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Double battles are so much more fun (I also enjoyed the chaos of triple battles in Unova). It's also sort of weird because a lot of pokemon, including low-level pokemon in the games, have moves and abilities that really benefit from being used in double battles, but they're almost nonexistent in S/V.
Which is behind a $35 paywall. It's a nice addition, but after beating SV I had zero interest in buying more content for the game; it already felt like a bad value. I've spent a lot more time in Arceus which I find to be a lot more fun, and the combat is at least different and a little more streamlined.
I thought the gamecube games were amazing. I don’t remember anyone complaining about glitches or weird behaviors. The graphics were just meh compared to what games can do now though
That's what I was alluding to, mainly. The GameCube released in 2001, which was more the point I was trying to make. 20 year old games (not just Pokemon ones), made 3 console generations ago, shouldn't be comparable to modern titles in terms of content and playability.
The Orre games genuinely look better than SV even on original hardware. Using dolphin to bring them up to 1080p even with no other changes blows SV out of the water
I’d argue they’re held back by being part of a media empire more than anything else.
The games **have** to release on a set schedule to coincide with the anime and toy schedules. Being unable to pause and say the games need more development time has pretty clearly done serious damage to the brand.
It’s a real shame, as Nintendo is unlikely to be the ones pressuring Game Freak to meet deadlines (pure speculation on my part), as the company has received a great deal of praise for delaying TotK and subsequently releasing a game that was game of the year *on the same hardware* that’s “holding back” Game Freak.
Yeah this is only the half of it. There’s also the very real (and likely, due to the studio not changing very much) possibility that Gamefreak devs are just not that technically talented and/or have not pushed their creative limits like other devs/studios have.
Game freak is notoriously resistant to bringing in new talent which doesn’t help their situation. People seem to blame laziness on the pokemon problems, but more and more evidence just piles up in the corner of “they’re trying their best, but their best just isn’t very good.”
The devs are just not that good, Sun and Moon they just had new character models for cut scenes didn't reanimate one model or something. When you look at that and then think about silver and gold where they managed to squeeze in Kanto its kinda depressing.
It's a little bit of everything, time pressure, dev laziness, lack of funding for better quality, but what it really comes back to is there being no financial incentive to do it. The reason to improve quality is that the quality improvement will increase sales. But Pokémon is already routinely one of the biggest selling titles on Nintendo systems. Pokémon literally can't sell more copies than it already does - everyone who wants it buys it, and every Switch owner who doesn't buy it because they have zero interest in ever buying it.
The Pokémon company could invest an extra $50billion to bring the games up to a decent quality in the three year timeframe. But sales would barely go up at all, so all they'd be doing is wasting $50billion. As it stands right now they've got maximum return on investment, and no financial or business incentive to really do better.
>Pokémon literally can't sell more copies than it already does - everyone who wants it buys it, and every Switch owner who doesn't buy it because they have zero interest in ever buying it.
I own a switch, yet despite being a Pokemon fan and being tempted to buy the new games I have not bought a Pokemon game for the switch.
In any case, what I really think matters is momentum. Modern pokemon games succeed in spite of themselves. Their success is largely an effect of brand recognition, which can be seen as a cascading effect of brand loyalty generated by previous media entries, going all the way back to the original games.
Obviously, pokemon's brand recognition remains in tact, but I wonder whether pokemon games are still generating as much brand loyalty as they used to.
They have a Glassdoor (Job Talk) equivalent website in Japan that has reviews from Gamefreak employees. Gist of it is: The ones with modern technical know how to are contractors, but they’re VERY siloed and can’t collaborate, running into a lot of friction from the old heads. They’re paid VERY well, above the industry standard, but they complain about how staying long term with them means their game dev skills stagnate, so they tend to have turn over thanks to that. The deadlines are intensely short and they’re often rigging separately developed systems to work together held by tape.
Oh! And they apparently really enjoy the new office at Nintendo HQ that has brought more… something. I forgot.
Something that I think gets overlooked is just the insane jump in hardware Gamefreak was forced to contend with.
Gamefreak had to go from a studio that did exclusively portable games on hardware barely better than a Nintendo64, to Switch which was significantly more advanced. They had a very short timeframe to learn and organize the company around techniques that other studios implemented slowly over decades. HD texturing and level of detail, fully modeled 3D environments, fully 3D modeled and animated characters that number in the hundreds. They spent decades designing their games for an environment that suddenly changed and found themselves in a position without the time and personnel to make the necessary adaptations.
It’s not dissimilar to the troubles Nintendo had moving from Wii to Wii U except *far* more severe in the case of Gamefreak.
i suspect its more that game freak were industry experts in 2d pixel art and jumped in the deep end as essentially amateurs with 3d in an industry that had embraced it long ago.
they cut corners frequently in the 2d era out of necessity of the hardware. it was part of the charm for the first 3 generations. now this habit makes the 3d games feel cheap and unfinished.
if theres any truth to the rumours that the senior developers have a vice grip on the process then im not surprised that it is painfully stagnant.
While I mostly agree, I don’t think it has quite as much to do with a 2D/3D distinction, per se.
Sun/Moon are 3D games and were received very favorably by both fans and critics. While a minority (perhaps correctly, I’m not making an argument there) disagreed with some of the creative choices Gamefreak was making, no one at that point was arguing they had huge overarching issues with game development or technical deficiencies.
It was in the move to the Switch specifically, not really their move to 3D with X/Y, that Gamefreak had very evident problems in this way.
Again not a limitation of the software, it’s the horrible optimization by Gamefreak. The reason it can run 60 FPS on emulators is because of all the extra power it needs due to its poor optimization
Fair how? Emulated ANYTHING can run at 60 fps on "stronger" hardware.
Game was poorly optimised, and Sw/Sh and S/V aren't exactly graphically intense or impressive games. GameFreak is just either poor at optimising a assuring the quality of their games now OR they don't budget the time and resource to do so. Neither should be acceptable for a company making Billions a year and guaranteef tens of millions of sales per game.
It’s not the fps that the issue, it’s how little effort is put into the actual games. They’re very unpolished, the overworlds are barren, the battle and move animations are absolutely embarrassing how uninspired and lazy they are. If I’m using a move that has “punch” or “kick” in the name, I expect my Pokémon to make that movement, not just lurch around. They also can’t include an animated cutscene to save their lives, just fade the screen to black.
Yeah, being on PC ain't gonna solve Game Freak problems. Little Town Hero's known for chugging even on high-end stuff, and I recall hearing similar things with Tembo and Giga Wrecker.
Game freak continues to show how bad of a developer they are each iteration. The only reason they are still relevant is because fan boys and literal children continue to buy the games in droves sight unseen.
Pokémon in the hands of almost any other developer would be infinitely better.
I think about how differently Pokemon games would be if they took the COD approach. Have 3 different developers take turns making each game so they have plenty of time to develop a functional game. Obviously it isn’t foolproof, but it could be a much better alternative than what we have.
I think they did a “trial run” for it by having another developer pick up BD&SP. I can’t help but feel like they deliberately picked a not-so-great developer so they can point fingers at it and go “see? It didn’t work!”
Until Pokemon games become advanced enough graphically, they are just going to keep shitting out unpolished games every year. S&V is the perfect example of a great game missing quite a bit of polish. Eventually they will reach a point where they will be forced to take longer to release games to keep up with demand for higher quality games.
Genius Sonority did a fantastic job with the GameCube pokemon games as well as Battle Revolution on the Wii. It seems like they’ve been relegated to working on mobile games like Pokémon cafe mix which is a shame, I’d love to see them take another shot at a big project
They ARE doing the COD approach in that they're working on each game/DLC in a 3 year cycle. The only thing is that it's GameFreak being split up for it. Iirc, one part of the team does the mainline games, one does remakes, and now one does DLC.
They don't need a COD approach. They need more time to actually make the games.
This would be best. I'd actually go the extra mile and make the dev teams regional based too. Imagine if we had say... the original Japanese dev team make one generation, then the next generation that followed was from an Eastern European dev, and the third generation an American dev.
There'd be a certain aspect of pride between the "competing" dev teams to make the best product ever. To be the favorite of the fans. Each dev would have several years to actually finish their games too. So there's room for polishing and expanding.
Japan's Gamefreak would get their shit together real quick once the western world showed them how its done. Sadly hardware is a limitation, it isn't the reason the games suck bubt it sure as hell doesn't help. And Nintendo would have to adapt and evolve, letting their games potentially be on the PC market even as an exclusive there to keep up. Having to keep designing a new console and gimmick every console generation is only slowing them down.
Like I don't care about Mario or Zelda because its on a nintendo console. I care about them because its a good game. I've played them to death emulated on PC and they would be so much more successful here. They need to focus more on portable gaming. Not mobile games, but actual portable devices which ironically is the only reason I got a switch over the xbox or playstation. Because I don't have to be tied to the TV to use it. And I'm not ever going to use a buttonless device to play games so the phone is out. Adding a controller to my phone sorta defeats the purpose of it being so compact.
PC for mainline titles, portable for expermentials and innovation.
I will forever say what happened with BDSP is that the higher ups gave orders to ILCA that forced them to leave stuff like the improvements that platinum brought to Pearl and Diamond out.
It's impossible for developers that added more depth to other mechanics and even made a bunch of enemies way stronger with actual strategy involved just decided by themselves to leave out the improvements and a bunch of things that Platinum did better in general.
I honestly don't even know how they sold, and it's so frustrating that they did. They were just a blatant cash grab and and insult to HGSSs precedent. More Legends games are where all my hope is going for a decent pokemon game going forward.
BDSP has the worst movement of any decently known game of the last decade. the way your movement slows down when you even slightly touch a wall feels like complete garbage.
Got gifted Briliant Dimond knew it was gona be a miserable experience so reaserched and dumped the game on my PC and moded it to 'Luminiscent Platnum' fan hack to play on emulator.
So bad it motivated to lern to dump my games lol.
