I'm open world hater number #1, i hated almost every single big open world game released in the last 5 years. botw, totk, elden ring, sv, ghosts of tsushima. i dont even like the old open worlds like skyrim and fallout 4. The only open world games i've enjoyed have not been true open worlds, like rain world, the ori games etc. I have not seen an open world game that wouldn't have been a better experience by lowering its scope back to a more traditional linear experience tbh
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Game Freak hit with another hack, info leaking
- Thread starter Yung Dramps
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So it's not inherently bad. You liked some of them.
I am not a big open world fan myself. But I wouldn't dismiss games outright because of it.
Again, I don't think GF were ready to make SV open world.
At this point once Legends Z-A releases I'm gonna just go with the flow and stop worrying about what happens with this series. I have enough great games to last me for years to come, especially if Z-A is as good as I think it could be. Italy region and the return to Alola will be the only future mainline game projects past that point I'll have a real vested interest in
Given the poor technical performance I agree, in that I think the scope of the world was not something they were adequately prepared to manage.
But I think their instincts as far as designing the open world of SV were pretty good. There’s an older post from Worldie in the Unpopular Opinions thread that sums up what I think its strengths are:
Certainly there’s plenty of room for improvement (especially in regards to the cities), but for me, this post captures most of the things I liked about SV’s world when playing through it.
So many times there were spots, in all areas of the map, that I’d earmark as something to come back to once I got a new Raidon ability. I never felt like I was necessarily “done” with an area just because I’d made progress in one of the story arcs. There was always some peak that was just a little too high for the regular jump, or some body of water that I’d need to be come back to once surfing was an option, or something else like that. Even Area Zero is like this, since the first time you go through it, you can’t ride on your dragon.
That whole section over in Alfornada’s corner, for example, is so much more complex than it appears at first glance, when you’re just looking at it from around Mesagoza. The tall peak is sufficient to get your attention, but then as you get closer you find multiple tiers of explorable areas with a sizeable cave connecting the whole thing.
I also remember early on in the game, when I read that a TM I wanted was located at Socarrat Trail, I thought it’d be fun to have my wife joined my world via the Union Circle, and ride our dragons all the way across the map from Artazon to Casseroya Lake to go looking for it. And we were able to just… do that. No gating, no progression checks, nothing to say “No, you can’t do this.” Never, ever, ever had that particular experience been possible in a Pokémon game before.
As far as intrinsic rewards in open-world games go, I also think Pokémon themselves are a pretty compelling reward all on their own. Exploring a new area to see what Pokémon are available to you now is such a simple yet fundamental source of excitement across all of the games, and I think it translates very smoothly to an open-world design.
I think they’ve got great ambition and a lot of good ideas for how to approach an open-world Pokémon game… they just really, really didn’t have the time they needed to make it right.
Haven't seen any interesting leaks to talk about but I'm wondering if we have removed/made sure those doxxing leaks of GF employees are forgotten about as some articles I read have mentioned personal information of employees being taken out along with the teraleak. (Although those dev meeting and notes are fine imo)
its hard to say that, because theyre not considered open world. they often fall under metroidvanias, because their rooms transition and are not a fluid world, and progress is not completely free as it relates to your upgrades in abilities/specific room unlocks (except rain world. idk what the fuck that games genre is other than good)
so its like saying i enjoy platformers as long as they dont actually have too many platforms and feature more ground action and speed. not completely incoherent but overall its hard to say thats someone who Likes platformers and not just some platforming elements in other gentes
So Sonic.
I was expecting this thread to transition to talk of the Switch 2 and what that likely means, since it doesn't seem like there's anywhere else discussing that on these boards. (granted Switch 2 was discussed as part of the leak, but now there's confirmation and more data).
Lol my bad ^^" but what else is there to talk about pokemon and switch 2 other than the most likely graphics (and hopefully fps) improvement we'll get for SV?
The Switch 2 is unlikely to affect Pokémon releases all that much in the grand scheme of things. It is simply a question of whether Z-A and gen 10 (or whatever is next) will be Switch 1 games, Switch 2 enhanced or Switch 2 exclusive.
