Pokémon Unite

I'll restate my biggest concern:

It's a pokemon Moba, and as Moba player myself I don't like the plan of bringing kids to the most toxic game genre ever conceived.

Plus, "Free-to-start"... can you smell the microtransactions coming?

I don't fancy the idea of a Tencent-handled Pokemon Moba. At all. It's dangerous stuff.

Kinda ironic that after defending GameFreaks about them not being greedy at all compared to other companies, I get to have an actual example of what it can mean to be greedy.
 
Yeah this is something I'm not particularly interested in either. The game itself looks ok, but MOBAs are just something I could never really get into.

Don't really understand why people are upset with this not being DPP or Johto remakes though. Weren't people complaining about Pokemon having yearly releases?
 
I'll restate my biggest concern:

It's a pokemon Moba, and as Moba player myself I don't like the plan of bringing kids to the most toxic game genre ever conceived.

Plus, "Free-to-start"... can you smell the microtransactions coming?

I don't fancy the idea of a Tencent-handled Pokemon Moba. At all. It's dangerous stuff.

Kinda ironic that after defending GameFreaks about them not being greedy at all compared to other companies, I get to have an actual example of what it can mean to be greedy.
Gamefreak/TPC has had dozens of shitty greedy microtransaction filled games, this is just another for the pile. They literally just released another one today with like a $70 best value acorn pack.

also i guarantee 100% that mobas have already grabbed the kids. There's a ton of them out there and even LOL I'm sure has a kids fanabse

e: To be clear this is less "these aren't problems" and more "these arent new problems and its weird to focus so heavily on these aspects for this game in particular"
 
Don't really understand why people are upset with this not being DPP or Johto remakes though. Weren't people complaining about Pokemon having yearly releases?
You've been on the internet enough to know people like to complain, expecially mainstream franchise fans.

I can guarantee you that if it was Let's Go Jotho, you'd hear people rage about gen 1 pandering (since jotho includes it) and it already having had remakes, and if it was Sinnoh Remakes, people'd be complaining about having to spend another 60 bucks this gen.

Gamefreak/TPC has had dozens of shitty greedy microtransaction filled games, this is just another for the pile. They literally just released another one today with like a $70 best value acorn pack.

also i guarantee 100% that mobas have already grabbed the kids. There's a ton of them out there and even LOL I'm sure has a kids fanabse
Man you need to prove me wrong, not rub more salt in the wound :psycry:
 
Anyway moba games aren't my thing at all and Iwas laughing at just how hard they were trying to pus the gameplay segment as exciting but my friends who do play mobas thinks it looks fine. nothing special. Tencent will at least keep it updated frequently, their previous moba offerings have been Fine, etc. It'll probably be a bigger hit in China, if I had to guess.
 
Plus, "Free-to-start"... can you smell the microtransactions coming?
If it's just skins with no gameplay impact, or permanent unlocks (don't some MOBAs have some sort of rotation of free characters?), it wouldn't be much of an issue.
 
Are mobages just not big outside of Asia? Genuinely curious.
They are, LOL & DOTA are both very popular in the west as they are in Asia (well maybe not AS popular? unsure). I just think I could see Pokemon MOBA not penetrate the market as well here as opposed to there. I figure Tencent Pokemon is a bigger selling point there, but thinking on it I can only imagine how crowded the moba market is there too so I suppose we'll see how this shakes out.
 
If it's just skins with no gameplay impact, or permanent unlocks (don't some MOBAs have some sort of rotation of free characters?), it wouldn't be much of an issue.
Just because it isn't pay to win microtransactions doesn't mean it's acceptable. The entire reason this sort of thing is so predatory is because it creates a "haves and have nots" dichotomy, where you see people running around with skins that cost money constantly, applying a constant stream of pressure to the people who don't spend money because they have to see all these exclusive skins time in and time out, wearing away at their mental fortitude until they finally crack and pull out the wallet... or in this case, their parent's credit card and begin shelling out money so they have those skins as well.

This entire announcement is layers upon layers of messed up and wrong. As Worldie already said, exposing kids, the primary target demographic of the IP as a whole, to the extremely predatory monetized world of MOBAS, and their excessive online toxicity, is a recipe for disaster, and if you wish to circumvent the latter, as Nintendo games like to do with their online components... the MOBA is going to fall apart, because communication is ESSENTIAL for a team based game. If you cannot constantly talk with your partners to go "Enemy is ganking middle" or "Ward here" or "Enemy has returned to base", it's just not going to work well. You NEED communication, and that's something Nintendo as a whole prefers to avoid with their titles to avoid toxicity. It's a match made in hell.

