Pokemon is forced to an HD console and now - the developers are out of excuses
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None of them look like indie games though... and none of them are billion dollar franchises
I'd sacrifice immediately to Cthullu sword and shield and whatever 3rd game they make in pokemon, if it gave us Mother 4.
Are you serious? Each and every one of those games have beautiful graphics and worlds to traverse. Not everything has to be ultra realistic with RTX at 144fps and with 8K resolution.
The fan-made one is looking pretty good, all things considered.
I wish Itoi made another game. Doesn't even need to be a Mother one.
And considering the performance issues in SM, and that this is the first hd pokemon game for GF, i'm pretty sure we'll have some fuckery with the performance too.
All of those games are incredibly beautiful and two of them run very well. Bloodborne and BOTW in particular are generation defining examples of the best art direction in games.
Pokemon looks terrible and has performed very poorly historically, which will likely be the case here.
This is where I am in my criticism. I don't think the game looks bad - I'm comparing it to other Pokemon games and not games from other series. In that context, the game looks visually good to me. One think I really liked in the Pokemon Direct in early June was how good the models looked - especially of the starters. This made me really want to see all the Pokemon we've had so far in beautiful HD. Sadly this decision has come along and completely deflated the hype for me
Is there a release date already for that one?
It's been years since i've heard of it.
This was my first thought when it came to the Dynamax battles. To play the 3DS games in double/triple/horde battles in any sort of acceptable way, you had to use a New 3DS. Given Gamefreak's history, my guess is (and there's obviously no confirmation of this and it's my guess) that the game might struggle with framerate issues in the Dynamax battle portions
Zelda is a billion dollar franchise? Other than BOTW, the last time a Zelda game sold over 10 million was OOT on the N64...
I think they're rebranding as a full indie game instead of a fangame last I've heard of it.
Of course it is. Zelda has sold over 90 million units game wise.
trying to word this with upmost respect to the devs: GF isn't a AAA studio and don't likely aren't given the budget to make a from the ground up, repurposed switch pokemon game. the most we can do is hope this and lets go were transitional games & they will be given staff, time and budget to actually make something special. i wouldnt hold my breath tho :/
I mean I can see 30 fps drops, but sub 420? Do you honestly think that will happen?
LOL you said it my man, I was just pointing you in that direction. You have only seen a sliver of S&S, so how do you know that the game is not going to have awesome environments to travel through? Everything shown so far looks great. Also let me tell you a secret BOTW and S&S have the same art style and they both look similiar.
Some spicy takes this thread I got to say.
I've said it before but there's a lot of misplaced anger going around when the thing most people are upset by is the exclusion of Pokémon from the game.
I've said it before but there's a lot of misplaced anger going around when the thing most people are upset by is the exclusion of Pokémon from the game.
No. But the fps drop is almost guaranteed considering Let's Go.
Well, I can only say that my expectations for new Pokémon games are at an alltime low, so I was actually positively surprised by S&S's reveal. Which is rather sad in itself, but GameFreak has made me reluctant to be hyped about Pokémon games for 5-6 years now.
Oh yeah. No I meant both, because that could happen with Xenoblade 2 in handheld.
Exactly.
I don't understand these takes of "Well it doesn't look even close to as good as Xenoblade or BOTW or whatever because those have performance problems in a few places" when instead we're going to get this much worse looking game... that almost certainly will also have performance problems in a few places.
Dude I'm not one of the people who complained about Pokemon's graphics or anything. Been a die hard fan since the originals. Graphics don't mean shit to me. My favorite game of all time is Tetris on Gameboy, it's literally a bunch of squares and rectangles in glorious shades of green.
HD doesn't matter, console doesn't matter. The thing you have to do is look at previous games in the series. They've always looked worse than other games on their respective platform, not even worse than the best the platform could do, but worse than the *average* game on the platform. Except maybe the black and white Gameboy, not sure about that one. It's part of the series look I guess, and likely due in part to the sheer number of Pokemon art they would have to make in each game.
