Ashunera84

All the haters need to search their souls and reawaken the undying light!

Byleth makes sense, and isn't really a standard sword fighter as many seem to think.

This certainly isn't the most exciting announcement ever, but it also isn't the last one. I think it makes sense to have someone else start off pack 2.

This is not really news.

In the end, nobody will remember it was late, they'll only remember if it was great.

Pokemon Home
Smash fighter (guessing Cinderace)
Sword/Shield DLC
Detective Pikachu Switch

And I'm hoping for a Diamond/Pearl remake

Couldn't possibly disagree more.

Love this game tbh

@AnnoyingFrenzy pretty much.

Three whole months after the non-monthly warning ooooooh totally worth a whine article.

@Digitamamon64 they didn't lie, because using 3DS models on Switch doesn't work without heavy modifications. Switch is not backwards compatible with 3DS. They literally rebuilt the models and animations to be mostly identical to how they were - and seeing as how they were really good for the most part, that's not a bad thing.

People "digging into the code" are drawing incorrect conclusions due to a lack of knowledge of how game development works, and spreading that ignorance.

Any actual criticism of the game itself is valid of course, but you weren't lied to.

@SuperEndriu people can disagree with facts all they like, doesn't make them right.

Backwards compatibility is everything when developing for a new system. They quite literally can not just reuse the same assets. Simply putting the old models on a new console does not work. The way the Switch handles textures, shaders, lighting etc. is different from 3DS and simply using the old assets would result in a garbled mess.

This is why Game Freak almost certainly wasn't lying when they said they said they rebuilt them from scratch. They had to either fix a ton of garbled messes or rebuild from scratch. Why lie? There's no reason to. They weren't lying when models and animation were cited as the reason many pokemon were cut, because rebuilding 1100 models from scratch with basically 0 reused animations/rigs between them is a colossal undertaking. I can confidently say no other single game release has ever had that many.

There ARE fair criticisms to be made of the games, but dishonesty from GF is not one of them. As I said, there are several causes of framerate loss and I can't speak to the total amount of game content because I haven't finished it yet. They aren't visually technical marvels, but saying they look bad is disingenuous... they objectively look substantially better than any past entry (excluding LGP/LGE maybe) and reasonably comparable to most other major Switch releases.

@SuperEndriu there's no evidence they lied.

There's evidence many previously existing pokemon/animations are identical to their Sw/sh counterparts, but backwards compatibility issues mean they were either heavily modified or entirely rebuilt, both of which take a lot of time. "Game Freak lied" is born out of complete ignorance of how game development works.

Criticism of the game is generally valid if it can be quantified in some way, and these games do have a couple issues - performance in some cutscenes drops, framerate is inconsistent in the wild area if you're online or during weather effects. Loading other players seems to cause some choppiness. If you've been a fan of past pokemon games, however, the reasons to dislike it are pretty few and far between.

@Wolf_Link the evidence isn't really evidence of anything if you understand game development. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the process.

@Mr_Muscle some weird logic you got going on here. Are you trying to prove yourself wrong?

Everyone claiming GF is lying is claiming to know Masuda's job better than him. I'm not. I'm pointing out what actual game devs have said on the matter.

Ask A Game Dev has been giving excellent insights into game development for years. It's not "iffy".

"Updating your engine so it uses modern physics, modern shaders, better animation based solutions, different kind of lighting etc REQUIRES you to check every single old asset you are importing, thats unavoidable! Maybe the polycount needs to be changed, maybe the rigs are acting funky, maybe the textures dont work well with the new lights, maybe all new materials for every creature need to be made." - Xavier Garcia, EA. Just one example.

@JugOfVoodoo
Difficulty settings - not really an elegant solution - here's why: https://www.google.com/amp/s/indiewatch.net/2016/06/08/why-difficulty-settings-are-bad-design/amp/
Skippable tutorials - a tiny fraction of games are spent in tutorials in the long run. While I personally like to be able to skip them, it's rarely more than a minor inconvenience.
Robust post-game - Pokemon defined the robust post-game. Finishing the Pokedex. Battle Tower. Competitive battles and tournaments. ORAS and USUM had meaty post-game chapters. And despite any efforts they may make in that direction, 90% of players are finished with the game before they even get there.

@Azikira constructive criticism is good, and Sonic does look great now, but toxic criticism (combatively suggesting GF are a bunch of lazy liars with) is not. The saying "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" applies very heavily to this situation.

@Yorumi Breloom punched with its tail. Many moves both then and now used generic animations. I played a ton of Colosseum and literally have it a foot away from me right now. Stadium, on the other hand, had more move-specific animations. But it also had only 151 pokemon (251 in 2), much lower polygon counts, only 1/4 the moves, and never made a leap to a new console.