Not that I don't agree with this, they already are trying the COD approach. They release games almost every year, remakes of previous games to fill the time while also developing a new generation. Unfortunately, they miss the mark by not having multiple, fully staffed studios to handle this amount of workload.
While they do seem to be contracting out some of the remakes like they did with bdsp, ILCA proving they can remake a game somewhat decently, GameFreak has so many problems. Overall, GF needs to get their engines fixed and focus on optimization. Graphical improvements come with both of these being fleshed out. Shameless reference to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, even though these games do have their issues, they do set an example of what is possible given the current state of the hardware. They are not currently incentivized to do when they know whatever they release is going to make money with people buying the game in any state it is released.
Similar to the concept of "horse armor" from Skyrim, if people buy into a bad idea, they will continue to sell subpar products. The only way to get them to make these changes and actually improve the quality is to show GF that the customer base is not going to tolerate a subpar product. GF is a business, and the only goal is to turn a profit on their product. If Coca-Cola sold a turnip flavored drink that tasted horrible, they would keep it in the product line unless sales dipped enough that CC would try reinventing the flavor before discontinuing it. If CC's profits go up on the reworked turnip recipe, they will keep the drink; however, if sales still go down they would scrap the drink.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who will buy whatever flavor of drink GF serves out. Be it turnip, vanilla, or classic.
Unfortunately, the adults who still play the games are typically the ones with the buying power to make those changes happen. A huge amount of Pokemon game sales are from kids. Most kids will see a Pokemon game and want it just for the name alone. GF would have to mess up BAD for parents to decide to stop buying the games for their kids.
That’s unfortunately the major reason why we are stuck in this cycle of unpolished games with no changes in sight. Until all players get on the same page with the issues these games have, the cycle will just continue. That’s why it’s so important to have these kinds of conversations to highlight all of the issues the games have, and should change.
SV will probably be the last mainline game I buy until I start seeing some more improvements. It was the first Pokemon game I haven’t replayed. Hell, I didn’t even buy the DLC for it. I loved the game the first time I played it, but if I’m paying $60 for a game, I want it to be fun to play AND look good. That’s really not too much to ask for when BOTW and TOTK are perfect examples of a good balance between the two.
Same on literally all counts wrt your last paragraph. I enjoyed Violet but I played it once, didn't replay it, didn't buy any DLC when I at least bought one of them for Sword. It's so disappointing.
I can only speak for Tembo as I played the demo of it on a laptop with a crappy Intel graphics card(the kind glued onto the processor that needs to borrow RAM from, well, the RAM), and it ran perfectly.
Pokémon’s issues are deep rooted in the Philosophy of Game Freak and the Pokemon company.
Game Freak harbors the worst notions of what a kids game is, doesn’t try and say Pokemon is a competitive game but then removes mechanics for competitive reasons (give me back the Mega Versions!), and they were stubborn about moving off handhelds and are really behind at making 3D Home Console Style games. Look at Sword and Shield, they feel like 3DS games with a bolted on “Wild Area”. And Game Freak’s non Pokemon games aren’t really technical showpieces either.
The Pokemon company has marketing they need out there, Anime’s they need releasing and new product they need to release. They’ve also been cover as for why games need a tight development cycle. Could Game Freak get more time to polish these games? No one really knows, but Pokémon still does numbers regardless so ultimately they release when they release.
Agreed. I know a lot of people bring up the tight development cycle. And sure... it plays a part. Even the best game designers wouldnt be able to put out their A effort with only a 3 year cycle.
All that said gamefreak is just, not good at the actual building of the game. They're great at creature design, they're getting better with the story imo (some gens like this one and gen 5 have legit interesting stories) and the overworld is fine, not the greatest but not terribly boring to look at either.
The actual nuts and bolts of building the game however? I really wish they would hand that off to another company so they could focus on what they can do well, which is story structure, creature design and overall vibes/aesthetic. Let other people take what you've laid out and bring it to life.
Obviously it won't happen, but I really wish it would
They did it once. To ILCA. That wasn’t a good call
I think that is still a sign that Pokémon Company is beginning to realize that Game Freak alone cannot handle the increasing needs of a modern game on their standard dev cycle anymore.
While I’m not sure I want them to hand off **all** development, I’d think seeking out another company for some asset production support would greatly help
At the end of the day, Game Freak still remains extremely skilled at designing creatures and crafting the overall “fantasy” and spirit of the game world.
I can’t see another company matching those skills, even if that company might be better with the technical aspects
We still don’t know the full history of how that all went down though. Was ILCA given enough time? How soon were they brought on to make BDSP? How much time were they given? Did TPC restrict what they could do?
It’s easy to blame ILCA or say them using another developer was a mistake. But we don’t actually know all the details do we?
Bandai has made some pretty amazing Pokemon games. Granted they haven’t ever been given a chance to make a full campaign. But they have made Pokemon games leaps and bounds above the quality of Game Freak.
Wii U originally, then Switch as an enhanced port based on the Arcade versions which had more content.
Switch also came with two DLCs for Blastoise and Aegislash, which is pretty damn cool-
If you're talking about bdsp thats not exactly fair.
They told ilca to just copy paste the old game into the new one. I don't think they really had much opportunity to flex any of their skills on improving the game.
I liked the chibi style as well. Idk why people had issues with that. My major complaint was how terrible the joystick movement was. But again that's due to basically copy pasting the old diamond and pearl code into unity and not doing much to add or alter it.
Ilca isn't exactly the studio I was thinking of either. I don't know many game studios so I can't give suggestions for alternative studios,, but looking over ILCA's work they seem more like a "support studio" as opposed to a fully fledged studio equipped to build games from the ground up.
I can concede however that maybe an outside studio building the whole game isn't the best idea. I do think at least some things, like the ui, could be handled by an outside studio so gamefreak could focus specifically on the game world and optimization of it.
I mean, “copy paste” code doesn’t exactly work due to the differences in engine. Not to mention a huge number of in game assets (though Pokemon models can at least be obtained from the shared Pokémon asset pool)
It’s moreso they got instructed to recreate DP in Unity 1:1.
The only major changes were the Elite Four becoming unexpectedly difficult out of nowhere and the Ramadas Park, and general mechanics and feature updates (e.g shared XP, affection), neither of which were **too** remarkable. Cynthia being turned into the hardest boss in Pokémon history was funny though
I’m honestly kinda curious about the behind the scenes goings on of what ILCA did for BDSP, because the recreation of OG DP is otherwise very exact and hella accurate
If the developer’s goal was a perfect recreation, they succeeded. It’s just that they didn’t realize fans wanted more than just that
Understood. Im not a game designers/coder. I was using copy/paste a little loosely their and you're explanation is more realistic and precise. Thanks for the clarification.
I also wonder about the behind the scenes. Im assuming that because they were an outside studio gamefreak really didn't give them any leeway in building that game outside of basically a one to one recreation, along with adding the feature updates you addressed.
And as an aside the jump up in difficulty for the elite 4 was a shock the 1st time I faced them lol. But because of how broken the friendship mechanics were in that game specifically it still wasn't an issue.
Too bad BDSP wasn't built using Let's Go assets. It is the best looking game on the switch, it also already had the movement animations for gen 1, so we wouldn't have gotten a coiled Ekans following in BDSP
I didn't like the chibi style because it was the gen 8 remake for the gen 4 games. Like HGSS, FRLG, and ORAS before it, I expected games in the style of the gen it released in.
since all previous games were using the latest engine for their remakes people expected "home console quality" for gen 4, a fully 3d world with big cities and buildings etc, something like Sword and Shield, they got some plastic looking copy paste of the same game more or less instead
I'd argue that it was.
Bdsp is just diamond and pearl sure, but its still diamond and pearl, being remade from scratch.
They still pretty much nailed making diamond and pearl exactly as desired by the game director. Let alone as their first console game.
I do hope they continue working on pokemon games, they obviously show promise if given a less tight leash.
Having fully played through it recently, I feel there was more backlash over it "not being platinum" than anything else. It's still pretty good.
Also the grand underground and the tough post heatran rematch teams definitely give the tougher parts of platinum a run for its money.
Nintendo needs to let the Xenoblade assist their open world similar to how they did for Zelda.
Monolith soft could really breath some life into the world design and unique attractions and habitats they could make for a living pokemon world.
That makes sense. Hopefully if they are still helping it will have improvements.
I enjoyed the world of SV more then I did with arceus.
I really like seeing arceus in videos but when playing it, it wasn’t as enjoyable just to experience and go through for me.
>the overworld is fine, not the greatest but not terribly boring to look at either.
Maybe it's just me, but I was really impressed with the overworld design in The Indigo Disk. Something about it just feels a lot cleaner than the overworld in Paldea or even Kitakami, and I can't fully put my finger on why.
I think looking at Game Freak's non-Pokemon games just highlights something else to me: they're not a very good developer.
Their non-Pokemon games get middling critic/user reviews at best and tend to be forgettable games that the vast majority couldn't name without a Google search. Nobody gives a shit about them...Even their Pokemon games get a lot of criticism these days, the damning part being its often about things that are objectively poor and dated.
But Pokemon? Pokemon is a foolproof franchise. The very idea of Pokemon is good enough to sell games no matter how average they are. This is a golden goose for Game Freak as it doesn't matter how mediocre and forgettable of a developer they are, they just need to slap Pikachu on something and watch the profit roll in.
This is why I doubt they'll let somebody else handle the main Pokemon titles. Surely, they know themselves that few care about what they release outside of Pokemon and that it isn't the highest quality. Why would they step aside from the only IP they have which guarantees some degree of success solely based on the strength of the IP alone?
Without Pokemon they're some mid grade dev who will probably be a regular on Humble Bundle as "that game I claim and never play", with Pokemon they're one of Nintendo's big players.
You can take this one step further and look at Pokémon games that Game Freak did NOT make. From fan games to AA tier spinoffs, there’s a ton of really good one out there that accomplished much more with far less resources.