That an whether Game Freak can harness the extra power to soar to the dizzying heights of 20 fps... maybe even 25.
That an whether Game Freak can harness the extra power to soar to the dizzying heights of 20 fps... maybe even 25.
I doubt they will release Switch 1 and Switch 2 versions of each game, because the S2 is backwards compatible, unlike the move from Wii U to S1. The Game Boy to Game Boy Color or DS to DSi is probably a better comparison.
We'll probably get a year or two more of S1 games (possibly with S2 enhancements), but they will gradually be phased out for S2 exclusives.
If I had to guess where Pokémon falls, Z-A will be a S1 game. Gen 10 (or the next game) is likely to be S2 exclusive, but if it doesn't perform as well for whatever reason they will keep it S1.
We'll probably get a year or two more of S1 games (possibly with S2 enhancements), but they will gradually be phased out for S2 exclusives.
If I had to guess where Pokémon falls, Z-A will be a S1 game. Gen 10 (or the next game) is likely to be S2 exclusive, but if it doesn't perform as well for whatever reason they will keep it S1.
Don't we literally have leaks as part of this whole thing that pointed towards there being a Switch 1 version and a Switch 2 version of Gen 10.
Cynically, to me, that would also probably point towards the Switch 2 not having any back end enhancements for Switch 1 games, likely beyond minor stuff that comes just from there being a little more processing like things load faster.
Cynically, to me, that would also probably point towards the Switch 2 not having any back end enhancements for Switch 1 games, likely beyond minor stuff that comes just from there being a little more processing like things load faster.
Hardly unprecedented, B2W2 were playable on more than one system and on the DSI/3DS the differences were miniscule and largely limited to QoL stuff (better internet, battery efficiency, et al). Biggest actual feature was probably Dream Radar compatibility and that was basically just a bonus.
I was too lazy to mention that it was early on in the Teraleak that the PLZA will be switch 1 release first and Gen 10 is Switch 2 exclusive so thanks R_N for doing it for me (and likely others). Now back to Z-A, was it debunked or truely-confirmed on that Zygarde and Zeraora will get Mega forms? I highly doubted mega zygarde at the start but zeraora seemed a bit odd, but promising too me first impressions wise. 
I've seen it suggested that they started doing some work for Gen 10 on the original Switch before getting Switch 2 devkits which honestly makes more sense. I cannot imagine why they'd do a cross-gen release for the 30th anniversary title during an early phase of the Switch 2 when it's probably still gonna need big first party exclusives that aren't Mario
Because they started development before Switch 2 dev kits came out and now they can sell to both systems in a transition year? Doesnt' seem that outlandish. Sometimes it's just how things align.
Somehow I think Switch 2 will do just fine on the launch year & change front, Nintendo's actual first party developers have probably been whittling away at it for a while.
Really the only reason not to have a S1/S2 version is for Pokemon it'd be awkward to effectively put out 4 copies of the same game at the same time. Just sounds like a mess, and wasn't something I was thinking about in my previous post; still a bit Legends brained.
I presume that most of the early work on Gen 10 isn't done in a game engine at all, but with pencil and paper. After all, before they build the game, they have to find out what to put in the game. And I think Game Freak really take their time in the concept art phase, especially considering their very short development cycles.
The reason for my assumption is SwSh, which overall feels like it had an amazing concept art phase, but was rushed to heck in implementation. The opening scene with Zacian/Zamazenta emerging from the fog, the picturesque fields in south Galar, the imposing tower of Hammerlocke, everything about Glimwood Tangle, the cozy hot springs in Circhester, the dingy back roads of Spikemuth, the plot with rampaging Dynamax Pokémon across the region, the glittering caves of the Galar Mine, hordes of wild Pokémon populating the Wild Area ... much as I like to pile on SwSh, there are some great ideas in there. They probably looked wonderful in the concept art. But it's evident that there was no time at all to flesh it out beyond the proof of concept, once it got into the game.
