Topic: Pokemon Pokopia

I edited that because I realized I wasn't sure what you were talking about so I guessed and made sure what I said was factual. My fault for misunderstanding. If there is an extra check swapping between my 2 consoles, it is apparently smooth and easy enough I haven't particularly consciously noticed it even though I swap a lot. I still don't understand in what situation someone would want to juggle games between two Switches and not have wifi. You are literally on the Internet right now. Even if you are some bizarre special anti wifi case, I guarantee to you that most people who don't like Game Key Cards are connected to wifi. Although, I'm pretty sure you can plug in the GKC into multiple consoles without Internet after the 1-time install anyways? Feel free to fact check me on that because I don't own any GKCs to check.

That's fair. You said 'in box at bottom of your closet' earlier which sounded far less convenient. So it is a difference between 30 seconds many time for physical and usually like 3 seconds for digital but occasionally a half hour or more to redownload. Either way, pretty mild inconvenience and as I said before, it is totally understandable that some people might prefer one method over the other. My only comment was that avoiding a specific game you want to play for that mild inconvenience seems pretty extreme.

Welcome to the modern world. What you described is essentially also what happens with banks and credit cards etc, but I still consider that I own that money in my account. It could all break and descend the world into chaos; let's hope it doesn't.

Totally valid, I used to do the same and still do sometimes. Recently I've been better at finding cheap prices digitally for most games personally. I assume the GKCs will also go on cheap physical sale used. Maybe even on better sales than typical given the bizarre hate towards them.

@FishyS
Yea, I did mention one of the good things with gkc is that they don’t make you do the internet check when switching consoles. I will always give credit where it’s due.

Yea, the box in my closet is just for the cases. I take the cartridges out of the cases. I’m like a kid lol

Realistically, if I’m 100% certain a gkc release is never gonna get a real physical and it’s a game I NEED to play (the FF remake, for instance), I’ll eventually end up getting a few of them.

But I still have faith something will change with this whole situation. I have more than enough to play at the moment while things continue to play out.

You could definitely be right but I'm not sure how long it will take. If things follow the usual process, the larger game cards will eventually be cheap as well as larger sd cards. So it might simulteously become less inconvenient to have GKCs but also less reason for companies to use them.

On the original topic, one thing that annoys me is that Nintendo (or Pokemon company) is playing the 'bad' part of both sides. Last gen they had digital be slightly cheaper than true physical since it is a higher profit margin. I feel like both digital and GKCs should have a discount off of the premium $70 price. No matter what you think about GKCs, it's definitely less premium.

@FishyS
It may take the better part of 2 years for things to solidify, is my guess. And at that point I’ll have to go with the flow, whatever that flow may be.

Digital and gkc should certainly be cheaper. I’m one who supports a solution where digital/gkc is cheap and the physical is limited and carries a premium. I would be fine with that. I’m supporting that model with Yooka Replaylee and Hades 2.

@OmnitronVariant
That is such an exaggeration.

My original GameBoy is still trucking. 30+ years. One faint line that goes across the screen near the bottom. Most GameBoy games didn’t even have batteries. For the handful that do, replacing the battery is a 5-minute job that anyone can do after watching a YouTube video, and you can buy a dozen of those suckers for like 10 bucks.

I still have my DS and GBA SP, too, both still working great with the DS just missing a pixel on the bottom screen.

My NES (original) and SNES (bought recently), same deal. Recapping capacitors is a once every 10-15 years thing (sometimes longer), costs about 20 bucks, and anybody can do it.

Sounds like you don’t take care of your retro stuff.

All things degrade, but if you store things sensibly, hardware is actually very resilient. Even motherboards that have stains and corrosion can be cleaned and saved.

I think its overstated that physical is the only way to own something and its understated that game key cards are obnoxiously cynical ways for companies to save money in order to waste space on your SD cards for no real benefit for me. That is enough reason for me to hate them forever. Inherently stupid purchase, just buy it digitally at that point, the box it would come with is a good example of "I'd rather have nothing."

Honestly, there was a small part of me hoping, for a brief moment, that they could download at least...enough of the game to the card, and that is what made them different from code in boxes. That would at least be SOMETHING to justify its existence.

And that's the big problem, they are cynically taking away from YOU. You need to get extra space even though you bought it at full priced at a store, its your problem that they could've avoided. They do not get the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, I refuse for them to get any, especially not for a Pokemon game. It's why I've started to get into LRG and similar such retail releases for notable indie games, because I want the game on the cartridge, with no caveats.