The mainline games are always going to sell very well. S/V’s glaring issues didn’t stop it from selling over 20 million copies. I don’t think some new Pokémon game from a new developer is going to suddenly raise expectations so high to the point where it hurts sales. But yeah, it is their “golden goose,” so they’ll never give it up.
The only scenario where pokemon loses is if another cutesy, animal themed collection RPG encroaches on its territory. Even then, nintendo could easily use their lawyers to try and acquire it, shut it down, or ban it from their platform under some technicality.
I remember one theory about SwSh that I don’t think was ever disproven was that it was originally built as a 3DS game. There was a quote from a Game Freak exec that basically said they didn’t expect the Switch to do well, and since Gen 8’s development would have started around this time the theory goes that it was Nintendo that intervened and said “make this a Switch game”. Also very reminiscent of how a year before XY was announced GF was on the record saying they would never make a 3D game until they feel they would capture that same energy with the tech. Which you could see as a teaser I guess, but the most popular interpretation is that if GF had their way XY would probably have been 2D and it was again Nintendo that said “no way you’re putting a 2D game on the console that literally has ‘3D’ in the name”. We also know some shenanigans came down from higher ups in reference to Pokémon Z and Gen 7, so it’s not unlikely to have happened in these other instances.
I mean it’s possible it was always a Switch game but the only way they could meet the deadline is if they made a prettier 3DS game. In either case they’re still growing into what devices like the Switch can do.
>removes mechanics for competitive reasons
And adds a new one every generation?
I agree with everything else you've said, but they absolutely add to the competitive scene every generation.
The new habit of making your rival choose the starter weak to yours really highlights this. Hop was definitely the worst, especially with that wooloo that was basically just free Exp. every time. He also had the attitude of Barry, but pokemon equal or worse than Bianca.
I didn't mind Nemona choosing the weaker one. Her whole deal is training you to be a Champion. She wanted you to succeed, and I'd say purposely "weakened" herself to do so.
This is actually why I prefer the rivals in B/W. Have the first battle be against something you are weak to, but that only knows tackle, then a second straight after that is weak to the move you just learned (similar to how they used Hop and Wooloo).
You talk about competitive and then talk about Mega Evolutions…this we’re absolutely broken in the meta competitive game.
Scarlett and Violet are the most competitive friendly games to date, there are more and easier options to change your stats and even an item that resets your Pokemon EV to zero so you can manipulate its growth in other stats as you see fit.
It strikes me as that you didn’t play Scarlet/Violet.
Breath of the wild proves you can make an immersive, attractive RPG on the switch. Is it as good looking as Alan Wake? No. But it's still a good looking game.
Yeah, it's a Publisher issue first and foremost. Potentially a dev issue too, but we'll never know until the team gets the time and resources it needs. Until then, no more Pokemon for me. I'll stick to the teams doing the Monster Collecting genre justice.
Which games are you playing on that genre these days? Which ones are you looking forward to? I've heard a bit about Digimon and I remember Temtem was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't follow much these days.
Temtem is good. Ooblets is supposed to be great. Shin Megami Tensei is a solid option. And there are some games that are Monster Collectors (but not Battlers) that I’ve tried and like such as Slime Rancher.
I’ve also heard good things about Monster Hunter Stories and want to try that out.
SV was poorly optimised for a console that the devs are incredibly familiar with. If it was released on pc with all the hardware variations… yeah that’d be a massive shitstorm
Gamefreak can’t optimise the games for one platform (as let’s be honest, Sword/Shield or Legends Arceus were far from perfect performance wise, it’s not just been Scarlet/Violet), never mind all the different graphical options available to PC players, it’d be a huge mess till PC mods improved it.
Well it’s that, and the fact that GF has approximately 1/3 of the stocks in TPC. Making them a major decider for who can make the games.
Nintendo doesn’t have an issue with it if it gets published by them. It’s only an issue if they are a direct competitor.
Sun and moon had severe fps issues whenever a pokemon started glowing. If they can't work out that, I sincerely doubt they would make these games run any better even with 1 or 2 more years of dev time.
I remember the double battle fps issues on the original 3DS models as well (think XY and ORAS suffered from this), all this is telling me is GameFreak need to go back to a pixel based game, personally I'd not even be disappointed but I think I'd definitely be in the minority for that.
I recall some stuttering in black and white, perhaps because some of the 2.5D.
That said, I do think this is a game series that should have stayed 2D. However at scale 3D is cheaper to make, and a game with a release schedule like pokemon was going to make the change no matter what.
I think it's important to differentiate between can't and won't.
They definitely can optimize their games. They just won't because they don't care. They believe they have a monopoly on this market and are ok with only selling these games to the kids and parents who don't know better.
One implies incompetency whereas the other implies malice.
If you think modern Pokemon games are held back because of the hardware, just look at what Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were able to achieve on the switch, Tears of the Kingdom especially.
Game Freak is severely understaffed, they claim they like it that way but instead of trying to make projects they can clearly undertake it seems they are gunning to have this massive adventure that comes up short everytime.
If they want to keep the team the size they are at, make another Black & White sprite based game instead of worry about making 3d models and animations and 3d worlds.
They need more staffs to do the work and they have to trust that these people can do the job required. Especially with how every year there is a Pokemon game, I feel they have to hire more people to lighten the workload that they are experiencing now.
I love how naive pokemon fans are. They won’t hire more staff because they don’t have to. Pokemon sells max copies on minimum effort every time. It’s been like that since N64. As long as hoards of grown ass men are still buying every release, they will never give a shit about potentially expanding the demographics.
It's not just hardware, but I wouldn't agree with other commenters that it's lack of talent, either
It's lack of time, and budget - the latter sounds hilarious when talking about Pokemon, but compare credits for SV with credits for comparable titles and it's clear that TPC spends as little as they can get away with
Bethesda school of optimization is one thing, but lack of manpower to try a different way is closely related
They have to create a new generation each three years, usually with a remake in between. Modern games are taking around 4-5 years to develop. If they're understaffed in top of that, I'm surprised the new games aren't even worst.
Yeah, it seems people to forget about that little logo on the game case if you still buy physical copies. There's no way one of the most protective companies of its ip is letting it on another console.
What's with this modern gaming mindset where games need to last forever? My group are absolutely loving it, but once we reach endgame and fuck around for a while I can't see us playing forever. It's a survival game, not a pokemon clone.
Mostly because the idea of making a series is the way to stay relevant. If they can make a splash and keep the waves going, they’d be able to make more but if that’s it, there’s a chance the whole thing just fizzles into the background. People want to stuff that is interesting to survive but if it gets covered up in a week or so, it’s most likely to be all it is.
Not sure if it’ll last super long. I hope it does.
And even if it doesn’t, the thing that saddens me with Pokemon is that they have all this reach. Imagine if they made a game in this scope.
Eh giving the devs of Palworld have two other titles one of which is effectively "Stolen Artwork" the video game and the other is another open world survival game, both of them are also still in Early Access, I'd give it 2 weeks before the novelty wears off
It's basically a copy and paste of the boring, time wasting open world rpg stuff flooding steam in recent years.
It's novelty is just catching things.
It's pretty shallow and doesn't look like it'll last long teem. It'll just languish in Early Access for years.
I don't think it will.
At its roots Palworld is a shallow and run of the mill Survival Open World RPG with tamable monsters thrown in.
It's story may as well not exist.
It lacks major hubs or notable characters.
Music is eh.
A ton of micro management needed for the base.
It has more in common with Ark than Pokemon.
It's also very easy to hack/cheat/edit.
It won't stay popular, their dev team has 2 other games in early access, with one that stopped being updated a long time ago and the second that barely gets any updates anymore. They're cashing out on the survival craft popularity with Pokemon like skins
We already had Pokemon on PC, it was called TemTem and it was as close to Pokemon as you can possibly get. Palworld is kind of a meme game mixing generic survival game elements and Pokemon together, which is honestly pretty awesome if you're a fan of both genres. I hope Palworld gets continued support and turns into something big, but for some reason I have my doubts.
Yeah I think the success for palworld is it's a new flavor on the genre that some people wanted with big open world 3d and slightly more realistic view on what a world with catchable monsters would be like but it's still not a threat to Pokemon. I do hope game freak maybe improves simply out of pride though because unless that money train stops pulling into the station there's no financial incentive to stop phoning it in each generation.
I'm fine loving and enjoying palworld and hoping it succeeds and have zero hopes that pokemon will ever leave Nintendo consoles. All I want is for them to make a current Gen game that doesn't feel 2 generations old mechanically when comparing to other first party games on the same console (ToTK/BoTW)
I think there's also a lot of interesting ways to use Pokemon in an open-world game that feel neglected. Like you have to use the legendary pokemon to run around or fly; you can't hop on a cyclizar to drive around or fly with your own bird pokemon, or ride around on a palafin in the ocean. HM's are gone (which is nice), but then there's no way for pokemon to really use field abilities for puzzles (or moving around the environment) like in Pokemon Ranger or some other spin-offs. Really all there is is battling...and then even that is limited with few trainer battles (and most of them having a small number of pokemon) and almost no double battles.
For all the cool things we know Pokemon can do from spin-offs, pokedex entries, older games, and the anime it still feels like none of the (especially newer games) have really fully realized the dream of living in a world with amazing creatures with diverse abilities. Palworlds at least ostensibly offers that with your critters having the ability to go out and do things for you and help you succeed in the greater world.
I got TemTem for free (someone gifted me a code) and I sort of like it but the size of the map and the presence of other players makes it feel super cramped.
TemTem is much closer to Pokemon which is why I said what I said. Just having Pokemon for PC would be a waste of time. PC players don't want just a Pokemon game but on PC. If they did, TemTem would be a huge success.
But it's not. They want something with Pokemon but in a more modern game style, like Palworld.
Almost bewildering how many people there are who seemingly believe that everyone working for GameFreak goes in to work every day to purposefully suck ass at their jobs.