And then there's the netcode. Japanese games are notorious for lack of good netcode, wherever it be fighting games or something like Monster Hunter, and the Switch's servers themselves are pretty bad as well, to where it's highly recommended you keep your Switch plugged into your router at all times, defeating the purpose of the handheld nature of it. trying to play a MOBA, a genre that DEMANDS consistent fast and reliable connection and stability to function, on something like the Switch... Good luck, unless you all huddle close together like I assume the developers are assuming the intended japanese and chinese audiences are going to do... and given the current... state of affairs in the globe, that's the LAST thing people will want to do.

This was just a really, REALLY bad idea shown at the worst possible moment, and that's not even getting into the more "personal" bits for the fandom like how most of the shown mons are just KANTOOOO and whatnot...
 

Celever

i am town
is a Community Contributor
This is the most exciting spin-off title in this franchise in concept. I said it.

Let's get the complaints out of the way:
  • "It's not a Gen IV remake"
  • "It's not Gen IX"
  • "It's not Crown Tundra news"
  • "It's not Let's Go Johto!"
  • "There's too many Gen I Pokémon"
  • "It's another Free 2 Play game"
OK good, so now we can talk about the game itself.

The Switch doesn't have any notable MOBAs on it, so this is a wide open market and more importantly playerbase in order to develop into something actually pretty huge. The mobile market having crossplay would have excited me massively a few years ago too, since it's easier to hide a phone under your desk at school than a Switch.

The mechanics of the game? Honestly they seem good. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but having customisation and branching in-game choices is nice and if they balance everything properly it should lead to having to cater your movesets depending on matchup, which helps to prevent gameplay getting stale. The combat seems relatively diverse for a mobile-catered MOBA with at least a discernible difference between long ranged and short ranged attacks, and fusion attacks as a gambit / nuke move. The impression I got of the game from the trailer is it isn't just a generic MOBA with a Pokémon skin, rather that it's a Pokémon game morphed into a MOBA. And that's exciting.

As far as micro-transactions are concerned: Yes, there will be micro-transactions because it's a MOBA and MOBAs have micro-transactions. That's how they're designed and it's how they've been designed for years. I don't quite understand why this is being criticised because it's not gonna be a "spend 5 hearts to play a game, they'll slowly refill or you can spend money to keep playing!" system. MOBAs rely on having a large cast of characters to cater to lots of different playstyles and roles. Characters usually have a period of time where they're free to try out on a constant rotation, so players can get a feel for the playstyles and decide which characters to use their collected in-game currency on. If you play fairly consistently, you'll never have to spend irl money at all in order to pick up the characters that you get along with. Usually the only things locked behind a paywall are skins, but it's more standard in MOBAs to give out free lootboxes than in other genres.

Let's look at the Pokémon included so far:
  • Venusaur
  • Charizard
  • Blastoise
  • Pikachu
  • Clefable
  • Machamp
  • Gengar
  • Snorlax
  • Lucario
  • Talonflame
It's relatively impossible that this is the final roster of characters. MOBAs depend on a wide variety of characters both to fill different roles on a team, and to cater to different playstyles in those given roles. 10 Pokémon simply isn't enough, and so the fact that 8 of those 10 are the Gen I staples shouldn't be too concerning. This is still the hype-building stage and it seems that they're taking building hype seriously by revealing this game a week later than the others in its own video. It allows for the announcement video to be shared around and for MOBA players to see characters they recognise, but also ones they don't but that still appeal to the male-dominated 20-40 year old playerbase that MOBAs have, like Talonflame. Plus. the whole point of MOBAs is that more characters are released one-by-one for years after the game is first released, as long as the playerbase is there for it. And even if they're not playable, the wild Pokémon are pretty diverse including characters like Joltik, Rotom and Swablu, who would be fairly difficult to turn into player-controlled characters looking at the mechanics (requiring long-ranged and short-ranged attacks).

tl;dr Sorry that this wasn't what you were expecting, but this is the first time Pokémon has tried to expand into a new genre since GO and it's needless to say that that went well. Micro-transactions are standard in MOBAs and it's also standard not to make players feel like they're really missing out if they don't spend money, so if you don't want to make use of the micro-transactions, don't and you'll still be able to get mileage out of the game. And this isn't being developed by Game Freak so honestly we can have high hopes -- the past few years have shown that third parties are better at making Pokémon games than Game Freak themselves are.

Appreciate this for what it is because what it is is really cool.
 
