Sword & Shield **Official news only** DLC Crown Tundra 22nd October

Xucrute

mt tchola
is a Social Media Contributor Alumnus
Yeah I guess I don’t know what people are expecting graphically. The Pokémon are always gonna stay more cartoony (I personally don’t want a game with Detective Pikachu-style monstrosities) and that would look weird in a more realistic environment/with more realistic human models. Can anyone displeased with the graphic shed some more light on what they’d want?

ETA: Also the comments about it being too linear kinda make me laugh, Pokemon is always linear no matter what the map looks like. There’s a handful of gyms you can do out of order but in general the world is gated in such a way that you don’t really have much choice how to proceed.
Not sure about the others, but this is the style I wanted for a pokemon game, the style they chose is nice tho

 
Not sure about the others, but this is the style I wanted for a pokemon game, the style they chose is nice tho

Yeah, not gonna lie while I like Pokken, I kind of hate its models and textures for the Pokemon that fight (anatomy errors everywhere). Also you know like 90% of the shading is painted on the textures in Pokken, right?
 

Xucrute

mt tchola
is a Social Media Contributor Alumnus
Yeah, not gonna lie while I like Pokken, I kind of hate its models and textures for the Pokemon that fight (anatomy errors everywhere). Also you know like 90% of the shading is painted on the textures in Pokken, right?
I didn't know tbh, I just really like how things look in Pokken, I think it's really cool looking ^^
 
If the Honedge line isn't native, there will be riots.

No real gameplay footage, I wonder what will be the gimmick this time.

Hoping for challenge mode or at least an Exp. Share that doesn't suplex the game. Preferably both.

Region map had me shook. Looks strikingly linear, almost as bad as Unova.

Ice-types confirmed to get shafted in-game again. Frozen area is definitely the end-game.

Reserving judgment on the starters until I see the final form, but bunny looks cool and Fire/Fighting material.
 

Dollainthewoods

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner’s for Beginners
If the Honedge line isn't native, there will be riots.

No real gameplay footage, I wonder what will be the gimmick this time.

Hoping for challenge mode or at least an Exp. Share that doesn't suplex the game. Preferably both.

Region map had me shook. Looks strikingly linear, almost as bad as Unova.

Ice-types confirmed to get shafted in-game again. Frozen area is definitely the end-game.

Reserving judgment on the starters until I see the final form, but bunny looks cool and Fire/Fighting material.
Lunatone and solrock weren’t for sun and moon so I wouldn’t count on it bud

On one hand through what if they give certain Pokémon an attack form and a defense form like slash, and the regular version is neutral. Ie Armored mewtwo is aegislash shield form, which would be bulky, and an attacking form which would be like aegislash blade form with high attack stats. This could break a lot of pokemon btw.
 
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I think that being up north means nothing for Ice-types.

There are railroads, so maybe you are fairly free to travel around.

Unpopular opinion here but since I never played Pikavee, I don't care about Random Encounters. Repel is there, ya know?

Also, as a VG judge, I just wish we had a competitive mode, where you could get rental Pokémon for your team pronto after you finish the game. And if you want special Pokeball or shiny, you breed/hunt.
 
Unless I missed something there really was almost nothing shown.

The graphics look like an improvement, although on a mainline console we could maybe expect better.

The region looks kinda cool, but really almost nothing has been confirmed apart from maybe the return of gyms.

The starters and characters are completely inline with the other games, and pretty much exactly what one would expect in general terms.

I guess the real news is that there's no major news. The next game will follow their tried and tested formula for main series games. There will be graphical improvements (and hopefully less lag) because the console is more powerful.
 
I just hope all this scenary gets used alongside online. It all goes to waste when you gotta teleport to the "online hub" location. Just "hey your friends online wanna battle or trade them while you're chillin by the waterfall"
That would be amazing. PBR had some really cool backgrounds, hoping to have the same variety this time.
 
Hmm, I might go for Grookey since I went for Fennekin in Gen 6 and Popplio in Gen 7, though admittedly I find Sobble kinda cute.

I predict his final evolution will be Grass/Dark and will appear as a playable fighter in Smash later down the line. I mean, we had a Water/Dark starter in Gen 6 who made it to Smash, and a Fire/Dark starter a gen later which did the same.
 
I'm starting to think the non-exclusive legend is going to be Poison/Electric based on the hill scene. It's blowing out smoke with lighting bolts around it, and what screams Industrial Revolution more than pollution and electricity?
You realize that's probably melmetal, right?
 
I'm seeing a lot of "too linear" comments but Pokemon games have always been pretty linear, so I'm not sure what people are expecting. When I think "nonlinear Pokemon game" I think of Johto where you had a choice at one point between many paths. The result was... absolutely horrid leveling so that each path wasn't "too hard." I'd like to avoid that.
Of course, if there's a way for Pokemon to get in a less linear approach while also getting a leveling system that goes based on your progress or level etc, then maybe I'd advocate for it. But I mean, if it ain't broken...
 

Codraroll

Cod Mod
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Okay, time for my long-winded "First impressions" post, mostly concerning the region as that's the info we have. I'm going to start with the not-so-good, mostly so I can end the post with the positive stuff. Thanks to Yveltal for the trailer screencaps I will use to illustrate.

First of all, it has to be acknowledged that no game exists in a vacuum (okay, my brother's copy of Pearl briefly did, but my mother got it out again after scolding him about leaving his games lying on the floor). My reaction to the announcement is influenced by some experience and expectations, based on other recent games released on a comparable scale. With that in mind, there's no way around the elephant in the room: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (BotW for short). This masterpiece of a game was developed for the WiiU, a weaker console than the Switch, and released some two and a half years before Sword & Shield-

Okay, sidenote, we need an abbreviation for these games. "SS" is already taken by SoulSilver, so we need something new. After asking the OI Discord channel, I like Altissimo's suggestion "Swish" the best. So Swish it is.