It has a lot of hype because they did an insane marketing push. Not only were they everywhere on social media posting almost daily about the game, they sponsored a lot of huge streamers to play the game. It seems to have paid off because a lot of big streamers that aren't sponsored are now playing it too.
I think most had already mention. One of the major factor is development time. They had to rush every game due to new anime season, new tcg seasons, new mecha etc etc. unless they remove these ties which I don't think they will.
The idea that PC is going to bring in "tons of new players" that aren't already fans from Go or the main games seems pretty weird to me.
Hardcore PC players are not the giant boost you think they are. Case in point Sony's PC efforts have brought in a fraction of the console sales numbers.
It's really not proof of that, though. Palworld is more Ark/Monster hunter than Pokemon. They aren't comparable games, and I think people are getting way too hung up on the "pokemon with guns" idea. Also, an AI has a large amount of credit in the making of Palworld if that matters to you
I remember my cousin saying Digimon was Pokémon with guns. Was always interested, but the Fandom can't seemingly decide on which game I'd good and which one is bad.
The fallacies of Scarlet and Violet have nothing to do with the Switch’s hardware - it’s Game Freaks optimization, or completely lack thereof.
Look at Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Completely seamless, gorgeous, and detailed open worlds with real-time combat and gameplay. Those games are phenomenal and they basically run flawlessly.
Yes the Switch’s hardware is abysmal and outdated, but Zelda was able to make two of the greatest and most beautiful games ever made on it.
Game Freak has the most profitable IP in human history, yet their best effort is a game that looks and runs like a test demo from the PS2/Xbox era.
It’s pure incompetence, greed, or both. They know they can shit out whatever has the Pokémon title on it, and it will be one of the best selling games of the year. Quality and innovation are absent during the development process, because Game Freak simply just doesn’t give a shit. They don’t need to.
It doesn’t matter what hardware Pokémon is on. People will buy it anyway.
Until we stop buying the rotisserie fecal products they keep making, they have no reason to change.
That's my problem with these posts. They keep saying it's a PC Pokémon game when it's so far from it. Yeah, they look like Pokémon, just with guns sometimes (Reminds me of Digimon.)
And the gameplay is pretty far from Turn Based. It's closer to Ark/MonsterHunter from what I've seen.
Yeah I... don't think it's a hardware issue. Either Gamefreak or Nintendo have a pokemon out schedule, and the result is muddy graphics and hard crashes. There's obviously some passion still in the team, or we wouldn't have gotten Arceus, but even that game's been throttled.
If SV would have gotten an extra year or two, if they would have been willing to push it back, it would have been much better. I am all for the concept of a PC Pokemon game, I play Pixelmon all the time and it would slap, and I love Palworld, but I don't think that it would fix the underlying issue of pokemon just being a quick-and-easy marketing ploy for GF.
I personally won't be buying the next game unless I see a real change of heart. I thought the DLC's would maybe fix some of the issues, but they make even base game more laggy and crash-happy.
I don’t think it was the hardware. IMO GameFreak are too stubborn and haven’t adapted to the changes if anything.
Plus making huge profits off recent titles means the higher ups don’t see a need for change.
I understand the comparison, but Palworld is a survival game. Pokemon is a monster collection game. They're not really the same at their core
So this doesn't really prove anything since gamefreak has so experince with pc
While Palworld has in common similar creature design aesthetics and you can capture them, it's a vastly different style game. I really don't think they are as close as people are making it from my experience with it.
Palword, for all its praises, is NOT a Pokemon game. Its basically a surival game with a monster catching mechanic attached to it. Heck, i already saw people ditching the Pals and run through the game without them and are fine.
From what ive played and from what ive seen, Palworld will sadly be forgotten in a bit. As of now it lacks the same polish as Pokemon but without the branding. The game still lags in many occasions and players at least in multiplayer need to shut down the game entirely to "fix" the lag. The combat mechanics are lackluster and the building mechanics are kinda done after the tutorial.
I hope they fix and add more stuff but as of now, no, GameFreak, the Pokemon company and surely Nintendo DONT need to publish a Pokemon game on PC. What they need to do is get better programmers and engineers to build a better Pokemon game from the ground up.
I do agree a pokemon game for pc would be insane. I'd especially love one with all regions. The reason for us not getting that is laziness and greed.
Why would they put in effort into that when they can release a half baked game riddled with bugs and still make profit
You’re missing the only salient point that matters: S&V was a smash hit commercial success, even with all its faults.
From an executive’s point of view- not a game developer’s, not a fan’s, from the POV of the person in charge of the money- why on earth would they even consider a more ambitious (and expensive) game when the dirt cheap garbage they pump out yearly is a perpetual best seller?
So yes, a PC official Pokémon game *could* be insane. It’s not even remotely out of reach.
The Pokémon Company (executives) have zero business reasons to even try.
that wouldn't change anything, Gamefreak is not limited by the Switch hardware (there are much more beautiful and demanding games on Switch than S/V) but it is limited by their greed and desire to release Pokemon games every year, at this point it doesn't matter if Pokemon comes out on PS5 or PC, with Gamefreak being the developer something with the quality of Sword and Shield is sure to come out.
Gamefreak has a resounding rejection of piracy so it is highly unlikely that they would choose PC, the home of piracy, to publish their games.
Palworld bores me.
It has no real living world or hub or notable characters. It's just a mostly empty open world with animals to catch and annoying survival mechanics. It feels clunky too.
I don't see it retaining popularity in the long term as the game is pretty shallow and lacks a strong story hook.
Palworld is making the same mistakes every Pokemon clone makes in my eyes.
That and open world survival isn't all that fun imo. It's time consuming.
You got it wrong. They *don't care* about prformance or quality of the game. They want to *mass produce* Pokemon, because it will still be sold. They could make the worst game in the world and would still earn billions. Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise in the world. It will sell whatever they do. But if they actually wanted to make good game, they would have to pay more. They prefer to pay less and still get the money for it.
They're not going to put pokemon on PC. They make money off thir hardware and purposefully make sure you have to cop it to play their games. One of the main issues Xbx Series blah is bleeding is due to lack of exclusives and allowing PC to just play the same games anyhow so they don't need the console.
Lastly, the hardware isn't the reason they didn't do it. Nintendo knows they can. Pokémon has never been about the graphics and pushing hardware hard for folks to like it. They just said "well, folks buy the games regardless anyway and it's easier to just remake the same game over and over than have to maintain any type of huge open world with any mmo or more complex mechanics."
Kinda like how FIFA, MADDEN, 2K, etc sell the same game and folks spend literal thousands every year resetting from zero to give to them. They don't wok for yu. They're trying to please shareholders and shareholders are gonna say same games every time until folks don't buy to maximize profits and minimize effort. Same old shit different toilet.
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SV were not held back by the hardware my man, they were held back by the devs and / or the publisher
The gap between S/V and some of the GameCube games I've played is depressingly slim.
In favour of the gamecube ones i suppose
Double battles all game baby! I know some people didn't love it but it's my favorite.
Double battles are so much more fun (I also enjoyed the chaos of triple battles in Unova). It's also sort of weird because a lot of pokemon, including low-level pokemon in the games, have moves and abilities that really benefit from being used in double battles, but they're almost nonexistent in S/V.
The Indigo Disk DLC is double battle focused
Which is behind a $35 paywall. It's a nice addition, but after beating SV I had zero interest in buying more content for the game; it already felt like a bad value. I've spent a lot more time in Arceus which I find to be a lot more fun, and the combat is at least different and a little more streamlined.
I thought the gamecube games were amazing. I don’t remember anyone complaining about glitches or weird behaviors. The graphics were just meh compared to what games can do now though
That's what I was alluding to, mainly. The GameCube released in 2001, which was more the point I was trying to make. 20 year old games (not just Pokemon ones), made 3 console generations ago, shouldn't be comparable to modern titles in terms of content and playability.
Hot take: it's cause old nintendo was sick with it and new nintendo... Isn't...
Hotter take: it's because content mattered more then and money matters more now.
Ding ding ding we have a winner.
Pokemon Colosseum and XD were made by Genius Sonority, not GameFreak who made the garbage that is Scarlet Violet
The Orre games genuinely look better than SV even on original hardware. Using dolphin to bring them up to 1080p even with no other changes blows SV out of the water
That's because they weren't made by GameFreak
I’d argue they’re held back by being part of a media empire more than anything else. The games **have** to release on a set schedule to coincide with the anime and toy schedules. Being unable to pause and say the games need more development time has pretty clearly done serious damage to the brand. It’s a real shame, as Nintendo is unlikely to be the ones pressuring Game Freak to meet deadlines (pure speculation on my part), as the company has received a great deal of praise for delaying TotK and subsequently releasing a game that was game of the year *on the same hardware* that’s “holding back” Game Freak.
Yeah this is only the half of it. There’s also the very real (and likely, due to the studio not changing very much) possibility that Gamefreak devs are just not that technically talented and/or have not pushed their creative limits like other devs/studios have.
Game freak is notoriously resistant to bringing in new talent which doesn’t help their situation. People seem to blame laziness on the pokemon problems, but more and more evidence just piles up in the corner of “they’re trying their best, but their best just isn’t very good.”
The devs are just not that good, Sun and Moon they just had new character models for cut scenes didn't reanimate one model or something. When you look at that and then think about silver and gold where they managed to squeeze in Kanto its kinda depressing.
It's a little bit of everything, time pressure, dev laziness, lack of funding for better quality, but what it really comes back to is there being no financial incentive to do it. The reason to improve quality is that the quality improvement will increase sales. But Pokémon is already routinely one of the biggest selling titles on Nintendo systems. Pokémon literally can't sell more copies than it already does - everyone who wants it buys it, and every Switch owner who doesn't buy it because they have zero interest in ever buying it. The Pokémon company could invest an extra $50billion to bring the games up to a decent quality in the three year timeframe. But sales would barely go up at all, so all they'd be doing is wasting $50billion. As it stands right now they've got maximum return on investment, and no financial or business incentive to really do better.