I haven't had much interest in MOBAs due to the apparent focus on competitive. Sure, I am willing to have my ranking dumped in order to try something cool, but I frankly don't have enough friends to reliably have a full team that will accept that. The concept is cool: take an RTS and shift the focus from several smaller units to one big complicated one, but the apparent lack of casual play really puts me off the multiplayer aspect. Even if the character select is larger, I don't want to feel that I'm letting my team down by picking whatever gimmick character I actually want to play. Could this be more focused on casual play than what I percieve the rest of the genre to be? Maybe, but there hasn't been anything to indicate that.
 
Appreciate this for what it is because what it is is really cool.
You know, i'm extremely pessimistic on this title, but I'd love to be proved wrong and it actually ending up being good.
I'd still not play it as I have no interest in mobas *on the switch*, but it's not like I'd not appreciate if it ends up being a good title.

If it's just skins with no gameplay impact, or permanent unlocks (don't some MOBAs have some sort of rotation of free characters?), it wouldn't be much of an issue.
I'm just worried of the wording.
It's not "free to play" like other notable Mobas, but "free to start", which smells of your standard mobile game with limited play per day unless you pay, or having paywall blocks.
 
I'm just worried of the wording.
It's not "free to play" like other notable Mobas, but "free to start", which smells of your standard mobile game with limited play per day unless you pay, or having paywall blocks.
Nah, that's just Nintendo's take on the term. Their "free to start" is the more ambiguous "free to play" of other companies. They just make it clear that there are microtransactions, instead of leaving us to wonder if "free to play" is either completely free, or if it has microtransactions.
 

Yung Dramps

awesome gaming
Don't really understand why people are upset with this not being DPP or Johto remakes though. Weren't people complaining about Pokemon having yearly releases?

YOU REALLY STILL THINK POKEMON FANS HAVE A FUCKING MORAL BACKBONE OR PATIENCE OF ANY KIND?! AFTER ALL THE FUCKING BULLSHIT THAT'S GONE DOWN OVER THE PAST YEAR?! The cold hard truth of the matter is that this fandom only ever paid lip service to the idea of good working conditions or reasonable production schedules, and the reaction to this announcement proves it. If this fanbase actually gave a shit about any of that they would be glad that they're not announcing new mainline titles; hell, I'd be fucking worried if they did show DPmakes considering we aren't even at the second wave of DLC for SWSH yet! But no, it's now confirmed beyond a shred of a doubt that they never gave a shit and only wanted their shitty wish fulfillment because they're all sad, pathetic people who need to be sold nostalgia to feel anything beyond bitterness and rage.
 

Codraroll

Cod Mod
is a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributor
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First of all, I think it's kinda neat how the community has united over this game. Not in adoration, but in dumbstruck amazement. When you sit back and watch the spectacle, it's actually kind of enjoyable. Everyone seems to have a field day cracking jokes and sharing their reactions. To sum it up, the reactions mainly seem to be "I didn't have any expectations so I didn't think I could be disappointed, but TPC sure gave me a surprise!"

So, personally I'm no big fan of MOBAs, and looking at this I'm already filing it in the mental list of Pokémon games I'm just going to skip. There have been many spin-offs made for a quick cash grab that I've skipped before. This one seems to have more aggressive, predatory overtones than the others, though. Microtransactions are the scourge of the game industry, and a clear indictator of greed as a primary motivation. It's not something I like to see in a franchise I'm invested in, and it's something I hate to see in a game aimed at children. Plus Tencent is involved, and as far as I'm concerned, those people can go ram a seabass up their nose.

Microtransactions and Chinese controversy aside ... well, again, I'm no big fan of MOBAs, and this seems to me to be just another MOBA with a Pokémon skin. There's not really anything brought to the table by the Pokémon concept here. Sure, there's leveling up and evolution and Pokémon catching, but those still come across as MOBA elements with a Pokémon skin. You could do the same, with, say, Ninja Turtles, and it wouldn't feel out of place. I heard somebody else say it best in a random YouTube comment, probably quoting somebody else: "We'd like to play a Pokémon game, not a game with Pokémon in it."

But anyway, this game appears to be geared towards the Asian market first and foremost, so hopefully it won't take off over here. Other MOBAs have failed in the past and gone offline, and I hope this will become a forgettable spin-off that dies quickly without wasting too many people's money (again, except Tencent's money. Screw those guys).
 

Celever

i am town
is a Community Contributor
Just because it isn't pay to win microtransactions doesn't mean it's acceptable. The entire reason this sort of thing is so predatory is because it creates a "haves and have nots" dichotomy, where you see people running around with skins that cost money constantly, applying a constant stream of pressure to the people who don't spend money because they have to see all these exclusive skins time in and time out, wearing away at their mental fortitude until they finally crack and pull out the wallet... or in this case, their parent's credit card and begin shelling out money so they have those skins as well.