@OmnitronVariant
But it doesn't mean I have to give up with collecting physical games.
Old games might get corrupted from aging or get damaged by any unfortunate circumstances, but it will not stopping me to keep collecting physical games.

I would agree this is almost by definition one of the downsides of digital but it's worth noting that improving tech over time somewhat mitigates it. For example when we were being told to clean out our Wii SD card fridges I had just recently upgraded from a 256kbps to an 8Mbps internet connection. The biggest HDD I had was the one in my desktop which would've been 120GB. And that SD card people were putting in their Wii to clean the fridge into would've been maybe 2GB or so? As a guess. So redownloading and moving stuff around, even Wii Ware sized stuff, was a hassle

Fast forward to the start of the Switch era I believe it would've been 2018 or our internet service tech got upgraded and we were able to move from 8Mbps to 50Mbps. The microSD card I first put into my Switch was IIRC a 32GB card to double the storage which, did the trick for a bit. The biggest HDD I had in the house was a 2TB drive which sat in a I believe at this point two disk RAID 1 config, so 2TB

Fast forward even further to today. The Switch 2 releases and on day 1 I look at the microSD express cards and I can probably hold out for a bit. But if I was to pull the trigger. the storage seems like the economical short term play. It's just this time it's 256GB. Meanwhile my internet tech and plan just got upgraded so I'm now on 500Mbps with the fastest plan I could get now being 2.5Gbps. And the largest HDD I have in the house is a 10TB drive which lives in my NAS in a 14TB four disk software RAID

So if we're talking relatively speaking, and lets say we're talking about a 10GB file. In the Wii "cleaning the fridge" era that takes me a bit under 3 hours to download, takes 5 SD cards, fills up 1/10th of my biggest storage device. In the early Switch era that same thing takes 30mins to download, chews up 1/3rd of my microSD card, fills up 0.5% of my NAS. Today? Same file. 3mins, 4% of the MicroSD Express card and a rounding error on my NAS. Yes games also got bigger over that same time, but not by the same rate as the internets got faster and drives got bigger

Obviously, bandwidth on the Switch 2 is going to cap at 1Gbps. Maybe I have a post 1Gbps service 10 years from now, but if I do I'm not going to see those speeds on Switch 2. But storage? I think I can confidently say that storage won't be the issue it is now. Because even on Switch 2 it's less of an issue with the increased game sizes than it was for the Switch at launch

@skywake @OmnitronVariant
You have a point: this is probably going to be one of "those games" that just constantly gets patches and evolves over time, to the point where the version that comes on the cartridge would look pretty foreign in a couple years.

You could say games like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe were relatively similar when they started adding all the tracks, and eventually they printed cartridges that included all the patches and stuff, but I still take your point.

As for internet speed, I'm in the U.S. And here, as you can imagine, it's pretty cutthroat. You're beholden entirely to the area you live and the providers that are available. I'm in Pennsylvania, which is an East Coast state and pretty happenin, but in my specific area Comcast is the only internet provider. And if I want anything over like 100mbs for my internet, I'm gonna be paying well over a hundred bucks a month once all of their deceptive "promotional period" stuff expires. It's insane.

Yeah, Comcast is super evil; I'm stuck with them too. But even at 100mb/s, it is only a few hours for FF7 remake, which will be by far the largest game I have ever owned. And I pre-ordered so it will download by itself overnight a couple days before release. That is an extreme case, but most of the games I own are a gigabyte or less so download in seconds or a few minutes at worst. Even the standard Switch 1 first party games are pretty darn fast to download. Switch 1 had slower downloads so this is all nicer for Switch 2.

Less than download speed, the big games are more painful for storage. FF7 will be like half of internal storage 😶 In a couple years, 512GB or 1 TB sd express cards will be cheap enough that it won't matter much, but right now it hurts to use that much space for one game instead of 100 smaller games. Huge sd cards are cheap for Switch 1, but the change to express has definitely temporarily put us in a worse spot than we were at the end of the Switch 1 gen. It's not really that problematic; I'll just archive many of my small games and quickly download them when I want to. It's just a little less convenient than with Switch 1. By the end of the Switch 2 generation, I assume we'll be in speed and storage paradise.

I understand that, and with that understanding, I do not particularly want them to exist.

I want to be clear that at THE VERY LEAST, in the context that they are being done to avoid spending extra money for proper physical releases they would've done if there was no alternative way to have the game boxes in a store, I want them to not exist. I want zero video games to be released where they could've made any profit at all from a normal physical release where they then avoid that physical release and do a GKC because it would be cheaper. I want that to never happen EVER. Do you understand?