That doesn't mean the games are bad, they just aren't about graphics. They've always managed to be addictive, regardless of the graphical quality. There used to be the idea of games with varying budgets - A, AA, and AAA game budgets. Not every game had a AAA budget, but people still loved those lower-budget games when they were made well or were fun. Pokemon is a relic of those times.
That doesn't mean the games are bad, they just aren't about graphics. They've always managed to be addictive, regardless of the graphical quality. There used to be the idea of games with varying budgets - A, AA, and AAA game budgets. Not every game had a AAA budget, but people still loved those lower-budget games when they were made well or were fun. Pokemon is a relic of those times.
D/P/Pt and HG/SS were very pretty, polished games. With superb overworld art and sprite work, probably on the top of the ds games.
I was absolutely hyped after the last Pokémon Direct. I mean, graphics aren't hot but they are better than the 3DS ones, the games should perform better on Switch and they were decent. Not ugly, at least.
Then, the week after, they said I wouldn't be able to carry my 17 years in the making Pokémon collection to the new games as I've been doing for more than ten mainline games and Pokémon Go.
I'm not saying the developers are lazy or anything like that. People that works in this industry usually works as hell in bad work conditions. But saying that the games are being mismanaged isn't hating at all.
Even if the 3DS games weren't impressive to some people, they still maintained all the Pokémon, items, abilities, moves and so on. It was something magical.
Now, the games are obviously getting compared to another AAA games on the system. Why? Because they are now selling a game more expensive than the 3DS games, less impressive given the hardware and destroying the thing that made Pokémon so enjoyable for me and lots of people: building a constantly growing Pokémon collection that can always be carried from game to game. We've been like this for 17 years and they even said they would have liked to be able to transfer Pokémon from the GB and GBC games to third gen onwards. This was somewhat fixed when the Virtual Console releases of Gen 1 and Gen 2 on 3DS were Pokémon Bank ready. Now we have lost all of that to, at most, decent graphics for the hardware.
I dunno. We've always seen tons of hate thrown to Game Freak, but there has been as well lots of legit criticism over the years. And, for the first time, I'm dissappointed with the mainline games. Simply put, they've been doing handheld games for over 20 years and their new games look subpar to other AAA games on the system on a technical level and subpar to the previous handheld games in terms of content. It's nothing about being lazy, it's about what can they do with the manpower used to do the 3DS games on an HD system and what can't be done. And the Pokémon franchise is really big and multitudinous, they already had to delay the franchise as a whole with Diamond and Pearl and that doesn't look as an option anymore. They need to be bigger to deliver the product Pokémon deserves. It's ok to be new on the hardware and do something modest if the content is there at least. You can do something like Monster Hunter World and get rid of some of the content in pursuit of doing something better and new. But we're only getting handicaps. And I don't understand how is this their new design philosophy when it goes totally against the concept of the Pokémon Bank and the new Pokémon Home they were selling us like three weeks ago.
Then, the week after, they said I wouldn't be able to carry my 17 years in the making Pokémon collection to the new games as I've been doing for more than ten mainline games and Pokémon Go.
I'm not saying the developers are lazy or anything like that. People that works in this industry usually works as hell in bad work conditions. But saying that the games are being mismanaged isn't hating at all.
Even if the 3DS games weren't impressive to some people, they still maintained all the Pokémon, items, abilities, moves and so on. It was something magical.
Now, the games are obviously getting compared to another AAA games on the system. Why? Because they are now selling a game more expensive than the 3DS games, less impressive given the hardware and destroying the thing that made Pokémon so enjoyable for me and lots of people: building a constantly growing Pokémon collection that can always be carried from game to game. We've been like this for 17 years and they even said they would have liked to be able to transfer Pokémon from the GB and GBC games to third gen onwards. This was somewhat fixed when the Virtual Console releases of Gen 1 and Gen 2 on 3DS were Pokémon Bank ready. Now we have lost all of that to, at most, decent graphics for the hardware.