...and BotW is another flagship release for Nintendo with massive amounts of work behind it. The two also have a pretty overlapping target market, it's a pretty fair assumption that many of the Swish players will have played BotW. This includes myself, so there will be comparisons.

Breath of the Wild proved that the hardware is capable of rendering a very big region. In that game, Hyrule clocks in at almost 70 square kilometers. It's a vast continuous expanse, a square more than eight kilometers on each edge. The overworld is completely seamless, you can walk from one end to the other (it'll take an hour or so) without any loading screens. The game also brilliantly incorporates sight lines. The location of the final boss - Hyrule Castle - is one of the first thing you see when you begin the game, and the map is vaguely bowl-shaped with it in the middle, meaning it is visible from almost every elevated point on the map. If you climb a mountain, you can look down on Hyrule Castle, you can walk there at any time you want (mostly to receive one heck of a beating unless you're very well prepared), and you can see mountains behind it that you can also travel to at any time without any loading (not in a way you will notice during play, at least). The point being, the Switch can render very large and detailed environments, and transport you across them seamlessly.

Literally every square meter of land you see in this picture can be visited. Every natural feature has a name on the map. The picture shows less than half the overworld, at my best guess.

Source


Compared to this, the trailer for Swish had me a little wary. Let's start with the Galar region map:


Immediately, we notice that roads and towns are very clearly marked. There are areas you are meant to go, and areas that will remain inaccessible. For instance, there are no areas interacting with the coasts apart from that little bit in the east. The mountains in the very north, or the woods in the south, all show no indication of being areas you can visit. Fair enough, though, Pokémon games have some restriction, with Routes clearly defining your path, but there was always a little spark of hope in me that the region would be fairly open to roam given the right tools to master difficult terrain. Alas, it seems like we are limited to routes and towns again - not that that is a problem if done correctly.

Another point to note is that the opening area exists in relative isolation. As seen in the first few seconds of the opening trailer, and pictures such as the one below, the map is very 1-to-1 in this particular area. It displays a town of six buildings, and those same six buildings are seen in the gameplay cutscene.


The town. All of the town.



Note how close the town is to the main character's house.



House by the lake, seen in its entirety.


But the background irks me a little. Those are naked, rolling hills, isolating the starting town from the rest of the region. You can't see anything beyond them. Neither the map nor the screenshots indicate that you can reach those hills in any way, they're just there to serve as background. It already makes the first little area seem limited and isolated, not so much a part of the region as a world in its own right. There was some potential here to make the central landmark of the city visible in the distance. However, I don't think it's that important for the starting area in particular, you're meant to hail from a far-away small town after all, it's a staple of Pokémon games apart from BW2. The games tend to let you start out in the most isolated backwater the region has to offer.

However, the trailer seems to indicate that other locations are "boxed in" as well. Let's have a look at the town with the hill painting, northwest of the southernmost big city. As we can see here, this place looks strangely isolated too:


I use the word "strangely", because the overworld map seems to indicate something does exist in the background here. Namely, a mountain range with a pretty distinctive cliff city:




By all indications, there should have been something more in the background than those samey, naked, rolling hills. It makes it feel like this town too exists in its own little "box" like the starting town, and that worries me since it's supposed to be right in the middle of the region. They could at least provide a view of the next area, even if only low-poly and inaccessible. Super Mario Sunshine did that admirably, on the GameCube, in 2002.

The other overworld shots we've seen don't fill me with confidence either. Here are two pictures from other locations, one in the southern city where you can't see beyond its limits, and one from the snowy town, where the player is confined to a town square with no view of the outside world:



In general, there seems to be hills, mountains, or city walls blocking the view wherever it seems like you should have been able to see outside the area you're in. The cities have high walls, or are surrounded by cliffs or forests. The routes appear to follow valleys. The designers appear to have purposefully avoided panoramas, places where you can stand and say "I went over there, and through there, but I haven't seen that place up close yet, wonder what that is like?".

But this feeling of being boxed in extends beyond the backgrounds too. Not to exhaust Yveltal's picture database, but have a look at these last few pictures:







Note all the fences limiting where you can go and where you can only look. Not only are you moving within environments that seem to exist as their own little bubbles, you're moving within bordered spaces in those environments. In other words, there seems to be a lot of Galar that just exists as "only background" while you're effectively moving through tunnels. After the ultimate freedom of Breath of the Wild, it feels like a step back.

Note that all these criticisms are valid for all Pokémon games up until now - heck, before Gen V there weren't even backgrounds. Graphically, Swish is a pretty big step up from what we've seen before, obviously a huge improvement. But this is the Switch, the console succeeding the one BotW was designed for, it's 2019 and eight years since Skyrim. I believe it is fair to expect a little more from the world design in this day and age.

...


Okay, that was the bad stuff. Onto the good! Because I think there are good things here too.

Take for instance the shadows. See the tree's shadows on the roof of the protagonist's house. The player character, buildings, other objects, Pokémon... it looks nice! Or the textures, they're really making the world come to life. Personally, I'm the most happy to see the brief clip of the female player character running through the mine, because you can clearly see the orange glow of its lamps on her skin. It proves that model textures are dynamically affected by light changes, so we won't have situations like this any more, where a Pokémon cast into utter darkness glows like it's standing in sunshine:

(picture from Bulbapedia)

And the region, well, it looks pretty great if seen on its own! While it's no Breath of the Wild, it's very definitely Pokémon. Rolling hills in the background isn't exactly new to the series. Have a look at this, for instance:

(From Bulbapedia)

I actually think the games are starting to look better than the TV series has done for most of its run. That's no small feat.
 

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