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Unpopular opinions
- Thread starter antemortem
- Start date
For the record I also agree that the Original Dragon is something we probably won't "officially" get, or at least not one that is better than whatever most people imagined back in 2012.
That said the boss fight approach seems simple enough to finagle. Make the Dragon a "fight only" form from Kyurem collecting the Black/White Stones, and then separated after the fight for post-game encounters, akin to Eternamax Eternatus being fought before you actually can catch Zacian/Zamazenta and the Dragon being caught in its normal state instead.
I have thought about the yearly releases recently, and I have figured out another reason as for why they are bothering me. It is because prior to 2010, I had gotten used to new releases happening every other year.
During 2003-2005, we got new games every year with R/S, FR/LG and Emerald, respectively. Back then, I thought it was fine. After that, we had a break in 2006, followed by D/P in 2007. This was followed by another break in 2008, after which we got Platinum in 2009. After this, the yearly releases started (again). HG/SS, B/W, B2/W2, X/Y, OR/AS (then a break in 2015, thankfully), S/M, US/UM, LGP/E, S/S, semi-break in 2020 thanks to DLC, BD/SP, L:A and ScaVio, then another semi-break with DLC.
Having to play through one game every new year takes a lot of time, it took me even more longer back when I got both games from every pair. It became very stressful since I wanted to do everything in the games, and I was always hoping they would go back to releasing a game every other year instead of continuing with a new game every year. And that's something I'm still hoping for. Fortunately, things have started to move in that direction now that we have gotten DLC for both S/S and ScaVio instead of a brand new game, and there's no new game announced for this year, so things are looking a bit better.
Not quite. The Gen 5 games run at 60 FPS in battles, on the title screen and in 2D menus. Though they still run at 30 everywhere else outside of the opening movie, which runs at 15. This is according to Bulbapedia at least, I can't really confirm this myself as I don't see a big difference between 30 and 60 FPS unless it is shown side by side. However, the Gen 5 games always felt a lot faster than Gen 4, and battles are a lot faster, so I'm pretty sure this is true.
You'll need to remember that in Japan, B/W were released in 2010, not 2011, making the time between these game pairs closer to two years. And the time between the international releases was a year and a half, not just one year (like for most/all of the other yearly releases). Now I don't know if this meant they had a longer development time, but for me as a player, I really appreciated the extra time between the releases.
Edit: Fixed a mistake.
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This is a very valid point, so why do people keep insisting on Gamefreak having a longer development time when it comes to Pokemon games?
Let's look at the games' biggest problems (not counting Gamefreak trying to quietly phase out transfers)
1- Very poor performance (bad draw distance, bad FPS, bad textures) (bad human designs, dear god the bad human designs)
2- Games seem unfinished (menus instead of models for stores, towns with nothing to do in them, towns that are a fucking long corridor)
Gamefreak is not known for coding skills nor for their non-sprite graphic capabilities, but that could potentially be solved by just hiring people
but "just hiring people" is known to not scale well when it comes to actually finishing features, thus fans
Would this work?
who knows, but it's better that going do ho ho I guess the games just suck when it comes to x, but I dont buy the games for x so Im fine with the franchise decreasing quality do ho ho
The way I see it, the current main games are already below my standards, so I'm not playing them. As a result, from the perspective of official games I own and not just Showdown updates, I'm already waiting many years for content. There isn't actually a downside to longer dev times for me as a consumer: there would only be less distance between external goings-on and my own experiences.
The Alola titles are literally only matched/surpassed in terms of graphical fidelity for 3DS standards by the N64 Zelda remasters and a handful of "on-rails" games like Kid Icarus Uprising and Great Ace Attorney but go off I guess. Don't even get me started on individual Pokemon models having more polygons than a considerable chunk of playable characters in other games which often have one or two and not 700something. When you get lag spikes in double battles those aren't the lag spikes of a poorly-optimized slapjob, those are the lag spikes of a system being pushed to its limits.
This tends to occur when you do not have enough development time! Do you think GF's developers are happy about this? Do you believe these problems would still exist or at the very least not be heavily mitigated if SV had been worked on for as long as BoTW? Do you really? This goes for the graphics problems too! There aren't aspects of game dev that are magically immune to bad scheduling, it all trickles down.
"Fixing the scheduling won't magically solve everything" is a reasonable enough take I guess but until that really starts happening it's kinda unfalsifiable. If after 5 years of getting serious about it there's still little to show for their efforts then we can collectively reconvene. If we're going off history, however, it's hard to believe slowing things down would accomplish little to nothing.
