@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town *new business model that doesn't depend on a game getting out every 3 years at minimum
I keep mentioning them, but GUST has managed to shit out a new Atelier game in that timespan, make it work on both PS4 and Switch with nearly the same performance and FPS and in between has managed to port like 9 games on both platforms and it's an infinitely smaller dev
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town
Scale and possibility of asset reuse is vastly different. Pokemon added 104 new damn creatures to the game. They both have to be made new, and 104 creature models is a lot. For comparison, skyrim has 164 different creatures after the expansions (excluding named creatures, since most of them would have similar models to others). Skyrim took 6 damn years. Given, it's a lot more detailed game. But the animated model count is immense still, especially considering that pokemon aren't particularly fit for animation reuse as they come in very wide range of shapes. Meanwhile, Skyrim could make most of animations on one dragon model, and just give minor tweaks for the other ones.
And on reuse part, you might be able to reuse some pokemon models from previous games, but most of the other stuff comes new. Things like the terrain, buildings, etc: most of them are new for this game. The fact that they made it properly open world adds extra challenges as well.
The dev team size isn't that huge as well. Right now it seems like Game Freak are working on two titles simultaneously, which would put them to about 70 people per game. It's a sizeable team, but not all things scale with the number of people. And I think that most of the things that the new game lacks, are the ones that don't scale that well with head count.
TLDR: if you want better games, ask for less frequent releases.
Most of these existing models are pretty much unchanged from the 3DS era too, one of the excuse of the 3DS games running like shit is that the models were downscaled for future proofing
This is a double digit million selling franchise. This is a ridiculously low level of quality
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town Creating pokemon designs is one thing.
Creating and animating 3D models that can be rendered on the shitstain that is Switch's GPU is another.
I'd say that at least 30 people of the ~70 that worked on the game have been working all of the time on pokemon modeling and animating.
And do note, that the franchise != game. They make more money from toys and TGC. The game is just an additional marketing channel.
It still does not excuse the terrible state of the games
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town What I'll simply say: Yell at Pokemon Company for giving the deadlines, rather than at the devs for failing to meed them.
Because this is what's happening. Last couple games have been like this.
But Game Freak has been basically incompetent from day 1 and it's extremely questionable on how they were allowed to get away with it for so long
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town Day 1 being Red and Blue?
Because that's the day 1.
Stadium, Gen 2: Satoru Iwata had to step in to port the code to Stadium and fix the bug. He also fixed GS's code to the level they were able to include Kanto as a bonus
I don't particularly remember anything about the GBA era
The DS era, expected 3D and they didn't. Square managed it on the Dragon Quest Monsters games, which sold infinitely less
3DS era, still stuck in GB levels of stiff animations. Games run like shit, the game has weird shit where every move it compress and decompress something 100 times for no reasons. They have a duplicate model for EVERY SINGLE EVENT in the game
Switch: SS still looks like a 3DS game, designed like a 3DS game, has pathetic animations, still stuck in GB level of stiff animations, game is even more ashamed of being a JRPG than ever, no dungeons, no challenge, nothing
And then here we are
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town Evidently, the game is still good enough though. It wouldn't have survived the if it wasn't.
The recent pokemon games are thoroughly not worth playing. The story sucks, the dialogue sucks, the gameplay sucks and is totally rendered pointless because there's no challenge because you can do just everything for free now and pretty much everything else sucks
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town If you say that the first games were just as bad, then it wouldn't have gotten off the ground.
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town Well, yes. But those programming issues are clearly not holding them back. Remember that Pokemon anime came out after the first game's success.
@coolboymew@shitposter.club @chjara@snowdin.town Deadlines set in the 90s no longer fit for modern day game development is what you want to say then
Because that's what it is.
@coolboymew @ignaloidas @chjara
Imagine thinking that the deadlines are the issue on a 20 year old game.
I mean, the game is the same. All the mechanics should be a copy-paste at this point, if you need a new game engine, and without an engine change, it's an asset flip.