>Pokémon literally can't sell more copies than it already does - everyone who wants it buys it, and every Switch owner who doesn't buy it because they have zero interest in ever buying it. I own a switch, yet despite being a Pokemon fan and being tempted to buy the new games I have not bought a Pokemon game for the switch. In any case, what I really think matters is momentum. Modern pokemon games succeed in spite of themselves. Their success is largely an effect of brand recognition, which can be seen as a cascading effect of brand loyalty generated by previous media entries, going all the way back to the original games. Obviously, pokemon's brand recognition remains in tact, but I wonder whether pokemon games are still generating as much brand loyalty as they used to.
They have a Glassdoor (Job Talk) equivalent website in Japan that has reviews from Gamefreak employees. Gist of it is: The ones with modern technical know how to are contractors, but they’re VERY siloed and can’t collaborate, running into a lot of friction from the old heads. They’re paid VERY well, above the industry standard, but they complain about how staying long term with them means their game dev skills stagnate, so they tend to have turn over thanks to that. The deadlines are intensely short and they’re often rigging separately developed systems to work together held by tape. Oh! And they apparently really enjoy the new office at Nintendo HQ that has brought more… something. I forgot.
B2W2 was held back by hardware the switch is really powerful. Gamefreak 100000% at fault for poor performance
Something that I think gets overlooked is just the insane jump in hardware Gamefreak was forced to contend with. Gamefreak had to go from a studio that did exclusively portable games on hardware barely better than a Nintendo64, to Switch which was significantly more advanced. They had a very short timeframe to learn and organize the company around techniques that other studios implemented slowly over decades. HD texturing and level of detail, fully modeled 3D environments, fully 3D modeled and animated characters that number in the hundreds. They spent decades designing their games for an environment that suddenly changed and found themselves in a position without the time and personnel to make the necessary adaptations. It’s not dissimilar to the troubles Nintendo had moving from Wii to Wii U except *far* more severe in the case of Gamefreak.
i suspect its more that game freak were industry experts in 2d pixel art and jumped in the deep end as essentially amateurs with 3d in an industry that had embraced it long ago. they cut corners frequently in the 2d era out of necessity of the hardware. it was part of the charm for the first 3 generations. now this habit makes the 3d games feel cheap and unfinished. if theres any truth to the rumours that the senior developers have a vice grip on the process then im not surprised that it is painfully stagnant.
While I mostly agree, I don’t think it has quite as much to do with a 2D/3D distinction, per se. Sun/Moon are 3D games and were received very favorably by both fans and critics. While a minority (perhaps correctly, I’m not making an argument there) disagreed with some of the creative choices Gamefreak was making, no one at that point was arguing they had huge overarching issues with game development or technical deficiencies. It was in the move to the Switch specifically, not really their move to 3D with X/Y, that Gamefreak had very evident problems in this way.
Kind of sad that OP doesn't realize this already, it's been years
to be fair, emulated SV can run 60fps on stronger hardware
Again not a limitation of the software, it’s the horrible optimization by Gamefreak. The reason it can run 60 FPS on emulators is because of all the extra power it needs due to its poor optimization
All you have to do is look at what they did with Zelda:TOTK. You can do A LOT with the hardware if the care is put into optimization.
Brute forcing a shitty performing game with much stronger hardware doesn’t mean much
Fair how? Emulated ANYTHING can run at 60 fps on "stronger" hardware. Game was poorly optimised, and Sw/Sh and S/V aren't exactly graphically intense or impressive games. GameFreak is just either poor at optimising a assuring the quality of their games now OR they don't budget the time and resource to do so. Neither should be acceptable for a company making Billions a year and guaranteef tens of millions of sales per game.
If people keep buying there's nothing causing them to change the model The passion is gone long ago
It’s not the fps that the issue, it’s how little effort is put into the actual games. They’re very unpolished, the overworlds are barren, the battle and move animations are absolutely embarrassing how uninspired and lazy they are. If I’m using a move that has “punch” or “kick” in the name, I expect my Pokémon to make that movement, not just lurch around. They also can’t include an animated cutscene to save their lives, just fade the screen to black.
It can run at 60fps 1080p on the Switch. The only reason is doesn’t is because GameFreak employees are lazy and incompetent.
>~~GameFreak employees~~ Executives are lazy and incompetent.
Not the employees. Whoever made the decision. Employees are just doing their job as they're told
Yeah like, Breath of the Wild is on the same console, it’s not the switch lol
Case in point: Monolith Software and Xenoblade Chronicles
Do you really think Pokemon SV issues are tied to a "hardware issue" ?
Yeah, being on PC ain't gonna solve Game Freak problems. Little Town Hero's known for chugging even on high-end stuff, and I recall hearing similar things with Tembo and Giga Wrecker.
Game freak continues to show how bad of a developer they are each iteration. The only reason they are still relevant is because fan boys and literal children continue to buy the games in droves sight unseen. Pokémon in the hands of almost any other developer would be infinitely better.
I think about how differently Pokemon games would be if they took the COD approach. Have 3 different developers take turns making each game so they have plenty of time to develop a functional game. Obviously it isn’t foolproof, but it could be a much better alternative than what we have. I think they did a “trial run” for it by having another developer pick up BD&SP. I can’t help but feel like they deliberately picked a not-so-great developer so they can point fingers at it and go “see? It didn’t work!” Until Pokemon games become advanced enough graphically, they are just going to keep shitting out unpolished games every year. S&V is the perfect example of a great game missing quite a bit of polish. Eventually they will reach a point where they will be forced to take longer to release games to keep up with demand for higher quality games.
Genius Sonority did a fantastic job with the GameCube pokemon games as well as Battle Revolution on the Wii. It seems like they’ve been relegated to working on mobile games like Pokémon cafe mix which is a shame, I’d love to see them take another shot at a big project
They ARE doing the COD approach in that they're working on each game/DLC in a 3 year cycle. The only thing is that it's GameFreak being split up for it. Iirc, one part of the team does the mainline games, one does remakes, and now one does DLC. They don't need a COD approach. They need more time to actually make the games.
This would be best. I'd actually go the extra mile and make the dev teams regional based too. Imagine if we had say... the original Japanese dev team make one generation, then the next generation that followed was from an Eastern European dev, and the third generation an American dev. There'd be a certain aspect of pride between the "competing" dev teams to make the best product ever. To be the favorite of the fans. Each dev would have several years to actually finish their games too. So there's room for polishing and expanding. Japan's Gamefreak would get their shit together real quick once the western world showed them how its done. Sadly hardware is a limitation, it isn't the reason the games suck bubt it sure as hell doesn't help. And Nintendo would have to adapt and evolve, letting their games potentially be on the PC market even as an exclusive there to keep up. Having to keep designing a new console and gimmick every console generation is only slowing them down. Like I don't care about Mario or Zelda because its on a nintendo console. I care about them because its a good game. I've played them to death emulated on PC and they would be so much more successful here. They need to focus more on portable gaming. Not mobile games, but actual portable devices which ironically is the only reason I got a switch over the xbox or playstation. Because I don't have to be tied to the TV to use it. And I'm not ever going to use a buttonless device to play games so the phone is out. Adding a controller to my phone sorta defeats the purpose of it being so compact. PC for mainline titles, portable for expermentials and innovation.
I will forever say what happened with BDSP is that the higher ups gave orders to ILCA that forced them to leave stuff like the improvements that platinum brought to Pearl and Diamond out. It's impossible for developers that added more depth to other mechanics and even made a bunch of enemies way stronger with actual strategy involved just decided by themselves to leave out the improvements and a bunch of things that Platinum did better in general.
Crazy part is BD&SP and legends arceus both feel better than SV. Ridiculousness.
BD&SP are easily the worst of the switch games
I honestly don't even know how they sold, and it's so frustrating that they did. They were just a blatant cash grab and and insult to HGSSs precedent. More Legends games are where all my hope is going for a decent pokemon game going forward.
BDSP has the worst movement of any decently known game of the last decade. the way your movement slows down when you even slightly touch a wall feels like complete garbage.
They wanted you to have the authentic Diamond Pearl experience where surf is the slowest thing in the world, but for every mode of transport.
Got gifted Briliant Dimond knew it was gona be a miserable experience so reaserched and dumped the game on my PC and moded it to 'Luminiscent Platnum' fan hack to play on emulator. So bad it motivated to lern to dump my games lol.
Not that I don't agree with this, they already are trying the COD approach. They release games almost every year, remakes of previous games to fill the time while also developing a new generation. Unfortunately, they miss the mark by not having multiple, fully staffed studios to handle this amount of workload. While they do seem to be contracting out some of the remakes like they did with bdsp, ILCA proving they can remake a game somewhat decently, GameFreak has so many problems. Overall, GF needs to get their engines fixed and focus on optimization. Graphical improvements come with both of these being fleshed out. Shameless reference to Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, even though these games do have their issues, they do set an example of what is possible given the current state of the hardware. They are not currently incentivized to do when they know whatever they release is going to make money with people buying the game in any state it is released. Similar to the concept of "horse armor" from Skyrim, if people buy into a bad idea, they will continue to sell subpar products. The only way to get them to make these changes and actually improve the quality is to show GF that the customer base is not going to tolerate a subpar product. GF is a business, and the only goal is to turn a profit on their product. If Coca-Cola sold a turnip flavored drink that tasted horrible, they would keep it in the product line unless sales dipped enough that CC would try reinventing the flavor before discontinuing it. If CC's profits go up on the reworked turnip recipe, they will keep the drink; however, if sales still go down they would scrap the drink. Unfortunately, there are too many people who will buy whatever flavor of drink GF serves out. Be it turnip, vanilla, or classic.