So the pretty-looking towns were made to have two houses plus a Pokémon Center and a Gym, the Routes were short and devoid of any branching parts, and since the engine couldn't render more than a handful of Pokémon at once, the Wild Area seemed empty and lifeless as the Pokémon only spawn in as you walk up to them.
I doubt Game Freak would want to shorten that concept art phase, though, because it's the foundation for their enormous merch sales. They get it back with interest later.
Let's not forget all the redundant and literally non-functional shops, the town that's just a hallway, and the planned dynamaxed Perrserker changed from being a model behind a bridge to this:
also, remember these waterfalls from S&M? you can barely look at them in the background of one route if you pay attention
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Mods, I am like a week late... Forgive me...
Every other monster collection game goes the route of reskins and clones of the same designs in order to save resources because game development with all of these creatures is multiplicative.
If you need to test if the Pokemon work in this one area, then you need to do that with every Pokemon. You can skimp on this scale by essentially having the same creatures but copy pasted in order to lower the workload.
This isn't just for testing, though, this is for the entire design of the game in general. Everything is like this.
The reason big AAA studios right now have a lot more staff is because they are dealing with 4K graphics. In fact, contrary to popular belief, Game Freak actually has proper staffing numbers for the Switch era.
200 core Game Freak staff worked on Sword and Shield directly with 800 additional names in the credits for contract work. On top of this, Creatures Inc. helps work on many models.
See, the "blame game" here is actually really unproductive because the real answer is capitalism lol. It's really that simple. Every single party involved here except the developers has a responsibility to The Shareholders of the World and are only hired in order to keep this cycle going.
Capitalism isn't about keeping the lights on. It's about profit margin and line go up. This is true for every videogame company. Game Freak themselves are not publicly traded, but Nintendo is, and that's what really matters.
Beyond that, Nintendo relies on Pokemon as Holiday titles to shore up their own weaker holiday cycles and guarantee a successful Quarter.
Not one company listed disagrees with it at a management level. Why would they. There is no singular company to blame. I'm sure they have some disagreements, but no one said no to the three Pokemon games in one single calendar year initiative- Clearly they were right from their business perspective, since it was their most profitable year *Ever*.
I also think that this is more stawman rhetoric with shit like "game dev hard" when, turns out, tbh game dev is hard? The thing that was being talked about in the prior page was genuinely insane deadlines for a project of this scope, which is why people were sympathizing with their jobs lol.
Also, no that isn't why this happens with every Pokemon game. For one, because that's not true- LGPE was fine, BDSP was, outside of bugs only speedrunners really found, pretty polished for what it was, and Legends Arceus' worst flaw polish wise was texturing.
Sword and Shield itself is just unfinished content wise and Scarlet/Violet is finished content wise but unfinished as a game, which is unacceptable but IMO makes this kind of rhetoric extremely eye-rolly.
And Scarlet/Violet was already a pretty big scope, they have the funds.
The problem is time and that's something you can't buy with money. Whereas some roles are scalable to where adding more cooks will in fact make things easier, a lot of game development roles are not like that.
There are around 300 people in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's credits, 1,000 in Pokemon Sword & Shield.
Staffing and budget aren't the problem, it's literally just as simple as time. Because time compounds badly. Not only are the developers not given enough time in general, but they aren't given much time on pre-production.
The most successful game developers right now are developers that have strong in-house engines or codebases for franchises, and the biggest point at which games tend to struggle in said franchises are when the scope radically shifts.
To streamline game development, you need to make the tools that will be used for it of course. A common one is a map editing tool that is developed to be easy for people to handle. The easier it is to work with tools, the more efficient the process is. But it goes deeper with game engines. Problem is: Scarlet/Violet is fundamentally running the same game engine as Sun and Moon.
Sun and Moon is:
-Linear
-Set camera angles
-Loading Zones Everywhere
-Made for the 3DS
The engine was fairly well-made for that type of game, but clearly SV is not made with that shit in mind. Engines will often be built with many tools designed to optimize the style of game being made, and that's something that this engine is clearly not designed for; as like, a small in-depth example, how an engine handles memory is going to be different from engine to engine.
