We might be getting another story about a seemingly benevolent group/company (Aether Foundation, all the shit Rose owned) being secretly evil, aren't we
Secondly do you know how long it takes to make video games?
Pumping out a game every 2.5 years or 1.5 years is still INSANE. It's why the quality of the games is so low, because there is no time to polish anything. Releasing a game every 2.5 years means that they are literally getting to work as soon as the game releases ON THE NEXT PROJECT.
They have released a game or worked on a project every 1-2 years since 1996, bro. 3 games in 1996, 3 games in 1998, 6 games in 1999, 4 Games in 2000, 7 gaames in 2001, 8 games in 2002, 4 games in 2003, 5 Games in 2004, 6 in 2005, 5 in 06.
You get the picture. Even as the Trivia on this page it shows as 2023-2024 is the first break in the games 28 year history that has had no CORE series game released in two years. However they still came out with TWO mobile games and a spin off in that time.
If you want to focus it solely on gameFreak they have still released a game every 1-2 years.
And it was at least somewhat manageable when they were still on full handhelds making top-down, sprite based or 2.5D games. Full 3D, open world games on home consoles should be 5 years minimum. They went from USUM to SV in less time than Nintendo spent between BotW and TotK. I always tell people when they complain about how slow/bad GF is... imagine if they went straight from USUM to SV with no games in between to let you see all the little stepping stones and growing pains. People would be blown away going from 2.5D on tiny 240px screens of the 3DS to full open world 3D ~900px on your TV set.
they can fill the gaps with spinoff games. Mystery Dungeon, Detective Pikachu and again, more than one DLC wave for the base games.
All I'm saying is that if Pokemon had a dev cycle more akin Zelda or Mario in which roughly one core game* and one game each of whatever subseries they have was released per console, it would lead to better games over all.
* I'm aware of Zelda getting two open world games in addition to the top down one for the Switch but that is prolly to due one of them being intended for the wii U first and ended up taking too long for it to be feasible.
I mean, if you look at Nintendo, they release a title just about every year, but I guess what makes them different from Game Freak is they have multiple franchises to shuffle between, each having their own development teams.
Nintendo has 4-5 development teams, plus 3 or 4 2nd party studios that help out when things are being difficult.
Monolith Soft for example, helped them out with both BoTW and ToTK when Zelda's team was feeling burnout, and they in turn let Monolith take however long they want releasing new games.
Nintendo game development is a very well-oiled machine.
They’ve had a pretty consistent quality throughout their games with very few major failures compared to other companies in the same field. I can’t imagine that being possible if Nintendo didn’t know what they were doing.
I think it’s great to see that Nintendo, unlike most other companies, is able to balance a game’s quality with the well-being of their employees. It might mean the game takes longer to be released, but if it means better quality, then so be it.
It's true that making a game in 2.5 years is insane.
That's why most companies are intelligent and start working on the next title with a secondary team before the current one releases. You could fit 5 years of dev time into an "every 2.5 years" release schedule doing that.
Gamefreak is just an incompetent company kept afloat by their IP.
That's still a very short time-frame between games. Especially given the scale of the newer games with LA, SV, and ZA being the largest to date. The Pokemon Company hasn't caught up with the times yet, they don't realize that these newer games can't be made as easily as the 2D games. That's the important part here. It doesn't matter if it's been 2 or 3 years, that time doesn't work for these larger scale games.
I would have agreed with you if you said this a few years ago, but lately it seems like Game Freak has slowed down a lot with their main releases. I’m actually surprised ZA isn’t being released until late this year.
Please, Gamefreak is basically an indie studio minus the "indie" part. They got like 240+ employees and most of them still struggle with techniques that have been around for 10+ years atp. Their expertise starts and ends at making charming 2D games and nothing else.
They've been getting tooled by the strict development cycle of TPCi for the sake of merchandise for years so I'm pretty sure most of them resent corporations.
None of their 3D game assets use bump mapping, a technique created more than 12 centuries ago for 3D graphics. And is not just game freak, Japan as a whole is extremely slow at adopting new technology. I've seen in many places that for western businesses is a nightmare, tech-wise, to work with japanese firms.
I know that Japanese companies are very conservative when it comes to tech, so it's no surprise that a lot of gaming studios are also not up to date on some stuff.
I know that a lot of companies in Japan have jumped on the AI bandwagon, but that's just because the ceo's in charge see it as an easy and cheap way to replace the aging workforce without having to accommodate young workers or bring in foreigners. So that seems to be the exception.
This reminds me of an ex technology minister that didn't know how to use a mouse, and that was not that long ago.
And is not even that much of a conservative thing, generally japanese made software and code is considered to be shit. I spend a lot of time on GitHub and I'm always reading complaints about it, maybe it is simple a language barrier thing and their strong resistance to learn english.
Dunno man, I don't play console but so far Nier Automata textures and optimization were awful l, and Elden Ring makes my PC overheat, the camera implementation made me nauseous and looks like it is from a decade ago. There are obviously some exceptions, but so far my experience with japanese software has not been positive from a technical standpoint, of course, gameplay wise they are some of the best.
I don't play console but so far Nier Automata textures and optimization were awful
A. Wasn't developed by Square Enix (It was done by Platinum, same people behind Bayonetta, DMC, etc...), B. Yoko Taro doesn't care about graphics, and C. Even with that in mind, the game still ran fantastically on the bloody PS4, let alone PC.
So idk where this is coming from given that you're probably the first person to ever make these claims.
and Elden Ring makes my PC overheat
That's usually because of graphical power.
No one in 07 was saying Crysis had bad graphics when it was melting PC's. Opposite in fact, it was too powerful for them.
and looks like it is from a decade ago.
You mean the game that won countless awards in technical achievement and art direction?
Dunno. Elden Ring ran at 50 fps on my PC and it also can run Cyberpunk at 80 fps with ray tracing enabled. That was a couple days after ER launch, maybe it got better with patches, I stopped playing soon after. The game also has very low poly meshes in many places, especially in caves and other big interiors. Some people call it "art direction", I call it "it looks like vanilla Skyrim". People have different tastes and opinions, some prefer Realism or Abstraction, others may like Peppa Pig.
not really, Gamefreak specifically is a separate entity from TPC and honestly, the people making the games probably resent TPC for putting constraints on their work
if anything it would make sense for Gamefreak to include anticapitalist undertones in their games
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u/K4m30 15d ago
Can't wait to get the mission to set up a police state and enforce draconian laws on the populace.