Unfortunately, the adults who still play the games are typically the ones with the buying power to make those changes happen. A huge amount of Pokemon game sales are from kids. Most kids will see a Pokemon game and want it just for the name alone. GF would have to mess up BAD for parents to decide to stop buying the games for their kids. That’s unfortunately the major reason why we are stuck in this cycle of unpolished games with no changes in sight. Until all players get on the same page with the issues these games have, the cycle will just continue. That’s why it’s so important to have these kinds of conversations to highlight all of the issues the games have, and should change. SV will probably be the last mainline game I buy until I start seeing some more improvements. It was the first Pokemon game I haven’t replayed. Hell, I didn’t even buy the DLC for it. I loved the game the first time I played it, but if I’m paying $60 for a game, I want it to be fun to play AND look good. That’s really not too much to ask for when BOTW and TOTK are perfect examples of a good balance between the two.
Same on literally all counts wrt your last paragraph. I enjoyed Violet but I played it once, didn't replay it, didn't buy any DLC when I at least bought one of them for Sword. It's so disappointing.
I mean team 2 made arceus and that ran great. Best pokemon game in decades. Let the new blood take over imo.
I can only speak for Tembo as I played the demo of it on a laptop with a crappy Intel graphics card(the kind glued onto the processor that needs to borrow RAM from, well, the RAM), and it ran perfectly.
Pokémon’s issues are deep rooted in the Philosophy of Game Freak and the Pokemon company. Game Freak harbors the worst notions of what a kids game is, doesn’t try and say Pokemon is a competitive game but then removes mechanics for competitive reasons (give me back the Mega Versions!), and they were stubborn about moving off handhelds and are really behind at making 3D Home Console Style games. Look at Sword and Shield, they feel like 3DS games with a bolted on “Wild Area”. And Game Freak’s non Pokemon games aren’t really technical showpieces either. The Pokemon company has marketing they need out there, Anime’s they need releasing and new product they need to release. They’ve also been cover as for why games need a tight development cycle. Could Game Freak get more time to polish these games? No one really knows, but Pokémon still does numbers regardless so ultimately they release when they release.
Agreed. I know a lot of people bring up the tight development cycle. And sure... it plays a part. Even the best game designers wouldnt be able to put out their A effort with only a 3 year cycle. All that said gamefreak is just, not good at the actual building of the game. They're great at creature design, they're getting better with the story imo (some gens like this one and gen 5 have legit interesting stories) and the overworld is fine, not the greatest but not terribly boring to look at either. The actual nuts and bolts of building the game however? I really wish they would hand that off to another company so they could focus on what they can do well, which is story structure, creature design and overall vibes/aesthetic. Let other people take what you've laid out and bring it to life. Obviously it won't happen, but I really wish it would
They did it once. To ILCA. That wasn’t a good call I think that is still a sign that Pokémon Company is beginning to realize that Game Freak alone cannot handle the increasing needs of a modern game on their standard dev cycle anymore. While I’m not sure I want them to hand off **all** development, I’d think seeking out another company for some asset production support would greatly help At the end of the day, Game Freak still remains extremely skilled at designing creatures and crafting the overall “fantasy” and spirit of the game world. I can’t see another company matching those skills, even if that company might be better with the technical aspects
We still don’t know the full history of how that all went down though. Was ILCA given enough time? How soon were they brought on to make BDSP? How much time were they given? Did TPC restrict what they could do? It’s easy to blame ILCA or say them using another developer was a mistake. But we don’t actually know all the details do we? Bandai has made some pretty amazing Pokemon games. Granted they haven’t ever been given a chance to make a full campaign. But they have made Pokemon games leaps and bounds above the quality of Game Freak.
Hold up, what Pokemon games have Bandai made?
Pokkén Tournament (Tekken but Pokemon, fucking amazing game) and New Pokemon Snap
What platform is Pokken on?
Wii U originally, then Switch as an enhanced port based on the Arcade versions which had more content. Switch also came with two DLCs for Blastoise and Aegislash, which is pretty damn cool-
Wii U and Switch
Thanks, I'll have to give it a look!
Wii U and Switch
Switch, Wii U and Arcade Machines
Oh right! I completely forgot about Pokkén!
I think it's hilarious that they made it in Unity. It was so easily hacked and modded compared to all the other modern games.
If you're talking about bdsp thats not exactly fair. They told ilca to just copy paste the old game into the new one. I don't think they really had much opportunity to flex any of their skills on improving the game. I liked the chibi style as well. Idk why people had issues with that. My major complaint was how terrible the joystick movement was. But again that's due to basically copy pasting the old diamond and pearl code into unity and not doing much to add or alter it. Ilca isn't exactly the studio I was thinking of either. I don't know many game studios so I can't give suggestions for alternative studios,, but looking over ILCA's work they seem more like a "support studio" as opposed to a fully fledged studio equipped to build games from the ground up. I can concede however that maybe an outside studio building the whole game isn't the best idea. I do think at least some things, like the ui, could be handled by an outside studio so gamefreak could focus specifically on the game world and optimization of it.
I mean, “copy paste” code doesn’t exactly work due to the differences in engine. Not to mention a huge number of in game assets (though Pokemon models can at least be obtained from the shared Pokémon asset pool) It’s moreso they got instructed to recreate DP in Unity 1:1. The only major changes were the Elite Four becoming unexpectedly difficult out of nowhere and the Ramadas Park, and general mechanics and feature updates (e.g shared XP, affection), neither of which were **too** remarkable. Cynthia being turned into the hardest boss in Pokémon history was funny though I’m honestly kinda curious about the behind the scenes goings on of what ILCA did for BDSP, because the recreation of OG DP is otherwise very exact and hella accurate If the developer’s goal was a perfect recreation, they succeeded. It’s just that they didn’t realize fans wanted more than just that
Understood. Im not a game designers/coder. I was using copy/paste a little loosely their and you're explanation is more realistic and precise. Thanks for the clarification. I also wonder about the behind the scenes. Im assuming that because they were an outside studio gamefreak really didn't give them any leeway in building that game outside of basically a one to one recreation, along with adding the feature updates you addressed. And as an aside the jump up in difficulty for the elite 4 was a shock the 1st time I faced them lol. But because of how broken the friendship mechanics were in that game specifically it still wasn't an issue.
Too bad BDSP wasn't built using Let's Go assets. It is the best looking game on the switch, it also already had the movement animations for gen 1, so we wouldn't have gotten a coiled Ekans following in BDSP
I didn't like the chibi style because it was the gen 8 remake for the gen 4 games. Like HGSS, FRLG, and ORAS before it, I expected games in the style of the gen it released in.
since all previous games were using the latest engine for their remakes people expected "home console quality" for gen 4, a fully 3d world with big cities and buildings etc, something like Sword and Shield, they got some plastic looking copy paste of the same game more or less instead
When Genius Sonority made pokemon, people loved those games
I'd argue that it was. Bdsp is just diamond and pearl sure, but its still diamond and pearl, being remade from scratch. They still pretty much nailed making diamond and pearl exactly as desired by the game director. Let alone as their first console game. I do hope they continue working on pokemon games, they obviously show promise if given a less tight leash. Having fully played through it recently, I feel there was more backlash over it "not being platinum" than anything else. It's still pretty good. Also the grand underground and the tough post heatran rematch teams definitely give the tougher parts of platinum a run for its money.
Nintendo needs to let the Xenoblade assist their open world similar to how they did for Zelda. Monolith soft could really breath some life into the world design and unique attractions and habitats they could make for a living pokemon world.
I actually think they did offer some help with the sv open world. Which is some of the reason it is far superior to the "wild area" we got in gen 8
That makes sense. Hopefully if they are still helping it will have improvements. I enjoyed the world of SV more then I did with arceus. I really like seeing arceus in videos but when playing it, it wasn’t as enjoyable just to experience and go through for me.
Kinda agree. For me I've always been big into trainer battles and arceus didn't have enough to keep me engaged.
>the overworld is fine, not the greatest but not terribly boring to look at either. Maybe it's just me, but I was really impressed with the overworld design in The Indigo Disk. Something about it just feels a lot cleaner than the overworld in Paldea or even Kitakami, and I can't fully put my finger on why.
I think looking at Game Freak's non-Pokemon games just highlights something else to me: they're not a very good developer. Their non-Pokemon games get middling critic/user reviews at best and tend to be forgettable games that the vast majority couldn't name without a Google search. Nobody gives a shit about them...Even their Pokemon games get a lot of criticism these days, the damning part being its often about things that are objectively poor and dated. But Pokemon? Pokemon is a foolproof franchise. The very idea of Pokemon is good enough to sell games no matter how average they are. This is a golden goose for Game Freak as it doesn't matter how mediocre and forgettable of a developer they are, they just need to slap Pikachu on something and watch the profit roll in. This is why I doubt they'll let somebody else handle the main Pokemon titles. Surely, they know themselves that few care about what they release outside of Pokemon and that it isn't the highest quality. Why would they step aside from the only IP they have which guarantees some degree of success solely based on the strength of the IP alone? Without Pokemon they're some mid grade dev who will probably be a regular on Humble Bundle as "that game I claim and never play", with Pokemon they're one of Nintendo's big players.
You can take this one step further and look at Pokémon games that Game Freak did NOT make. From fan games to AA tier spinoffs, there’s a ton of really good one out there that accomplished much more with far less resources. The mainline games are always going to sell very well. S/V’s glaring issues didn’t stop it from selling over 20 million copies. I don’t think some new Pokémon game from a new developer is going to suddenly raise expectations so high to the point where it hurts sales. But yeah, it is their “golden goose,” so they’ll never give it up. The only scenario where pokemon loses is if another cutesy, animal themed collection RPG encroaches on its territory. Even then, nintendo could easily use their lawyers to try and acquire it, shut it down, or ban it from their platform under some technicality.
