've played (most of them) really she's more of a PMC doing the military's dirty work. Even in these situations we never see Samus get her reward. What does she do with the money? It would be great for the next Metroid game to actually be about bounty hunting in a more open-world kind of environment.

Sure Metroid's environments always had a bit of open-world non-linearity, but taking some cues from Rockstar could really make for a different kind of Metroid game that explores new territory for the series and fleshes out the character of Samus. A game about independent-minded bounty hunting retains the classic image of Samus as galactic badass, in charge of her own destiny. There could be a larger conflict happening that occasionally overlaps with Samus' interests and she gets involved, but for the most part she should be out doing her own thing, taking on contracts, exploring cool areas, finding hidden items, and fighting otherworldly creatures.

Samus speaks to people when she needs to, but otherwise lives a solitary existence, sort of a lone wolf thing. To make the most use of an open-world the game should probably be polygonal. I really liked the Prime games, so first-person works for me, though some aspects of Other M's hybrid 2D/3D approach seemed neat (haven't played it). The tone should stay pretty serious, true to the rest of the series. Some degree of the "trapped in a strange world" feeling would be lost by giving the player more freedom, but could still be achieved in smaller chunks (sort of how MP3 worked with dropship landing pads, but with more character agency).

Just an idea I wanted to put out there. Metroid is one of my favorite game franchises, and I'd love to see something different done with it, but done right of course.

Nopleaseno. The contained but nonlinear map is a dying breed and Metroid is it's mother. Please don't kill the mother of my favorite type of map. We already have way too many open world games.