I mean, sure, theoretically you could do anything as long as you have enough time and money, that was never in dispute. That being said, just because Pokémon is the most "successful media franchise in the world" or whatever that doesn't automatically mean they can just flaunt their budget however they want, or that they should. That's not exactly sustainable, these games have to make money, they have to ship at a reasonable date, and they already outsource a bunch as is. These games have huge dev counts, at some point you gotta draw a line in the sand and focus on optimizing game development rather than ballooning it.
There's a reason a lot of professional developers chimed in during the NatDex incident to say that they expected dex cuts sooner, not a lot of devs would have had that commitment to the creature headcount as long as Pokémon did. That's kind of an inherent problem with the concept.
It's not "
theoretical", it's a fact that there are many MANY devs and studios out there who know how to make 3D games better than GF ... a pretty much HH only Dev who up until recently have only made tile turn-based JRPGs. For them to not simply partner up with anyone to make these games so that they could be optimized/ done right and instead just try to brute force it is just kinda strange.
I mean, it's not uncommon at all. Look at BoTW, they wanted to do something with LoZ that was new and BIG and said "Hey, lets get help from
Monolith Soft" (they also helped with SS apparently). Look at Smash ... as time went on the series became too big to be handled the way it was before and now we have Sora (Sakurai and his Wife) making the game with people from Nintendo people as well as Bandai
Namco developing it cause they know how to do what this game needs done.
So maybe GF/ TPC should have a dev better suited for this handled these games?
As for cost, I'm not sure if you're joking or not.
Like ... Main line Pokemon is basically guaranteed to hit somewhere between 10 and 16mill copies sold so far as anyone has seen. Those are amazing numbers deserving of AAA budgets and efforts under any rule. But we don't get that quality or effort reflected in the games. I'm sure they could double the damn current budget (Not asking for that) and it wouldn't make a dent in the profits they get from this game that's gonna end up having 10-16mill copies sold. There's nothing unsustainable about pumping more money into a game series that makes THIS MUCH. I mean hell, Pokemon Go was far far cheaper to make and
made 2bill in 2 years ... why CAN'T they put more money into the main games?
Also, where tf are all the spin offs? Where's Pokemon MD/ Pokemon Rangers/ Pokepark/ Pokémon Conquest and such? All these interesting spin offs and things just stopped after Pokemon Go cause the mobile shit is far cheaper and makes far FAR more money ... all this stuff adds up to the "Lazy Dev" debate people have in the shadows because the only reason people can see for why things are the way they are is because they feel like GF just thinks they don't need to put in the effort or budget to make the huge advancements the want. "This is gonna push 10mill at the very least after all."
And yeah, like I said, normally expecting a dev to crank out all the mons this series has at that level of polish animation wise would be a fool's dream. But this isn't you're normal series, it's a series that makes money hand over fist from every possible angle and is legit the highest grossing franchise of all time. It's not at all unreasonable to think more of that insane money should go towards this games.
Now as for me, I'm perfectly fine with how the games LOOK. Sure, the models of the characters and style of the world/ textures look a bit too soulless and generic for my liking. But it's the best visuals the game has had on this scope so w/e, don't really care to debate if it looks like a slight step up from S/M or not cause it looks ok to me.
What gets ME is the animations and seeing suck ass draw distances where a big ass Machoke just pops outta the ground like 20 feet in front of you (Things that many MANY devs know how to handle by now. Also ... now that Pokemon are in the open, wtf do they do? It's kinda off putting looking at a Machoke just walk around aimlessly in a field like a Zombie. Shouldn't this dude be doing push ups or lifting or doing pull ups on a tree or doing cardio with his body improvement pals?)
If they had slashed the Dex in half and in return gave use fleshed out and good looking battle animations as well as Camp animations (Both of which they would surely use for the next 2 decades) I could see why it was dashed in half. They could focus on these this time and next time release the other half along with the current done half ... yay, full dex.
But as it stands I legit see no reason for the cut other than "it's hard" which is sad. :/
I also wish that someone ... somewhere ... somehow lets me get my hands on a Scorbunny rig. I fucking love rabbits and I haven't seen ONE battle animation for this bunny that looks acceptable. Even his idle looks stupid, unbalanced and makes it seem like he has to pee. I'm lazy af but I'm sure in 2 days I could pop something out that's more impressive than any battle animation I've seen for him so far. -_-
EDIT- Holy fuck, I just watched a vid of someone making the same Machoke observation and example as me. O_0
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