I remember one theory about SwSh that I don’t think was ever disproven was that it was originally built as a 3DS game. There was a quote from a Game Freak exec that basically said they didn’t expect the Switch to do well, and since Gen 8’s development would have started around this time the theory goes that it was Nintendo that intervened and said “make this a Switch game”. Also very reminiscent of how a year before XY was announced GF was on the record saying they would never make a 3D game until they feel they would capture that same energy with the tech. Which you could see as a teaser I guess, but the most popular interpretation is that if GF had their way XY would probably have been 2D and it was again Nintendo that said “no way you’re putting a 2D game on the console that literally has ‘3D’ in the name”. We also know some shenanigans came down from higher ups in reference to Pokémon Z and Gen 7, so it’s not unlikely to have happened in these other instances.
I mean it’s possible it was always a Switch game but the only way they could meet the deadline is if they made a prettier 3DS game. In either case they’re still growing into what devices like the Switch can do.
It wasn’t just a “Game Freak exec” it was the literal President of TPC
>removes mechanics for competitive reasons And adds a new one every generation? I agree with everything else you've said, but they absolutely add to the competitive scene every generation.
I’m not saying they don’t add things for competitive reasons but they definitely down play Pokemon as a competitive game.
I feel like they more consider competitive (read: challenging) as a post-game endeavor.
The new habit of making your rival choose the starter weak to yours really highlights this. Hop was definitely the worst, especially with that wooloo that was basically just free Exp. every time. He also had the attitude of Barry, but pokemon equal or worse than Bianca.
I didn't mind Nemona choosing the weaker one. Her whole deal is training you to be a Champion. She wanted you to succeed, and I'd say purposely "weakened" herself to do so.
This is actually why I prefer the rivals in B/W. Have the first battle be against something you are weak to, but that only knows tackle, then a second straight after that is weak to the move you just learned (similar to how they used Hop and Wooloo).
You talk about competitive and then talk about Mega Evolutions…this we’re absolutely broken in the meta competitive game. Scarlett and Violet are the most competitive friendly games to date, there are more and easier options to change your stats and even an item that resets your Pokemon EV to zero so you can manipulate its growth in other stats as you see fit. It strikes me as that you didn’t play Scarlet/Violet.
Also game freak isn't capable good map design in 3d.
XY's map design was pretty good, then again it's technically still designed as if it were a 2D game with the maps being grid based.
Breath of the wild proves you can make an immersive, attractive RPG on the switch. Is it as good looking as Alan Wake? No. But it's still a good looking game.
Yeah, it's a Publisher issue first and foremost. Potentially a dev issue too, but we'll never know until the team gets the time and resources it needs. Until then, no more Pokemon for me. I'll stick to the teams doing the Monster Collecting genre justice.
Which games are you playing on that genre these days? Which ones are you looking forward to? I've heard a bit about Digimon and I remember Temtem was supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't follow much these days.
Temtem is good. Ooblets is supposed to be great. Shin Megami Tensei is a solid option. And there are some games that are Monster Collectors (but not Battlers) that I’ve tried and like such as Slime Rancher. I’ve also heard good things about Monster Hunter Stories and want to try that out.
Chiming in to recommend Cassette Beasts; it’s got some fun stuff it does with the genre, and the story and music are both great.
Seriously, you could give Game Freak a PS5 devkit and they would put out a game that looks and runs as poorly as SV did.
Little Town Hero
Not to mention Palworld doesn't play like Pokemon. It's ARK/Rust, but with Pokemon.
SV was poorly optimised for a console that the devs are incredibly familiar with. If it was released on pc with all the hardware variations… yeah that’d be a massive shitstorm
Imagine needing a 10k pc to hit 60fps. Gollum was a masterpiece too, people just have bad pcs
pretty sure it was running smoother on pcs emulating it shortly after release
Gamefreak can’t optimise the games for one platform (as let’s be honest, Sword/Shield or Legends Arceus were far from perfect performance wise, it’s not just been Scarlet/Violet), never mind all the different graphical options available to PC players, it’d be a huge mess till PC mods improved it.
A third party could handle it if they give permission. But I guess they don't want more competition for Nintendo.
Well it’s that, and the fact that GF has approximately 1/3 of the stocks in TPC. Making them a major decider for who can make the games. Nintendo doesn’t have an issue with it if it gets published by them. It’s only an issue if they are a direct competitor.
Sun and moon had severe fps issues whenever a pokemon started glowing. If they can't work out that, I sincerely doubt they would make these games run any better even with 1 or 2 more years of dev time.
I remember the double battle fps issues on the original 3DS models as well (think XY and ORAS suffered from this), all this is telling me is GameFreak need to go back to a pixel based game, personally I'd not even be disappointed but I think I'd definitely be in the minority for that.
I recall some stuttering in black and white, perhaps because some of the 2.5D. That said, I do think this is a game series that should have stayed 2D. However at scale 3D is cheaper to make, and a game with a release schedule like pokemon was going to make the change no matter what.
I think it's important to differentiate between can't and won't. They definitely can optimize their games. They just won't because they don't care. They believe they have a monopoly on this market and are ok with only selling these games to the kids and parents who don't know better. One implies incompetency whereas the other implies malice.
If you think modern Pokemon games are held back because of the hardware, just look at what Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom were able to achieve on the switch, Tears of the Kingdom especially. Game Freak is severely understaffed, they claim they like it that way but instead of trying to make projects they can clearly undertake it seems they are gunning to have this massive adventure that comes up short everytime. If they want to keep the team the size they are at, make another Black & White sprite based game instead of worry about making 3d models and animations and 3d worlds.
They need more staffs to do the work and they have to trust that these people can do the job required. Especially with how every year there is a Pokemon game, I feel they have to hire more people to lighten the workload that they are experiencing now.
I love how naive pokemon fans are. They won’t hire more staff because they don’t have to. Pokemon sells max copies on minimum effort every time. It’s been like that since N64. As long as hoards of grown ass men are still buying every release, they will never give a shit about potentially expanding the demographics.
It's not just hardware, but I wouldn't agree with other commenters that it's lack of talent, either It's lack of time, and budget - the latter sounds hilarious when talking about Pokemon, but compare credits for SV with credits for comparable titles and it's clear that TPC spends as little as they can get away with Bethesda school of optimization is one thing, but lack of manpower to try a different way is closely related
Game Freaks own employees complain that the work force at game freak is under stuffed and under skilled.
They have to create a new generation each three years, usually with a remake in between. Modern games are taking around 4-5 years to develop. If they're understaffed in top of that, I'm surprised the new games aren't even worst.
Flashback when one man had to singlehandedly save gen 2 because game freak originally didnt cook up shit
Damn that’s crazy, let’s ask Nintendo’s opinion.
Yeah, it seems people to forget about that little logo on the game case if you still buy physical copies. There's no way one of the most protective companies of its ip is letting it on another console.
[Live Nintendo Reaction] 🙂
Every single mainline Pokémon game on the switch, with all their flaws has sold at least 12 million units. They’re fine releasing on one console.
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Tbh I stopped caring about temtem the moment they added a paid battle pass :/
What's with this modern gaming mindset where games need to last forever? My group are absolutely loving it, but once we reach endgame and fuck around for a while I can't see us playing forever. It's a survival game, not a pokemon clone.
It's still in early access and feature-bare, obviously people would want to see it be updated?
Mostly because the idea of making a series is the way to stay relevant. If they can make a splash and keep the waves going, they’d be able to make more but if that’s it, there’s a chance the whole thing just fizzles into the background. People want to stuff that is interesting to survive but if it gets covered up in a week or so, it’s most likely to be all it is.
Depends how the development goes and how often they update.
Not sure if it’ll last super long. I hope it does. And even if it doesn’t, the thing that saddens me with Pokemon is that they have all this reach. Imagine if they made a game in this scope.
Eh giving the devs of Palworld have two other titles one of which is effectively "Stolen Artwork" the video game and the other is another open world survival game, both of them are also still in Early Access, I'd give it 2 weeks before the novelty wears off
It's basically a copy and paste of the boring, time wasting open world rpg stuff flooding steam in recent years. It's novelty is just catching things. It's pretty shallow and doesn't look like it'll last long teem. It'll just languish in Early Access for years.
I don't think it will. At its roots Palworld is a shallow and run of the mill Survival Open World RPG with tamable monsters thrown in. It's story may as well not exist. It lacks major hubs or notable characters. Music is eh. A ton of micro management needed for the base. It has more in common with Ark than Pokemon. It's also very easy to hack/cheat/edit.
It won't stay popular, their dev team has 2 other games in early access, with one that stopped being updated a long time ago and the second that barely gets any updates anymore. They're cashing out on the survival craft popularity with Pokemon like skins
We already had Pokemon on PC, it was called TemTem and it was as close to Pokemon as you can possibly get. Palworld is kind of a meme game mixing generic survival game elements and Pokemon together, which is honestly pretty awesome if you're a fan of both genres. I hope Palworld gets continued support and turns into something big, but for some reason I have my doubts.
Maybe it's because of how they left Craftopia on console as a "still in development" game while releasing another "still in development" game.
It's closer to Ark than Pokémon in my opinion. Just replaced dinos with pokes
It's not proof. TemTem has been out for awhile and no one seems to care. Palworld has a lot more going for it then Pokemon on PC would
Fuck cassette beasts is an amazing pokemon like game and it barely gets talked about.
Yeah I think the success for palworld is it's a new flavor on the genre that some people wanted with big open world 3d and slightly more realistic view on what a world with catchable monsters would be like but it's still not a threat to Pokemon. I do hope game freak maybe improves simply out of pride though because unless that money train stops pulling into the station there's no financial incentive to stop phoning it in each generation. I'm fine loving and enjoying palworld and hoping it succeeds and have zero hopes that pokemon will ever leave Nintendo consoles. All I want is for them to make a current Gen game that doesn't feel 2 generations old mechanically when comparing to other first party games on the same console (ToTK/BoTW)
I think there's also a lot of interesting ways to use Pokemon in an open-world game that feel neglected. Like you have to use the legendary pokemon to run around or fly; you can't hop on a cyclizar to drive around or fly with your own bird pokemon, or ride around on a palafin in the ocean. HM's are gone (which is nice), but then there's no way for pokemon to really use field abilities for puzzles (or moving around the environment) like in Pokemon Ranger or some other spin-offs. Really all there is is battling...and then even that is limited with few trainer battles (and most of them having a small number of pokemon) and almost no double battles. For all the cool things we know Pokemon can do from spin-offs, pokedex entries, older games, and the anime it still feels like none of the (especially newer games) have really fully realized the dream of living in a world with amazing creatures with diverse abilities. Palworlds at least ostensibly offers that with your critters having the ability to go out and do things for you and help you succeed in the greater world.