I dunno. We've always seen tons of hate thrown to Game Freak, but there has been as well lots of legit criticism over the years. And, for the first time, I'm dissappointed with the mainline games. Simply put, they've been doing handheld games for over 20 years and their new games look subpar to other AAA games on the system on a technical level and subpar to the previous handheld games in terms of content. It's nothing about being lazy, it's about what can they do with the manpower used to do the 3DS games on an HD system and what can't be done. And the Pokémon franchise is really big and multitudinous, they already had to delay the franchise as a whole with Diamond and Pearl and that doesn't look as an option anymore. They need to be bigger to deliver the product Pokémon deserves. It's ok to be new on the hardware and do something modest if the content is there at least. You can do something like Monster Hunter World and get rid of some of the content in pursuit of doing something better and new. But we're only getting handicaps. And I don't understand how is this their new design philosophy when it goes totally against the concept of the Pokémon Bank and the new Pokémon Home they were selling us like three weeks ago.
When you think about it Pokemon Home makes more sense now that we know this. You can't trade all your pokemon in the game anymore so you're going to need somewhere else to store them, right?
Odyssey is a truly great successor to 3D Mario, but I think there are a few important differences to Mario's video game progression when compared to the Pokemon games. 1) As the Mario games gradually grew (from Galaxy to 3D World to Odyssey), the developers themselves also gradually grew by building up experience and manpower. They didn't ever need to make very big, sudden changes to the Mario games or (presumably) their team. And 2) the Mario games don't come out yearly.
Game Freak has always been gradually growing and increasing their development skills, and the mainline Pokemon games have been growing alongside them. But even if other teams have successfully done so, I feel like Game Freak probably can't (and IMO shouldn't) rush to quickly play catch-up over the multi-generational leap from 3DS graphics to Switch graphics just to make Pokemon look like other Switch games. That said, Game Freak and Pokemon will get to that level in the future, through experience and a slower, more gradual growth.
But as I mentioned (and I think you were partially saying as well?), I really feel like Game Freak purposely makes Pokemon with a retro, old-school charm, and they consider that part of its identity. But I would take it a step further and say that old-school charm is part of Game Freak's identity, and that identity permeates into most, if not all, of their games. I mean, I'm sure Game Freak has the funds to be as big a studio as they want to be, but yet they purposely decide to make smaller games like HarmoKnight, Tembo, Giga Wrecker, and Town because that's what Game Freak really is and really wants to be.
In other words, I think Game Freak making Pokemon S/S has much different challenges from that of the Mario team making Odyssey, in large part because they're faced with a sudden multi-generational leap in graphics quality.
Regarding Minecraft, I honestly haven't played it much, but I think specifically the graphics pack is totally something a small team (or even one person) could feasibly make, especially since it's built upon their own same base assets. Plus, even with the graphics pack, it still retains the charm and identity of the retro style pixel art, since it's for the most part just putting different shaders on top of existing work. So I really feel like the devs could make the graphics pack and still retain the identity of Minecraft and their team.
Yeah this shit got me a bit upset. I've been holding off with Pokemon since X waiting for the time that Pokemon made it's way into the HD era proper. I was really excited at the idea of this finally happening when the Switch was announced and when they said that a Pokemon game was in development for the Switch. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 came out, we had Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey. Man, I was fucking HYPED to get back into Pokemon seeing as I had been away from it for so long.
But then gameplay dropped and I felt really underwhelmed. I felt like I was looking at a passion project by fans rather than something that is made by a multimillion dollar corporation that pushes literal billions in game sales and merchandise sales. It all just feels super dry, flat and boring. And I understand that moving all of the Pokemon over is a difficult task and it can be hard to balance considering the sheer amount of Pokemon there are now, but GameFreak is HUGE, and they've got Nintendo behind them as well. There's no way that they couldn't pull it off. It really takes away from the whole "Gotta catch 'em all" aspect that the games have been known for.