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Uhhh, yeah. These are pretty good reasons why people want GF to have more development time.
We know that GF has been hiring more people, so it's not manpower. It's kind of unbelievable that they're only hiring grunts who can't code anything but fine Italian spaghetti, so we can count out skill issues for the most part.
And then there's the elephant in the room.
Cut/barebones content and poor optimization are more often than not related to time constraints and short dev cycles. Pokémon is the poster child for both.
Because one year wasn't enough.
DP was a MASSIVE leap from Emerald in a lot of ways, including the leap to 3D. Yes, I'm aware it's mixed with sprites, but it still counts. DP, to put it bluntly, had more than its fair share of issues, which explains why even this franchise was willing to hold out for another year because the result at the time was likely unplayable.
Ironically, there's more to this story than meets the eye...
BDSP is NOT an example of a game that needed more time in the oven.
It may look like it because everyone got their hands on 1.0.0 and noticed things like the soundtrack being midi placeholders, the lack of an intro, and chunks of the game missing.
But 1.0.0 was never supposed to be the final product. The final product is what we got after the Day 1 patch, which, as the name implies, was ready on Day 1.
BDSP runs perfectly on a Switch. It doesn't suffer from performance issues like say, SV.
The issues with BDSP are completely different. They're direction issues. That game is a mire of bad decisions.
Forced Exp. All in a game that's obviously not designed around it, ignoring all of Platinum's fixes, Affection not having a soft cap...
These are bone-headed decisions, straight up. This is not a team not having the time to optimize a game, it works perfectly. It just shouldn't have been designed that way.
The decisions taken when it comes to many things in that game are just baffling, that is the kind of thing that more time doesn't fix.
The technical issues from DP were fixed. No more "saving a lot of data", slow engine, and poor AI implementation. BDSP's issues lie at a conceptual level because Masuda wanted a faithful-to-a-fault remake. This is why, barring the Frontier and some details, modders recreated Platinum out of it in a matter of weeks.
Again, I must ask: But did he really? Even for a remake, 1.5 year production cycle for a console jrpg is lol lol lmao lol lol. I guarantee you, I absolutely bet my life on it that if BDSP had another year it would've been a Platinum remake. The only reason why it's in this state is because, say it with me now, it's all they had time to do! This was a development cycle in a state so dire that they needed to patch in the completed music. Even in an era where a lot of people complain about overly bloated day 1 patches and devs banking on "release now, finish later" mentalities, this is not REMOTELY normal. They didn't omit the Battle Frontier, Distortion World etc because of executive mandates, they omitted these things because if they tried to jam them in under the circumstances there would've been hospitalizations of staff.
No, no it wouldn't. It was always going to be Diamond and Pearl, not Platinum. No matter how much time it got, even if they put every Pokémon in, they were never going to make it Platinum.
It takes the exact same time to program the Safari Zone to have a Yanma or a Bidoof.
The plan has always been DP.
My unpopular opinion is that The anime is GREAT. we're not that much on pokemon battles But if Showdown made me realize sth, it's that pokemon battles Really are not what makes pokemon great -and the series are ways more on the adventure with pokemon rather than adventure By pokemon aspect of the franchise. So I think it is great, the opening, While not mythical, is 9232793772823782 times better, is more anime-like in general. I find the change of style great
Never!
Stadium has quirks of its own that the base games do not (Stadium 2 for Gen 2 as well).
Hyper Beam worked better with what it was in Gen 1 because of a general lack of boosting moves/options and the higher bulk relative to modern Pokémon courtesy of stat EXP.
RBY has its own quirks such as "PVP being added as a late addition at the behest of the publishers, whomst pressured Game Freak to make PvP work at the end of development, making it extremely rushed"
Half of Stadium's job was to make a game that could actually be reliably used for competitive tournaments at the time, because RBY sure as shit was not. Stadium 2 we can forego because Gen 2 itself is just actually fairly stable, but Gen 1 RBY OU is literally basically modded RBY OU
I don't think Gen 1 PvP actually has all that many modded concessions, and most of them outside of Sleep Clause (which is a Stadium addition) really just exist to solve programming errors. Offhand:
- Psywave Desync Clause (this one genuinely feels like a omission on GF's part, though it's in line with Gen 1's 1/256 misses)
- Counter Desync Clause (a result of the FIGHT button, and errors involving it are probably a result of late PvP additions, since I'm not specifically aware of uneven data communication being an issue in later Gens)
- Sleep Clause (an understandable inclusion, given how powerful Gen 1 Sleep is, though Stadium using it is probably more because most of its formats use 3v3 and not full 6v6)
- Freeze Clause (see Sleep Clause)
- Whatever-clause-assumes-both-trainers-fully-healed-their-teams-before-joining-a-link-battle (IDK if this even counts as a mod but I'm including it anyway)
- Perfect DV mod, as it doesn't impact gameplay mechanics, and is theoretically obtainable with tradebacks in most cases anyway. One of the cases where tradebacks don't apply (Mewtwo) does have gameplay repercussions, but the gameplay effects aren't changed by the mod... just how accessible they are. It's more of a legality mod than a gameplay mod.