@Mr_Muscle you've clearly taken a side despite logic pointing out that "gamefreaklied" is, itself, a lie, and that sensationalizing those claims is a disservice to reasonable discourse. I'd say you have a dog in this race, for whatever reason.

I can't speak for others, but I certainly don't "blindly defend" anything. I'll reserve judgment for when I actually play the game. I didn't blindly defend Borderlands 3's embarrassing release problems (many of which persist) despite loving that franchise, but I will happily point people towards facts and reason when they spout useless drivel like literally every attempt at "proof" that GF is lazy or lying.

@Yorumi they were subjectively higher quality because you liked them more and that's it. No technical reason they were higher quality.

But there weren't as many. Pokemon didn't really walk, or fly or have emotions or really anything other than enter battle/faint animations, maybe 2-3 attack animations, an idle animation, and maybe 2 "being hit" animations.

Have you used Pokemon Amie or Pokemon Refresh? There are more animations for playing with your pokemon in that alone than there were in the entire Colosseum game. They have the same number of battle animations, and have walking/running/flying etc. for outside battle or for the new camping feature.

@Yorumi I linked why it "can't just read the data" earlier, as did someone else. Most game devs from any competing company could tell you.

There are more than just pokemon movement animations in the game. Pokemon Colosseum models were MUCH lower quality. There's definitely some rose coloured glasses thing going on for you.

@Mr_Muscle this isn't marketing material. Read it and understand, or don't and enjoy being wrong in your anger.
https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/186632316431/what-do-you-think-about-the-pokemon-sword-and

@Chunkboi79 Xenoblade has much less than half of gen 7. Objectively. Less than Sword and Shield.

Please read the article that was linked twice now. Please, educate yourself. I've explained it. I have game developer friends. A game developer explained it very thoroughly in that article.

Why was it axed?

Switch is not backwards compatible with 3DS, so assets had to be modified substantially or entirely recreated, both of which take a lot of time. Junichi Masuda said they were remaking models from scratch. There is no reason to believe otherwise. He also said they were making new animations and improving old ones. This is objectively true, with 100 new pokemon and character and NPC models and animations for moves.

As I said, anyone is more than welcome to dislike the game, but saying cutting half the pokemon is lazy reeks of ignorance.

@Chunkboi79 number of enemies is irrelevant...

"Depending on 20 year old game design" to one person is "staying true to what made it great" to another. This is subjective. You can like or dislike or not feel the "magic" all you want, and that's totally fine, but don't try to say Xenoblade having 1300 uniquely named enemies is akin to Pokemon having 1100 unique models and 1000 animation sets (of a dozen or more animations each - not counting humans or moves).

The funny thing is, Game Freak probably did rebuild all of the pokemon from the ground up to be nearly identical and occasionally improved from the 3DS versions because the the way Switch handles graphics is not backwards compatible with the way 3DS did it. Chances are GF didn't lie about anything at all despite all the people out there trying to rile people up and "prove" they are just reusing assets.

@Snaplocket if you don't know all that much about game development, you can't possibly know if any of those companies would be better at making a Pokemon game.

As someone else linked, try actually hearing it from a game developer:

https://askagamedev.tumblr.com/post/186632316431/what-do-you-think-about-the-pokemon-sword-and

@Chunkboi79 you are here to prove GF is bad and/or lazy.

XC2 does not have 1300 enemy models, and suggesting it does is absurd. The expansion was exactly that - added content for an added price. Great game, great DLC, but not even remotely close to Pokemon in character models.

@Wolfgabe that is an excellent article.

@Chunkboi79 did you have one? No? Didn't think so.

There are 92 total species in XC2 (according to XC2 wikia) 65ish blades, 7 playable characters. Most species have only one model, a few have model variations, a few have variations in textures or colouring. There may be 100 or so variations of human/nopon NPCs, but they mostly share the same animations as the others of their race.

There are 807 pokemon in gen 7, I don't think a single one of them shares an animation with another, at least 100 of them have appearance differences based on gender (Bulbapedia), roughly 140 different forms and 17 Alolan variants, most of which have unique animations from different forms and variants, 46 mega evolutions, and one with a randomly generated skin texture. Some pokemon have different models in the Gen 6-7 games that are used outside battle.

There are roughly 100 new pokemon and variants (probably more). There are also over 650 remaining moves that mostly have unique visuals. There are numerous animations for each pokemon (battle, pokemon amie, cutscenes) that needed to be added to for the open world and camping, and these areas are where most changes and additions were likely made.

@Chunkboi79 Xenoblade Chronicles 2 isn't even close. It might have half the models and 20% of the animations, and I doubt more than a handful of those models have the polygon counts of most Pokemon.