Perhaps this would have been a little more forgiveable if the game looked a bit nicer or presented a much more detailed world for me to explore, but the gameplay and screenshots show a really bland, uninteresting and technically unimpressive world that was really, incredibly underwhelming. Hopefully the next generation of Pokemon will really shine through on a more powerful platform, but at this point I'm incredibly doubtful that they're going to delay the game despite the relatively large outcry of upset fans.
I'm bummed. I'm really bummed.
But then gameplay dropped and I felt really underwhelmed. I felt like I was looking at a passion project by fans rather than something that is made by a multimillion dollar corporation that pushes literal billions in game sales and merchandise sales. It all just feels super dry, flat and boring. And I understand that moving all of the Pokemon over is a difficult task and it can be hard to balance considering the sheer amount of Pokemon there are now, but GameFreak is HUGE, and they've got Nintendo behind them as well. There's no way that they couldn't pull it off. It really takes away from the whole "Gotta catch 'em all" aspect that the games have been known for.
Perhaps this would have been a little more forgiveable if the game looked a bit nicer or presented a much more detailed world for me to explore, but the gameplay and screenshots show a really bland, uninteresting and technically unimpressive world that was really, incredibly underwhelming. Hopefully the next generation of Pokemon will really shine through on a more powerful platform, but at this point I'm incredibly doubtful that they're going to delay the game despite the relatively large outcry of upset fans.
I'm bummed. I'm really bummed.
The main issue I have with Pokemon S/S, is as you said it... The ground and wall textures, and trees in the outside environment. It just sucks terribly and looks like N64/DS textures at the worst. Not to mention really inconsistent with all the effort they out in the city.
I will give Gamefreak some leeway for this game though. Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee was their first dip in the waters, but it's only 153 Pokemon and literally an HD remake of gen 1. With this game there's more than 150 Pokemon (I think.. or close to at launch), and they're doing this open world thing which is completely new for them, not to mention it's going to their most expensive game by far and the longest to develop to date.
the next Pokemon game however, I am going to have relatively high expectations. I'm not expecting Xenoblade 2 high quality grass, but I am expecting some actual natural textures and a few other things that make it look 100% like a switch game and not some 64-3DS game.
But going back to S/S, who knowe how old the build at E3 is, and how much they could improve the overworld by release. I'm sure they have heard the complaints. I know it's unheard of for GF to make significant QOL or performance patches post game, but maybe this will be different.
Also curious if we'll get another main line Pokemon game next year...
I will give Gamefreak some leeway for this game though. Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee was their first dip in the waters, but it's only 153 Pokemon and literally an HD remake of gen 1. With this game there's more than 150 Pokemon (I think.. or close to at launch), and they're doing this open world thing which is completely new for them, not to mention it's going to their most expensive game by far and the longest to develop to date.
the next Pokemon game however, I am going to have relatively high expectations. I'm not expecting Xenoblade 2 high quality grass, but I am expecting some actual natural textures and a few other things that make it look 100% like a switch game and not some 64-3DS game.
But going back to S/S, who knowe how old the build at E3 is, and how much they could improve the overworld by release. I'm sure they have heard the complaints. I know it's unheard of for GF to make significant QOL or performance patches post game, but maybe this will be different.
Also curious if we'll get another main line Pokemon game next year...
Diamond and Pearl are a great example of my point. Here's Children of Mana, published the same year on DS:
Yes, it's not using true 3D environments. That was the choice that was made for Diamond/Pearl, to break with the previous games' sprite-backgrounds for 3D, and it made the games not look nearly as good as other RPGs on the system. But the characters in Pokemon at the time *were* sprites, so could have had this level of detail, but they didn't choose to do it. Like I said, it's probably due to the sheer amount of art they would have to create for all the various Pokemon; Game Freak isn't a huge developer, and it seems they haven't wanted to grow too huge.
Note: Diamond/Pearl were far superior games to Children of Mana. I'm only comparing graphical quality.