- HP percentage mod, since literally every tier uses this too, and it's unfair to single out Gen 1.
Basically, from what I know, while Gen 1 Showdown gameplay is undeniably modded, the community is largely dedicated to keeping the gameplay true to all of Game Freak's strange coding decisions and poor coding oversights, including their impacts on gameplay. Mods for specific moves really only exist when the issues involving said moves can cause the games to desync. Stadium is definitely a more stable gameplay experience, but it also removes a little of the nonsense that gives Gen 1 competitive its charm.
If anyone asks why I don't do research before making posts like these, it's probably because I'm responding on mobile and I am replying in the moment and don't feel like taking the time to research because I don't feel like specific examples would make my point any better.
Relevant Policy Review thread going on now: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threa...ad-about-rby-cart-accuracy-vs-modding.3739684
Static encounters including Mewtwo aren't affected by the DV limitation because it's just based on how wild encounters are generated after an encounter rate roll.
Yeah I did glance at the policy review thread, it's pretty interesting. I actually didn't know that the uneven way link battles handle information from each player' FIGHT command had multiple impacts on the battle until like, last week lol. I think it was Reverend's video on Counter that introduced me to it, showing that I don't play the Gen but I do like learning about its mechanics and bits about its metagames.
gen 1 ou is funny as hell. thats not an unpopular opinion sorry but the fact theres programming patches for it because of how insanely bad the pvp code is amuses me
its a bit wild how smogon players prefer old gens being frozen though. The whole rby tradebacks ban feels silly, if you can do it you should do it etc, even if its not the game you used to play or something. I dont remember this being a common thought process for other competitive games, but I could just have a limited view LOL
its a bit wild how smogon players prefer old gens being frozen though. The whole rby tradebacks ban feels silly, if you can do it you should do it etc, even if its not the game you used to play or something. I dont remember this being a common thought process for other competitive games, but I could just have a limited view LOL
Y'know, it gets me how with Pokemon comp, the meta back then wasn't so adapting to change
Like it was only recently people realized Normal types weren't affected by Body Slam paralysis. Most of meta picks were set in stone for over a decade that point
But then man. Now we have a lot of changes. We went from "Moltres is the worst bird" to "Moltres does very well in RBYOU actually" after people started to experiment more
Gen 3 OU similarly is experimenting more these days, and then Gen 4 we had Clefable reinspected for being a bulky status immune mon after its Gen 6/7 success
It's a nice thing, to see people break out from stereotypical picks and find use that's more than just niche
Like it was only recently people realized Normal types weren't affected by Body Slam paralysis. Most of meta picks were set in stone for over a decade that point
But then man. Now we have a lot of changes. We went from "Moltres is the worst bird" to "Moltres does very well in RBYOU actually" after people started to experiment more
Gen 3 OU similarly is experimenting more these days, and then Gen 4 we had Clefable reinspected for being a bulky status immune mon after its Gen 6/7 success
It's a nice thing, to see people break out from stereotypical picks and find use that's more than just niche
I used to see this semi-frequently in classic fighting games. In the late '90s, Capcom would occasionally put out an updated version of one of their titles in the arcades, but the community would sometimes stick with an older version of it for one reason or another anyway. Like, the Street Fighter Alpha 3 playerbase largely stayed on the original CPS2 release even though the Naomi re-release added a ton of then-console-exclusive characters to it and fixed a bunch of infinite combos. Alpha 2 was also largely preferred over Alpha 2 Gold for reasons that I've entirely forgotten at this point. The Street Fighter III community also stayed on CPS3 instead of migrating to the later Naomi release. There were a lot of little reasons for this. Sometimes some of the specific changes were arguably a step back for one reason or another, but I think chief among them was that the updated versions of these games weren't as widely available worldwide as they were in Japan, so people largely just preferred to stick with what they were familiar with and what they had already invested practice time into.
