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Game Freak hit with another hack, info leaking
- Thread starter Yung Dramps
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Not very surprising, we've known for ages that once the previous game wraps up they start on the next one. So a few months of pre-production, potentially a little juggling/delay from working on DLC depending on the people involved, then starting for real in June makes sense. Perhaps they would have started a little earlier if not for the onset of Covid while they adjusted to work-at-home (iirc, they actually did make the jump relatively smoothly which was impressive)? But sounds about right.
It's worse than what people think because this actually is closer to a 2 year effective dev time than a 3 year dev time. It's at minimum weeks before November where the 1.0 game has to be on cart, often sooner.
About a 2y3m core dev time is probably a lot less than people expect (3 year) from the sound of it.
Not only that. A two year and few months dev cycle through the worst parts of Covid. Something that devastated many a game. SV didn't even have a chance.
I guess if people just look at years I can see how people would think that I suppose.
Though personally my misconception was basically shifting the timeline up a few months. Approx the same amount of over all time but they'd start around the last couple months of the previous game (actually I think this is how L:A worked, maybe) and then the game would be more-or-less gold a few months prior.
All things considered, messy though they are, things could have been much worse for both L:A & SV. Even before accounting for them having to rebuild their tools + making new ones.
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Ok but I thought when discussing dev cycles for Pokemon or any other game preproduction is priced in. So like when people say "Elden Ring had a 5 year dev cycle from 2017 to 2022" that's with preproduction included. Or am I just stupid
Hmm, interesting. As we know, some of the dev names were never updated (i.e. Iron Bundle, Roaring Moon, Iron Valiant, Toedscool line. Iirc the treasure legendaries are also the same), but it seems like some of them did. In fact, only the dev notes are different in this diff, which means the dev names for the Charcadet evos and Iron treads had been updated in an earlier commit.
I think it was probably the right call for the first paradox to be a volcarona-styled split, but Bouffalant definitely would have been an interesting pick.
Interesting to me that most of them still retain their OG dev names in the final build.
I wonder what they would have *done* conceptually with a Future Bouffalant. What typing would it have had? What would its afro have looked like as a robot? (Just a metal sphere?)
Also, it's a shame we likely will still not know what Okakingu and Okagyarados would have looked like. I have been hoping they would surface ever since the freak leak happened.
I really wish they'd gone with a Bouffalant, even if not at the expense of Treads in hindsight. One of the things I kind of like about the Past Paradoxes is they have much less predictable base-Pokemon choices, which Bouffalant would have done a lot for the Future side of things.
To wit, excluding anything that is meant to have a direct counterpart (Donphan, Volcarona, and the Raidons)
- Past Paradoxes have one Pseudo Legendary, and it's for their "Boss" Mon that also serves the Mega callback with Roaring Moon. The others are pretty random, and several are NFE mons even (Scream Tail, Flutter Mane, Sandy Shocks).
- Futures meanwhile consist of 1 Joke Pokemon (which is a half point because making it Legendary tier might itself have been the joke), 1 "rando" mon (Iron Hands), 2 Pseudos (Thorns and Jugulis) and the Boss Mon as a dual Mega.
What's especially a letdown for me is that a lot of the Future Paradoxes, including Hands, are in a lot of ways built to be the original's statline, with varying degrees of success being distinguished by other traits (Hands good, Thorns/Jug bad).
My guess is the afro would've been the main LED glowy part the other Future Paradoxes have
If I had to replace one, I'd go with Iron Jugulis. It keeps the number of Unova Paradoxes the same and, while I have a weird soft spot for the guy, I acknowledge Jugulis is decidedly considered a dud by most and going for a weirder pick would've probably yielded better results on the whole
Disco ball.
Oh, I could definitely see that. That makes a lot of sense actually.
Or that, haha. The glowy LED lights most likely would make it look like a disco ball
I imagine the awkwardness of the afro, combined with reusing Donphan being a neat parallel with Great Tusk and the resultant Iron Treads being by far the best future paradox at actually being a robot, were why Iron Afro was scrapped.
So that explains why Scarlet and Violet feel more rushed compared to L:A. That explains so much, actually, given the ambition.
The poor game balancing for in-game and competitive, the open world that’s more rigid than it look, the hit-or-miss designs (more hits than misses but the misses are apparent), poor implementation of certain QoL stuffs, the numerous visual glitches and even some game-breaking ones, yeah that explains too much.
I imagine some of those issues you have are stuff that can't fully be blamed on dev time (& L:A itself likely was in a similar ballpark in terms of dev time).