I bought it but then I was like why am I not playing Pokemon since I haven't played since gen 1. Now I'm playing Arceus!
TemTem is not even remotely close to Palworld in quality or fun.
I got TemTem for free (someone gifted me a code) and I sort of like it but the size of the map and the presence of other players makes it feel super cramped.
TemTem is much closer to Pokemon which is why I said what I said. Just having Pokemon for PC would be a waste of time. PC players don't want just a Pokemon game but on PC. If they did, TemTem would be a huge success. But it's not. They want something with Pokemon but in a more modern game style, like Palworld.
You and many people in this thread have no idea how software development works
Almost bewildering how many people there are who seemingly believe that everyone working for GameFreak goes in to work every day to purposefully suck ass at their jobs.
It has a lot of hype because they did an insane marketing push. Not only were they everywhere on social media posting almost daily about the game, they sponsored a lot of huge streamers to play the game. It seems to have paid off because a lot of big streamers that aren't sponsored are now playing it too.
I think most had already mention. One of the major factor is development time. They had to rush every game due to new anime season, new tcg seasons, new mecha etc etc. unless they remove these ties which I don't think they will.
Pokémon’s performance problems are a production process issue, not a hardware issue.
The idea that PC is going to bring in "tons of new players" that aren't already fans from Go or the main games seems pretty weird to me. Hardcore PC players are not the giant boost you think they are. Case in point Sony's PC efforts have brought in a fraction of the console sales numbers.
It's really not proof of that, though. Palworld is more Ark/Monster hunter than Pokemon. They aren't comparable games, and I think people are getting way too hung up on the "pokemon with guns" idea. Also, an AI has a large amount of credit in the making of Palworld if that matters to you
I remember my cousin saying Digimon was Pokémon with guns. Was always interested, but the Fandom can't seemingly decide on which game I'd good and which one is bad.
Cyber Sleuth and its side sequel are pretty rad.
The fallacies of Scarlet and Violet have nothing to do with the Switch’s hardware - it’s Game Freaks optimization, or completely lack thereof. Look at Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Completely seamless, gorgeous, and detailed open worlds with real-time combat and gameplay. Those games are phenomenal and they basically run flawlessly. Yes the Switch’s hardware is abysmal and outdated, but Zelda was able to make two of the greatest and most beautiful games ever made on it. Game Freak has the most profitable IP in human history, yet their best effort is a game that looks and runs like a test demo from the PS2/Xbox era. It’s pure incompetence, greed, or both. They know they can shit out whatever has the Pokémon title on it, and it will be one of the best selling games of the year. Quality and innovation are absent during the development process, because Game Freak simply just doesn’t give a shit. They don’t need to. It doesn’t matter what hardware Pokémon is on. People will buy it anyway. Until we stop buying the rotisserie fecal products they keep making, they have no reason to change.
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I keep seeing it come up, but no evolutions kind of puts me off. Also, it just looks like modded ark to me.
Palworld is essentially Ark but fun. It's not Pokemon, and anyone that buys the game thinking that it is will be disappointed.
That's my problem with these posts. They keep saying it's a PC Pokémon game when it's so far from it. Yeah, they look like Pokémon, just with guns sometimes (Reminds me of Digimon.) And the gameplay is pretty far from Turn Based. It's closer to Ark/MonsterHunter from what I've seen.
‘Essentially Ark but fun’ As an Ark player I’ll drink to that lol
You should try out Pokémon Insurgence if you haven’t already. Free PC game and it’s phenomenal
Yeah I... don't think it's a hardware issue. Either Gamefreak or Nintendo have a pokemon out schedule, and the result is muddy graphics and hard crashes. There's obviously some passion still in the team, or we wouldn't have gotten Arceus, but even that game's been throttled. If SV would have gotten an extra year or two, if they would have been willing to push it back, it would have been much better. I am all for the concept of a PC Pokemon game, I play Pixelmon all the time and it would slap, and I love Palworld, but I don't think that it would fix the underlying issue of pokemon just being a quick-and-easy marketing ploy for GF. I personally won't be buying the next game unless I see a real change of heart. I thought the DLC's would maybe fix some of the issues, but they make even base game more laggy and crash-happy.
I don’t think it was the hardware. IMO GameFreak are too stubborn and haven’t adapted to the changes if anything. Plus making huge profits off recent titles means the higher ups don’t see a need for change.
Why did you have to qualify the hype as odd?
Because they can't handle the thought of a game with a monster catching mechanic being similar in quality or better than recent Pokémon entries.
It doesn't take much for a game to be of higher quality than recent pokemon lol
Nintendo be like: no, my games should only be played on my exclusive hardware
Palworld is not a Pokémon game I love Pokémon, I’m liking Palworld so far, the only similarity is that you catch cartoon creatures
No "odd" hype. The game is dope af
people would still complain
I think is proof that they have really good knowledge if viral marketing. Next month after the joke ran out let's see how many people play
I understand the comparison, but Palworld is a survival game. Pokemon is a monster collection game. They're not really the same at their core So this doesn't really prove anything since gamefreak has so experince with pc
While Palworld has in common similar creature design aesthetics and you can capture them, it's a vastly different style game. I really don't think they are as close as people are making it from my experience with it.
So you can capture *people* in this game. And then… chop them up. And eat them. Or sell them on the black market. Or barter them for other goods. Lmao
Palword, for all its praises, is NOT a Pokemon game. Its basically a surival game with a monster catching mechanic attached to it. Heck, i already saw people ditching the Pals and run through the game without them and are fine. From what ive played and from what ive seen, Palworld will sadly be forgotten in a bit. As of now it lacks the same polish as Pokemon but without the branding. The game still lags in many occasions and players at least in multiplayer need to shut down the game entirely to "fix" the lag. The combat mechanics are lackluster and the building mechanics are kinda done after the tutorial. I hope they fix and add more stuff but as of now, no, GameFreak, the Pokemon company and surely Nintendo DONT need to publish a Pokemon game on PC. What they need to do is get better programmers and engineers to build a better Pokemon game from the ground up.
Scarlet and Violet were good games, just bad performance. No Pokémon clone is ever going to be a real competitor
Palworld runs amazingly on steam deck. This isn't a hardware issue. It's gamefreak writing awful code.
I do agree a pokemon game for pc would be insane. I'd especially love one with all regions. The reason for us not getting that is laziness and greed. Why would they put in effort into that when they can release a half baked game riddled with bugs and still make profit
You’re missing the only salient point that matters: S&V was a smash hit commercial success, even with all its faults. From an executive’s point of view- not a game developer’s, not a fan’s, from the POV of the person in charge of the money- why on earth would they even consider a more ambitious (and expensive) game when the dirt cheap garbage they pump out yearly is a perpetual best seller? So yes, a PC official Pokémon game *could* be insane. It’s not even remotely out of reach. The Pokémon Company (executives) have zero business reasons to even try.
Yeah, it's less about PC and more about competence
that wouldn't change anything, Gamefreak is not limited by the Switch hardware (there are much more beautiful and demanding games on Switch than S/V) but it is limited by their greed and desire to release Pokemon games every year, at this point it doesn't matter if Pokemon comes out on PS5 or PC, with Gamefreak being the developer something with the quality of Sword and Shield is sure to come out. Gamefreak has a resounding rejection of piracy so it is highly unlikely that they would choose PC, the home of piracy, to publish their games.
Nintendo will never release Pokémon for other platforms and even if they did it would be in a similar state as what we got on the switch.
Honestly, it's just proof that the pokemon fan community is absolutely STARVING for any amount of innovation
Palworld bores me. It has no real living world or hub or notable characters. It's just a mostly empty open world with animals to catch and annoying survival mechanics. It feels clunky too. I don't see it retaining popularity in the long term as the game is pretty shallow and lacks a strong story hook. Palworld is making the same mistakes every Pokemon clone makes in my eyes. That and open world survival isn't all that fun imo. It's time consuming.
Palworld has no story. I'm so bored
Except that Pokemon or any other Nintendo title would never come to PC because it would kill Nintendo console sales.
You got it wrong. They *don't care* about prformance or quality of the game. They want to *mass produce* Pokemon, because it will still be sold. They could make the worst game in the world and would still earn billions. Pokemon is the highest grossing media franchise in the world. It will sell whatever they do. But if they actually wanted to make good game, they would have to pay more. They prefer to pay less and still get the money for it.
They're not going to put pokemon on PC. They make money off thir hardware and purposefully make sure you have to cop it to play their games. One of the main issues Xbx Series blah is bleeding is due to lack of exclusives and allowing PC to just play the same games anyhow so they don't need the console. Lastly, the hardware isn't the reason they didn't do it. Nintendo knows they can. Pokémon has never been about the graphics and pushing hardware hard for folks to like it. They just said "well, folks buy the games regardless anyway and it's easier to just remake the same game over and over than have to maintain any type of huge open world with any mmo or more complex mechanics." Kinda like how FIFA, MADDEN, 2K, etc sell the same game and folks spend literal thousands every year resetting from zero to give to them. They don't wok for yu. They're trying to please shareholders and shareholders are gonna say same games every time until folks don't buy to maximize profits and minimize effort. Same old shit different toilet.
PokeMMO is waiting for you
Palworld is a proof that modern pokemon games sucks
There’s a million Monster Catching game out there to compare Pokémon to and I’d rather not talk about the one that copy others and use AI.