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If that's their plan, that would be so anti-consumer I would pull the plug to my most beloved videogame franchise, being Pokémon Silver my first videogame when I was three years old and having bought all the videogames since then.
I've grown with Pokémon. I've liked every game since then. But this doesn't feel right.
That screen honestly makes me mad. We still don't have games looking like that even on PC. It's like the artistic touch has completely vanished while skin pores and individual strands of hair etc has become super important.Diamond and Pearl are a great example of my point. Here's Children of Mana, published the same year on DS:
Yes, it's not using true 3D environments. That was the choice that was made for Diamond/Pearl, to break with the previous games' sprite-backgrounds for 3D, and it made the games not look nearly as good as other RPGs on the system.
I don't think it would be their plan, it might just be a side effect of what they want to do going forward.
For instance, if they came up with the idea of pokemon home and thought "how can we manipulate people into buying this service?" That would be bad.
But if they came up with the new strategy and thought "we need to come up with a solution to let people manage their pokes who can't cross over into the current game" then that's not too bad.
I don't know why they didn't just upgrade/overhaul pokemon bank.
I also think Home should be free, or free to people who sub to Nintendo Switch online at the very least.
Not true. Sure, they were less graphically impressive because, for example, on DS they chose to partially stick to 2D but they had great art direction and good performance. I'm playing White 2 and it looks gorgeous and super polished even if it is not as technically achieving as, say, Dragon Quest IX or Final Fantasy IV remake.
Right now, new entries look less impressive than competition and also perform badly. I don't like Sword/Shield art direction either which makes the game unappealing and flat for what I've seen—while I love the colourful Alola.
This is the biggest issue for me. The marketing for Home every time they've talked about it as far as being a way to transfer your Pokemon up was misleading at best and actively trying to lie to fans at worse.
If Pokemon can't be transferred to Swprd and Shield, once you put something in Home you're FORCED to keep it there and keep paying for it until Game Freak allows you to use it in some other game.
Glameow hasn't been in a regional dex since Pearl. How do we know some Pokemon won't have similar fates, with the added issue of paying money to keep it in a smartphone app?
There have been a couple posts in this thread and others that make me really worried that people don't realize not only does the free camera only work in the Wild Area, but also that the Wild Area... is one chunk of the map. It's not even that big. It's a field. One part of the region. 95% of the game will have you running around facing random encounters with a fixed camera. Yeah, you can have a lot of fun detours in the Wild Area, and you'll probably be spending a decent chunk of the postgame there... but I think some people really believe the free camera and overworld Pokemon happen throughout the game, and/or that the Wild Area is massive or something. This is a minority of fans, yes, but if the game launches in this state, I fear there is an impending second wave of negativity when those people realize what's up.
I also love how one of the Pokemon Directs made sure to focus so hard and make sure we were aware of the fact that the camera could rotate in one specific area in this game. Could you imagine if ANY other developer felt that was noteworthy? It's basically a standard at this point.
Literally some of the strongest art direction of the generation in that list lmfao
And Xenoblade looks about as good as it could on that platform. Which is approximately 98458651589614856941563456254654.4589489% times more impressive than Pokemon.
Let's Go was the 1st HD Pokémon by Gamefreak.
It does have performance issues in handheld though.
To be honest, intentional or not, if this is the case for all the new games I'd get myself pulled out. As a person who absolutely loves collecting things in videogames and who likes competitive breeding and battles, I can't see myself paying 60 bucks only to know there are hundreds of Pokémon out of the game with unique design and competitive traits. Hundreds of my Pokémon, result of thousands of hours and hundreds of euros (if not more than a thousand) invested in the franchise over the years. I'm not angry, at the end of the day it's just a videogame. I'm just... sad to see this happening to something I love so much.
All this talk of textures and animations is really not that important. What is important is that they are cutting down the number of pokemon, actually making this game have less available monsters than Sun and Moon, probably by around half. That's just so disappointing, and their reasons for doing that just don't really hold.
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