Okay, my mistake, apparently they just hired 20 new staffers when making XY, not sure why I thought it was supplied to them by Nintendo.
Sorry to sound naive, but what exactly was wrong with DP? Note, when I said that I wasn't talking about their map design if you're thinking about the headache that's travelling through Mt. Coronet constantly. The major programming problem I can think with DP are those long saving times.
The game was slow. Extremely slow. In every regard. You were slow in the overworld, you were
disasteriously slow while surfing, and battles took a small eternity that got worse as you added extra effects. I am pretty sure everything was 30 FPS rather than the GBA's 60, so the slowness gets amplified. wi-fi communication could take a while as well, and just connecting to other players was an ordeal i went through
quite often. In general, performance was just poor, though it rarely had the frame issues XY-on had.
Additionally, the tilesets used in the game are kind of rough. Like they're not bad, but they're pretty bland. And its not like the geometry used was that...great... It helped add some depth to the region (Stark Mountain seems designed to show this off in a literal fashion) but, again, bland.
When I said it took them years to get great I mean. THey
very slowly and incrementally improved on it. One of Platinum's biggest improvements was that surfing moved twice as fast and it was
ever so slightly faster in battle. HGSS was every so slighgly faster than that. By the time of BW2 battles even with animations on were lightning fast again. Platinum refreshed all the tile sets and added smaller, newer things to give more life to the region. HGSS obviously took that even further, and BW1 expanded on both that and 3D evnirons.
I also suspect, but they have never said anything about it, that they had development troubles with DP. It is very unusual that they put out FRLG
and Emerald in 2004, but DP would not land until 2006. There was also a pretty long stretch of time between the first announcement and screens (which seem more like mock ups imo) and, like, actual information.
But, again, just a theory.