That sort of mindset isn't so common in the genre today, but it's still heavily embedded into Smash Bros. The Smash Ultimate devs actually put in a decent amount of work into making the Stamina mode viable (e.g. some fixes to what had previously been fundamentally broken combo set-ups in a format that didn't use the standard percentage-based scaling knockback), as well as adding a traditional super meter mechanic into the game as an alternative to the standard Final Smash mechanic so that all of the ultimate attacks could still be utilized in some manner even when items were disabled. The game even heavily features both of these things in its various single-player modes, as if the devs wanted to make sure that the players at least tried them out. Does the competitive Smash community utilize either of them at all, even in smaller alternative-rules side brackets? Nope. They just play Smash with largely the same house rules they always have, with only the slightest tweaks from one game release to the next. (Disclaimer: I haven't been involved with Smash tournaments since 2020 and don't care to investigate whether any of this has changed since then.)
People just get set in their ways, and after enough time of being set in their ways, it takes a lot of inertia to get them to budge. To tie this back into unpopular opinions about Pokemon, this is the sort of stuff that got me to abandon Smogon OU for VGC back in Gen 4. Like around the time that Garchomp got put into Ubers, I sat back and thought about the game at a macro scale a little bit and came to the conclusion that some of the most significant gripes that the community had with the game's balance were at least partially a result of the rules that the community itself imposed onto the game. To give a simple example, Outrage and Stealth Rock were extremely powerful and centralizing in Singles... but they kind of sucked in Doubles. So, at least a few of the reasons that contributed to why Garchomp was so polarizing in OU (Outrage OP, Stealth Rock resistance) weren't factors at all in the "official" ruleset. So that gets the gears turning in my head, and I figure that: to any extent that Game Freak is putting any care into competitive decisions at all, that care is going into Doubles, so I'm just going to move on with my life and play Doubles rather than deal with any of these arguments about Singles.
I'm a pretty strong believer in the idea of "playing the game that you have, not the game that you wished you had." And if I don't like the game that I have, then I'd just rather move onto another game altogether than try to "fix" the current one myself, because the latter process just comes with a whole bunch of community politics and baggage that I loathe to interact with. Tons of agenda-setting for what "should" be part of the game, who gets to decide that, and how best to mask your personal taste as "objectivity." I don't want to play Debate Club. I want to play video games.
(This is not a value judgement on your favorite metagame. Especially you RBY heads. I think it's great that anyone out there is trying to keep classic scenes alive at all, especially when their default state is such a hilarious patchwork that barely functions out of the box. You guys do you.)
Tradeback RBY is wildly different enough to warrant its own meta.
I suppose it makes sense to have them be a time capsule of sorts because it reflects how things were at the time.
For example, Electivire being OU in Gen 4 because everyone wanted to make it work at the time. Would it be UU if it was updated for the current meta? Probably. But it's not accurate to what it was back then.
Ideally, gens should have a cutoff point and have a "Historic Tier" and "Current Tier" IMO.
VGC is low-key a horrible example of it tho. After all, most of the in-game campaign is Singles. It's the main reason why Smogon is so popular, VGC is the one that feels like crazy house rules.
As for my unpopular opinion of the day... Shiny hunting is a fool's errand.
No, it's not because of anything related to the process itself. Most shinies are just too ugly/similar to bother.
Except some past gen stuff has been altered, some big stuff even, like the banning of the Gems in gen 5.Tradeback RBY is wildly different enough to warrant its own meta.
I suppose it makes sense to have them be a time capsule of sorts because it reflects how things were at the time.
For example, Electivire being OU in Gen 4 because everyone wanted to make it work at the time. Would it be UU if it was updated for the current meta? Probably. But it's not accurate to what it was back then.
Ideally, gens should have a cutoff point and have a "Historic Tier" and "Current Tier" IMO.
VGC is low-key a horrible example of it tho. After all, most of the in-game campaign is Singles. It's the main reason why Smogon is so popular, VGC is the one that feels like crazy house rules.
As for my unpopular opinion of the day... Shiny hunting is a fool's errand.
No, it's not because of anything related to the process itself. Most shinies are just too ugly/similar to bother.
Which is why I said there should be a historic cutoff for the record and then the updated, current meta.
Did y'all know people actually play offense in GSC nowadays?
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