Like some definitely are -some glitches likely would have been caught earlier, I'd like to believe they'd figure out *something* to handle performance issues better, they probably could have refined some elements like towns more since I think we had some wayward "indoor" assets- but developers are fully capable of making bizarre design decisions even with all the time & resources in the world.
Just as an example....It's a different genre, but having gone back to Animal Crossing New Horizons (a significantly more polished game that likely had a longer dev cycle AND was likely a healthier cycle compared to New Leaf judging by interviews) lately even after its big 2.0 update it was still full of intentionally-designed jank.
Not to mention some things, like Pokemon designs, are extremely subjective. I suspect that the designs we got are about what we'd have always gotten even if it had another year in the oven; maybe a tweak here & there but overall <insert your least favorite design here> would likely be approximately the same. If there had been any major changes with that extra year I'd wager more towards potentially adding more designs & even thats dependent on other balance changes, presumably.
Pokémon designs are subjective and all, that’s fine, but some Pokémon are more popular than others partially thanks to design. Some Pokémon designs are criticized for a reason, i.e. too little distinction from each others’ evolutionary stages, or copying too much of what was done before. Being seen as boring can be seen as the worst insult that can be given to a design, after all.
But yeah, I do agree it’s not the dev cycle to blame entirely, and I worry if this just prove how incompetant or behind-the-time GF can really be despite their great upsides.
One of the reasons Legends Arceus is a more solid game with a similar dev time is because the scope is fundamentally smaller.
From a game dev perspective, think about something like this: Persona 3 Reload is actually a very small game. It's just an incredible, and high-quality way of reusing assets again and again and again.
Most of the game is spent in the same maps with the same anime portraits with a lot of the social sim taking a giant portion of the gametime, all while basically being text boxes.
Scarlet/Violet vs PLA isn't as drastic, but it's similar in some ways: PLA's maps are big in a way, but also are fairly small, and because they're self-contained the technical details are easier. SV has few loading zones while PLA has them constantly, making it easier to keep it running well by a *mile*.
Then, a giant portion of PLA's gametime is tasks that are easy to code while reusing the same content over and over and over. The main story itself is one of the shortest in the series event wise, but in-between you have hours of "catch 10 of x Pokemon"
That's how a game like PLA feels so big! It's not a bad thing btw, just talking about game design stuffs
Eh... I'd really not go too hard into the "Lol Gamefreak's incompetent" mindset. A lot of that, frankly, is from gamer ignorance as to how game design can be sometimes added with memeified understandings of the game's history. We've seen from these leaks that some of the examples we thought were just lazy game design or incompetence turned out to be due to strict deadlines or deliberate design choices. Add in the fact Gamefreak had to quickly take to some of the worst moments any game designer had to face (the 3D transition, the HD era, and Covid/Post Covid) and it makes it more understandable why some of these things happened. Doesn't excuse the failings, but they make more sense than just apathy.
And really, most of that mindset comes from people misinterpreting, or being misinformed on, the development of Gens 1 and 2 and then interpolating those issues as to why there were so many issues development wise to the games Gen 6 and onward. It's best we put that narrative aside or else we won't understand what is actually happening. If anything, it's more like what's happening with a lot of game studios nowadays. They got so used to getting games out in spite of huge production problems that they generally believed things would work out on their own only to have that illusion shatter in front of them.
Except I didn’t say just incompetency, I also said behind-the-time which, while not mutually exclusive, might explain more given how late they tend to respond to common criticisms.
But I do agree we need to be more lenient with Game Freak given their struggles, despite some of their conscious decisions being questionable at best. But for all legitimate criticisms fans may give, a lot others took it too far to the point of insulting the more optimistic fans. I also said myself once “fans can be as much as problems as corporates can be” by allowing too little middleground between them, with what are long rants instead of legitimate criticisms, letting nostalgia out of hand by ignoring legitimate criticisms and repeating old memes over and over even after it stopped being funny (or even after it get funny again).
They were also clearly much more at home making handheld-scale games (probably why the main games stayed there until there was no longer a dedicated handheld to stay on), and have struggled to adapt to making console-scale games.
I'd count that personally as part of the HD era switch they had to navigate through. I mean they had to go from essentially PS2 specs all the way to the Switch, a leap that is still pretty massive even if the Switch isn't the most intensive system out there. And with the very quick dev cycles they went through, it is impressive Sword and Shield turned out as well as they did. They still really should have had more time. It may take some reorganization and resources, but the games really should switch to something closer to a five year dev cycle instead of three.
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