This entire announcement is layers upon layers of messed up and wrong. As Worldie already said, exposing kids, the primary target demographic of the IP as a whole, to the extremely predatory monetized world of MOBAS, and their excessive online toxicity, is a recipe for disaster, and if you wish to circumvent the latter, as Nintendo games like to do with their online components... the MOBA is going to fall apart, because communication is ESSENTIAL for a team based game. If you cannot constantly talk with your partners to go "Enemy is ganking middle" or "Ward here" or "Enemy has returned to base", it's just not going to work well. You NEED communication, and that's something Nintendo as a whole prefers to avoid with their titles to avoid toxicity. It's a match made in hell.

And then there's the netcode. Japanese games are notorious for lack of good netcode, wherever it be fighting games or something like Monster Hunter, and the Switch's servers themselves are pretty bad as well, to where it's highly recommended you keep your Switch plugged into your router at all times, defeating the purpose of the handheld nature of it. trying to play a MOBA, a genre that DEMANDS consistent fast and reliable connection and stability to function, on something like the Switch... Good luck, unless you all huddle close together like I assume the developers are assuming the intended japanese and chinese audiences are going to do... and given the current... state of affairs in the globe, that's the LAST thing people will want to do.

This was just a really, REALLY bad idea shown at the worst possible moment, and that's not even getting into the more "personal" bits for the fandom like how most of the shown mons are just KANTOOOO and whatnot...
What.

This reads like the equivalent of "rock music is harming our children". This isn't introducing kids to anything they're not already well-acquainted with: kids already play MOBAs specifically all the time. Out of everyone I know who plays League or DOTA, I don't know anyone who started playing later than early teens. And besides MOBAs specifically, you have games like Clash of Clans which are far more predatory and kids are better-acquainted with that. And in terms of toxic online games with communication and chats, when I was in primary school (like 8 years old) half of my class played Runescape daily.

I'd understand if this were the first game of its ilk that's "marketed directly to children", but these games have been around for enough time for parents to know how to stop their kids from stealing their card and spending money, or to say no if their kids demand that they get a skin in x game. This is only one in a long list of many, and I don't even think it's really applicable here. Clash of Clans was such a success among kids that if TPCi was trying to exploit kids for money, this would be a clone of that. MOBAs have a more diverse range of kids and adults playing them.

Also it's an assumption everyone's made that there will be skins but... how would that even work? Sure, the shiny colouring of each Pokémon. Maybe Super Smash Bros.-style references to others in the series, like Salamence colours for Charizard or Staraptor for Talonflame. Beyond that though, there's not much room to play with here. I imagine micro-transactions will be relegated to perma-unlocking characters alone and one-two skins for each Pokémon that won't be that notable or worth spending money on unless you really like the colours. I can't see how it could be any deeper or more predatory than that.

Netcode and in-game communications are valid concerns that hopefully manage to be gotten around somehow, but the claims of predatory business practice seem misplaced here. The practices are probably gonna be far milder here than in the other mobile games Little Timmy's playing.
 
Also it's an assumption everyone's made that there will be skins but... how would that even work? Sure, the shiny colouring of each Pokémon. Maybe Super Smash Bros.-style references to others in the series, like Salamence colours for Charizard or Staraptor for Talonflame. Beyond that though, there's not much room to play with here. I imagine micro-transactions will be relegated to perma-unlocking characters alone and one-two skins for each Pokémon that won't be that notable or worth spending money on unless you really like the colours. I can't see how it could be any deeper or more predatory than that.
Look at it like this. No game can be "free to play". They need to get money from somewhere to keep the servers running.

There's healthier ways to get that money (personally, I don't dislike skins and cosmetics like LoL and Dota do as an approach since they are relatively harmless and completely "opt-in"), there's way more predatory ones (hello lootboxes) that can create addiction, and in this case, we're talking of a infamous company, and a game notably aimed at asian market which is filled with gachas and F2P games with whaling systems all over the place.

I am really really concerned that it will be predatory. In a franchise that is notable to attract underage kids.

We can gliss over the toxicity issue as yes, MOBAs communities are a disgrace, but it isn't inherently limited to them and other games with not-very-friendly environments like Fortnite are already in the market, but the predatory aspect is something to be concerned about.

It's not so much a case of "Metal music harms children", more a case of "should we really sell beers to kids?"
 
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