In a linear, set camera angle game, you only need to create the illusion of a map. Borders are the end of the world and then you have the space the player moves along, the rest is void. When you enter a battle, the game fades to a loading transition and enters a scene where you do a battle, then after loads back in to the prior world.
Let's compare this to Scarlet/Violet:
In Scarlet/Violet, the world is loaded at some level at all times, with it basically being everything you can see. I do not know everything about how the game does level of detail/collission/spawns, and I also cannot be sure what the intention was since all of that is unfinished.
You see Pokemon spawn in said world and then start a battle with it, adding more to the load. More importantly, however, we've laid a trap: Now we're doing battles at anywhere, at any time. This means that you need to have a rigid system for making sure battles do not go out of whack, plus you need to change how move animations work so that they work everywhere. This is why SV scales back the animation quality very hard, which people ended up complaining about.
Since all of this applies anywhere, they had to do this for various environments such as water areas, whereas in the 3DS game you can just have it float over a water circle in a Battle scene.
All while this is happening, more Pokemon are spawning and moving independently in the background.
Now, this isn't impossible stuff to do, but to actually optimize it takes a lot of time to code and have an engine designed for this kind of thing.
Because what you're imagining in your head is "Monolith makes Pokemon Xenoblade" but what will actually happen is they pick up the shitty game engine Game Freak is forced to work on, except their staff are way less experienced with it, and catching up on all of that will take a significant amount of dev time.
Then, you'll have the fact that everything about the game will still have to be managed by Game Freak or TPC.
Alright I can't help myself
No they aren't. Every other game developer that has looked like they're going to do a similar task has actually lowered their scope an insane amount to even be relative.
Every other monster collection game goes the route of reskins and clones of the same designs in order to save resources because game development with all of these creatures is multiplicative.
If you need to test if the Pokemon work in this one area, then you need to do that with every Pokemon. You can skimp on this scale by essentially having the same creatures but copy pasted in order to lower the workload.
This isn't just for testing, though, this is for the entire design of the game in general. Everything is like this.
I'm gonna let you in on a little secret: Money doesn't solve game development.
This is actually irrelevant because money does not solve game development.
Okay
None of this matters. You can't actually just hire staff until the problem is solved because most roles in game development only has a few people working on it.
The reason big AAA studios right now have a lot more staff is because they are dealing with 4K graphics. In fact, contrary to popular belief, Game Freak actually has proper staffing numbers for the Switch era.
200 core Game Freak staff worked on Sword and Shield directly with 800 additional names in the credits for contract work. On top of this, Creatures Inc. helps work on many models.
This feels like a strawman honestly.
Eh.
This is ultimately semantical since TPC is effectively Nintendo's company when you look deeper into the rights and ownership, the 33% splits aren't truly 33% in terms of who holds the reins.
Eh.
See, the "blame game" here is actually really unproductive because the real answer is capitalism lol. It's really that simple. Every single party involved here except the developers has a responsibility to The Shareholders of the World and are only hired in order to keep this cycle going.
That's why this is a silly statement.
Capitalism isn't about keeping the lights on. It's about profit margin and line go up. This is true for every videogame company. Game Freak themselves are not publicly traded, but Nintendo is, and that's what really matters.
Beyond that, Nintendo relies on Pokemon as Holiday titles to shore up their own weaker holiday cycles and guarantee a successful Quarter.
This makes literally no sense.
This is something literally everyone has said. But the thing is that, no, it's not "somebody"'s fault, literally every single party agrees with the system. There isn't one person you fire that conveniently is making the wrong decision.
Not one company listed disagrees with it at a management level. Why would they. There is no singular company to blame. I'm sure they have some disagreements, but no one said no to the three Pokemon games in one single calendar year initiative- Clearly they were right from their business perspective, since it was their most profitable year *Ever*.
I can because judging games by what they could be and not what they are is dumb and silly. I judge the games by what I received, not by what they could be, and therefore I assess if I enjoyed them or not.
I also think that this is more stawman rhetoric with shit like "game dev hard" when, turns out, tbh game dev is hard? The thing that was being talked about in the prior page was genuinely insane deadlines for a project of this scope, which is why people were sympathizing with their jobs lol.
