After Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's performance issues, the developer is having "conversations" about how often new games release
After Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's performance issues, the developer is having "conversations" about how often new games release
Because nostalgia is a driving force for this franchise and BW committed the sin to dare not to rely on that. Which is why even when they cut the National Dex in Sword and Shield, they made sure nobody would miss that Charizard was still there.
They are constantly testing how little they can offer and still have people buy out of sheer nostalgia. That Indigo Disk DLC with the Blueberry Academy looks like it will be very barebones, just an enclosed environment with some Elite 4-like fights, but they made sure to show that all the old starter buddies are back, because they know people will flock to that.
It really seems like Gamefreak just can’t handle 3D games, but they’ve been forced to since the Switch is now the only main platform for Nintendo.
I feel like the games would really flourish if they were taken away from Gamefreak and given to a different studio to handle.
They get like 3 years between each major title, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. If they’re overwhelmed by remakes and side games then they need to outsource those parts, but maybe they’re worried about being shown up by another studio.
Even then, every remake that came before it added something more to the originals than just a 2D sprite to 3D model conversion. Even if they had included the improvements from Platinum, it still would've felt lacking because they added nothing to justify buying and playing the remakes over the originals. Not even the National Pokedex was expanded beyond what already existed back in gen 4, so you couldn't even get the novelty of playing with your newer Pokemon in Sinnoh.
I guess I'm more upset about this than I realized, but to ILCA's credit, none of my complaints come from the perspective of the game being poorly coded or full of bugs.
I’d agree with this. From story and gameplay standpoints, Scarlet/Violet are among the best mainline games in the series, leagues above Sword/Shield (story wise, don’t know if they beat Sun/Moon, though). They gave us an open world, a battle gimmick that’s balanced well enough to at least not be broken, allowed us to ride the legendary pokemon (as goofy as the designs are) to get around that world, and let us do things in essentially any order. All things fans have been begging GF for for a long time. Unfortunately Pokemon is a huge franchise that relies on so much other media by design that it’s tough to allow GF the time they need to give the games the optimization they need. You delay the main games, you then also have to delay the anime and anime movies, the card game, and all the events built around those things as well. It’s a major part of how the franchise has become the #1 grossing media franchise in history. That money train can’t wait.
Franchises like Mario and Zelda, on the other hand, don’t have nearly as much other merchandise or other moving parts to their brands that would have to wait for the new game release, and even then, that other merchandise isn’t nearly as big a share of their overall brand as in Pokemon; they don’t have anime, Mario only has one movie (we acknowledge) that wasn’t connected to a specific entry in the franchise, and so without all that other stuff tied to specific games or “generations”, other franchises can much better afford delays. They’re mainly about the video games, and when a new mainline Mario/Zelda/etc game comes out, it’s an event in itself that may actually benefit from a delay to further build hype.
I honestly feel that the main story is the one thing they got right, it’s not on gen 5s level, but much better than gen 6 - 9. The rest of the game was mediocre at best, and raids do really suck compared to gen 9 raids.
The open world part would be a lot better if the battles scaled to your level though. Hopefully gen 11 fixes this.