And no, they won't be able get away with being inferior to the competition. Pokemon's playing with the big boys now, and so everyone expects them to get on their level. If they don't, gamers are going to start to flock to other games to get their fix. Like it or not, open world is becoming a standard for anything exploration based. If Game Freak can't keep up with that then the industry is going to leave them behind.
Don't forget Pokémon is aimed primarily at children. On top of that, the franchise hasn't changed much, if at all, since its birth on the original GB, but is more popular than ever. Changing it all up would do more harm than good I believe.
Game Freak seems extremely ill-prepared for the transition to HD console development
Evidently you ARE caring about it, because you list the jump to HD as a reason you are concerned due to their "Inexperience with it". Worried about how long it will take or the resultant quality since you specifically mentioned High Definition Development.
The reason I'd worried about the jump to HD is because of the effect that it has on development time and content. Look at what happened with the Wii U, we had game droughts because of Nintendo's inexperience with HD, they underestimated how long it would take to release an HD game and so the lineup suffered because of that. The same thing may happen with Game Freak, especially if they seriously believe they can crank something out in 2 years. That would mean either it's going to be delayed as much as BotW was or it's going to be FAR below what people expect out of it. This has nothing to do with liking the graphics bump.
Don't forget Pokémon is aimed primarily at children. On top of that, the franchise hasn't changed much, if at all, since its birth on the original GB, but is more popular than ever. Changing it all up would do more harm than good I believe.
Aimed at children =/= shallow and linear. You can make an open world game that still appeals to children. Hell, do you think only adults bought BotW? It sold 4.7 million and counting, do you really think that's just adults?
The reason I'd worried about the jump to HD is because of the effect that it has on development time and content. Look at what happened with the Wii U, we had game droughts because of Nintendo's inexperience with HD, they underestimated how long it would take to release an HD game and so the lineup suffered because of that. The same thing may happen with Game Freak, especially if they seriously believe they can crank something out in 2 years. That would mean either it's going to be delayed as much as BotW was or it's going to be FAR below what people expect out of it. This has nothing to do with liking the graphics bump.
I wouldn't expect Wii U length delays with Switch, they're different in so many ways. The Wii U was marketed badly and was too awkward for many third parties to consider it worth porting to. On top of that it didn't have a great CPU because they decided to reduce power consumption and noise. That's going to cause problems if you want to output a 720p image as well as a 480p one to the gamepad without major performance issues. That's what caused problems for developers, more so for third parties that were porting as they were also expected to accommodate the gamepad in some way.
I really don't think that the HD part of game development was a major issue for Nintendo, higher resolutions require good resource management and that's something that Nintendo really excels at and they've continued to show this with the Switch.
Zelda games are well known for long development periods already but it wouldn't have been delayed so much if they didn't add the physics engine or the Switch port.
Gamefreak doesnt take Breath of the Wild size risks because they have never really needed or wanted to. They already had the 3DS games running high res models and they will have had higher resolution textures before they were shrunk and compressed for 3DS. If that was running at 720p then it would still look good, and the docked version will just add the usual resolution boost, improved shadow quality etc.
I don't think the HD part of the game will slow them down too much, I think living up to the pressure created by BotW and Odyssey is what will cause delays. The Wii U could get away with just adding the HD aspect to many series but now people expect some kind of twist it reinvention.
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Topic: Concerned about Pokemon Switch and Pokemon's Development
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