Also, no that isn't why this happens with every Pokemon game. For one, because that's not true- LGPE was fine, BDSP was, outside of bugs only speedrunners really found, pretty polished for what it was, and Legends Arceus' worst flaw polish wise was texturing.
Sword and Shield itself is just unfinished content wise and Scarlet/Violet is finished content wise but unfinished as a game, which is unacceptable but IMO makes this kind of rhetoric extremely eye-rolly.
I think people in the Pokemon fanbase vastly, vastly overestimate how many people buy both versions. It is a miniscule number of buyers.
I want to say again budget is literally never the problem with Pokemon, because budgets in this industry only really matter as to scope and how long a game takes to make.
And Scarlet/Violet was already a pretty big scope, they have the funds.
The problem is time and that's something you can't buy with money. Whereas some roles are scalable to where adding more cooks will in fact make things easier, a lot of game development roles are not like that.
There are around 300 people in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's credits, 1,000 in Pokemon Sword & Shield.
Staffing and budget aren't the problem, it's literally just as simple as time. Because time compounds badly. Not only are the developers not given enough time in general, but they aren't given much time on pre-production.
The most successful game developers right now are developers that have strong in-house engines or codebases for franchises, and the biggest point at which games tend to struggle in said franchises are when the scope radically shifts.
To streamline game development, you need to make the tools that will be used for it of course. A common one is a map editing tool that is developed to be easy for people to handle. The easier it is to work with tools, the more efficient the process is. But it goes deeper with game engines. Problem is: Scarlet/Violet is fundamentally running the same game engine as Sun and Moon.
Sun and Moon is:
-Linear
-Set camera angles
-Loading Zones Everywhere
-Made for the 3DS
The engine was fairly well-made for that type of game, but clearly SV is not made with that shit in mind. Engines will often be built with many tools designed to optimize the style of game being made, and that's something that this engine is clearly not designed for; as like, a small in-depth example, how an engine handles memory is going to be different from engine to engine.
In a linear, set camera angle game, you only need to create the illusion of a map. Borders are the end of the world and then you have the space the player moves along, the rest is void. When you enter a battle, the game fades to a loading transition and enters a scene where you do a battle, then after loads back in to the prior world.
Let's compare this to Scarlet/Violet:
In Scarlet/Violet, the world is loaded at some level at all times, with it basically being everything you can see. I do not know everything about how the game does level of detail/collission/spawns, and I also cannot be sure what the intention was since all of that is unfinished.
You see Pokemon spawn in said world and then start a battle with it, adding more to the load. More importantly, however, we've laid a trap: Now we're doing battles at anywhere, at any time. This means that you need to have a rigid system for making sure battles do not go out of whack, plus you need to change how move animations work so that they work everywhere. This is why SV scales back the animation quality very hard, which people ended up complaining about.
Since all of this applies anywhere, they had to do this for various environments such as water areas, whereas in the 3DS game you can just have it float over a water circle in a Battle scene.
All while this is happening, more Pokemon are spawning and moving independently in the background.
Now, this isn't impossible stuff to do, but to actually optimize it takes a lot of time to code and have an engine designed for this kind of thing.
Monolith Soft already helped on Legends Arceus but also they'd actually do worse than Game Freak at making Pokemon.
Because what you're imagining in your head is "Monolith makes Pokemon Xenoblade" but what will actually happen is they pick up the shitty game engine Game Freak is forced to work on, except their staff are way less experienced with it, and catching up on all of that will take a significant amount of dev time.
Then, you'll have the fact that everything about the game will still have to be managed by Game Freak or TPC.
This is wild considering they literally just let ILCA make a Pokemon game.
ILCA has had a good development history. They just were given like 1.5 years to make the game. They also had to take the codebase and slam that shit into Unity.
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The only monster game that even attempts to do something similar in scope to Pokémon is Temtem since its ultimate goal is to be Pokémon at home and that game had just barely more monsters than Gen 1 at launch (if we consider the early access launch, that number drops to around 70) AND EVEN THEN they have to rely heavily on cosmetic microtransactions to keep the lights on.
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