@Jugdral people on one side of any debate aren't "all" anything. Is there a drop in quality and passion? I see no evidence of either. How do you quantify these things?

What people like me want are for those raging at Game Freak to do is not just join the mob chorus without at least trying to understand it from another angle. Did GF actually seek to mislead? Probably not. So what are some possible explanations that don't include toxicity like "lazy" or "bad"?

@Snaplocket "hiring another company to help make it" quite literally is adding a lot of people to the project...

Look, there are many great games out there, but name one - just one! - that has as many character models and animations as Pokemon since it went 3d.

Game development is complex. So is translation. Words spoken in a different language in response to questions in a language the answerer doesn't speak can result in a lot of missed meaning. Lost in translation.

We do not know what challenges Game Freak has faced developing Sword and Shield, but I do know modeling and animating is very time consuming work, and there are certainly hundreds of new models and thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of animations for new pokemon/variants/dynamax/humans etc. in and out of battle.

Those saying "GF should hire more people" have never heard of Brooks' law.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law

@ancientlii sure, but would sing or sleep powder not work similarly in its place?

@RupeeClock heal order is just another name for recover, and is kind of a perfect example of where pruning should happen. If Vespiquen doesn't get a replacement, I would understand a mild annoyance, but I can't imagine it makes a meaningful difference in the end.

@RupeeClock are you normally easily insulted?

The only moves of any real consequence being removed are Hidden Power and Return. The rest were pretty irrelevant, barely used, or just differently-named clones of other moves. Nobody is going to miss Grasswhistle.

Hidden Power had many problems that others have explained. Return, while a decent filler, was never exciting.

In my area at least, there were always a handful more well known fighting series. Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Killer Instinct, Soul Calibur, Tekken, Virtua Fighter. I've spent a ton of time gaming (even 90s arcades) and only barely knew of this guy. NeoGeo, SNK, Fatal Fury weren't exactly household names to anyone I know. They were known to exist, and it was just referred to (perhaps unjustly) as "Street Fighter knockoff". That's it.

More recently, with all the NeoGeo Switch ports? "Just another NeoGeo fighter, do they really need this many?"

Criminally underplayed. Don't take it for a cheap, annoying JRPG. This is a quality game for Fire Emblem and Shin Megami Tensei or Persona fans. It's an all-time great in the JRPG genre.

People care way too much about this.

This game is excellent.

Probably Sonic. Hoping for a new Phantasy Star with a western release.

@RyanSilberman everyone has heard that phrase, which is too bad, because it's awful and useless.

Not even remotely interesting.

Ys VIII was phenomenal for completely intangible reasons. Nothing about it stands out as amazing, and yet the entire package was delightful and emotional and fun.

@amiiboacid oh because, you know, NL has access to every animation and pokemon in the game, including all the new ones and features the rest of us don't know about. They couldn't possibly write an article like that for clicks.

Try using your brain instead of your entitled feelings yeah?

In other words, "try ducking"

I suspect "Mario's Swim Trucks" is a typo that was copy/pasted from the original reddit post.

Yes, same in both posts.

@amiiboacid I'm aware of what people are upset about.

I'm also aware of how INSANE it is to expect a developer to have over one thousand uniquely animated creature models updated for a new generation on a new console. Most games don't even have 10% of that, especially keeping in mind that the game has non-battle animations for all of them and possibly even more for whatever this game's version of Pokemon-amie is.

Basically any game dev anywhere will tell you it's a colossal, even unprecedented, undertaking.

@NIN10DOXD no, Twitter data shows it's around half of the VOCAL fanbase. Very different things. Most pokemon fans aren't on Twitter, and many who are on twitter aren't vocal about pokemon.

People are also far more likely to be vocal about something that upsets them than about something they are happy about.

I think this is all exaggerated by the vocal minority online. Most don't care about this, or are excited for the games.

The problems with the Switch version exist, but are overstated. The game is perfectly playable.

This looks incredible.

@nintendoknife it takes more courage to state an opinion that disagrees with the Angry Internet Mob than it does to side with it.

It takes a special kind of stupid to not see why the status quo was unsustainable. The Angry Internet Mob is quite often wrong, like in this case.

Good article. Seems rare to read something that doesn't join in on the entitled whining and instead take the developer's side.

List of things stock prices measure well:
1.

Kinda prefer this, as long as it's not permanent. Would prefer a higher degree of focus on the new ones.

As an owner of 40ish amiibo, "Kick in the teeth" is an exaggeration if I've ever heard one.

Mario Land 1 and 2 would be nice. Mario 2 (USA) would be the best.