Well, I can't really relate on price anymore. My 500Mbps plan is $92AU/mo ($60US/mo) and is currently in an introductory discount period so I'm only paying $64AU/mo ($40US/mo). Even so, I definitely can definitely understand in terms of being locked out of decent speeds. The only speed I could get up until early 2018 was 8Mbps, ADSL. And because of the technology my area got upgraded to (VDSL) the best I could order on my line was 50Mbps until April this year when my area got full fibre. There was a technology upgrade program that was running so in theory I could have asked for and got fibre earlier, but that scheme cost tens of thousands

But yeah, when the Switch launched I was still largely buying games physically. Something like BotW, if I got it digitally not only would it take up half of my storage but also it would've taken 4 hours to download on my internet at the time. Fast forward to now and a game of that size, it'd barely rate. It'd have to be 100GB to chew up the same amount of storage, and 1TB to take the same amount of time to download

Technology generally progresses over time is the main point I'm getting at. And it does eventually advance to the point where it's not viable for even vested interests to keep holding it back. Eventually the dam breaks and we get cheaper flash, faster internet, newer consoles

I have Xfinity myself, and we only really pay 92 a month for it. Although- all we really got from them was internet.

Looking at the Treehouse - they mentioned that it uses a real time clock for time of day. I really really hope that is incorrect and that you can jump around rather than having to play 24 hours a day to see all the game has to offer. Although I'm used to it in Animal Crossing, it is sort of purposefully bad design which restricts the game based on your work and sleep schedule to make it more immersive. I can grudgingly live with that in Animal Crossing just because that is how it is, but I really hope Pokopia isn't like that too. Pokemon will never feel immersive in the same way and pretending it does in exchange for losing out on basic QoL gameplay is not a good tradeoff.

Played Pokopia for 3 straight hours tonight. Woke up a bit after midnight and remembered it was released, so I hopped on thinking I'd just get a save file going.

3 hours later...

Got like 10 Pokemon already, habitats for them, made most of them conformable, got my house being built, can splash water, plant grass, cut debris, rock smash and something else I'm forgetting.

Can't help but water every last square of dry ground. It's OCD mania in this game and I love it! Found some weird leaking block I broke which unleashed a river that led down and fed into a fountain, got security cameras posted on tall hills to monitor everything and keep tabs on my cute little Pokemon.

And I have never been a Pokemon guy. Arceus was the closest I came with about 15 hours in, and maybe 10 hours in Z-A. Maybe 5-10 hrs in X/Y, Sun/Moon, Sword/Shield and as for Scarlet/Violet, I dropped that pretty fast due to performance (did put a few hours in on Switch 2 since then though).

All this to say, I don't know these Pokemon. I don't know their names, or what they do, or their numbers, or what their evolutions are. None of that. Aside from like Pikachu, and Evee, and perhaps Bulbasaur, I didn't know any of these guys. So meeting Squirtle and Charmander and Oddish and Hitmonchan and Scyther and Timburr and Combee... not to mention learning I'm a Ditto, I think?

It's just all great stuff. Pokopia goes so hard, guys.

Hell yeah! Glad you are enjoying it

I'm only 1 hour in myself, about to continue it since I'm finally done with today's... everything lmao. So many things to do!! Now it's time to have fun with my Pokemon...

I need an honest, unbiased opinion.

I am not a big Pokemon fan, I'm very casual. I grew up with the anime but struggled with the actual games because I didn't understand how RPG games worked. So I missed out on the game's hypetrain until years later when I picked up Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Red on 3DS. Long story short, fell out of both of those games. Pokemon Red, I got stuck in Lavender Town and got stonewalled by the final boss in Sun. I finally beat a Pokemon game with Legends Arceus but that's where my experience begins and ends. And it was a spin off so I'm not even sure it counts.

I'm telling you all of this because I've heard Pokopia pays off storylines from past games and that has me worried. As someone who hasn't really experienced fan favorite games like Diamond/Pearl or Ruby/Sapphire, am I going to miss out on a lot since my experience is so limited? Can A relative newcomer still appreciate what this game has to offer?

Even when I’m not interested in playing the game, I still enjoy reading Jaxon’s positive vibes on things!
Too much negativity in gaming spaces makes me sad.

@OmnitronVariant 100% agreed. I wish they would have gone with a universal, unlimited chest :/

Like it will fix any issues I have with the game. Or like, allow us to pick up the filled chest with us >.> Overall the game's very fun but holy ***** I don't like the way they did chest.

Not got the game,
but I'm curious;
What is your favourite biome (so far) ?