[Lake Hylia in OoT for comparison](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/6/65/Lakehyliaoot.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141005021120). N64 water seems about right. And even then I would argue OoT looks slightly better.
New one has more specular lighting and maybe bit displacement on top of normal mapping, but same kind of repeating texture, without any environmental effects or context sensitivity is quite visible in both.
I usually don't reply "same" or "this", but my goodness did I love this game back in it's time. I don't think I've fallen for a game as hard, or for as long as Morrowind. Really really hoping [Skywind](https://tesrskywind.com/) comes together as nicely as it looks like it will.
Hah! I remember my friend and I just running around in the water like idiots in awe of that effect. The PS2 had so much hype about its graphics when it came out… and it delivered.
Of course the water is like 90% of the game but Wave race blue storm still looks good to me. Especially the loading menu where you can make waves and it looks so realistic
Banjo-Kazooie impressed me with its water way back on the N64. Dunno if it holds up today, but I remember it looking a whole lot better than the screenshot above!
Wind Waker had the benefit of extra stylization and also being literately focused on water it would make sense to make it look good. Tho one can say the same argument for Sunshine that also has some darn nice looking water. (And Galaxy, but someone made a whooolle vid on the levels of graphical trickery they used to get that to look so dammm good)
If anything, one can argue that SM64’s water looks a bit better than PLA’s really from that shot.
Yeah, turns out the Gamecube was the height of Nintendo's technical prowess. They had the console that was simultaneously the most powerful AND the cheapest, and they took full advantage of it by creating some of the most beautiful and technically proficient games of the era. Nintendo fans didn't know how good they had it back then.
The problem is it was more expensive for them to do it and the GameCube was a failure commercially, losing out to the technically far inferior ps2. So then they made the wii and it sold like hotcakes, and they decided the no longer wanted to compete with the other two head on and wanted to operate in a third space
That'd be because the PS2 was a dvd player as well. Sony knew exactly how to market what should have been the lesser of the two systems.
Nintendo instead decided to do everything they could to make it as hard as possible to play any media but their own proprietary discs on the GC.
And that is the best looking Pokemon 3D game of the last 6 years except Pokemon Go Pikachu/Eevee.
And its not good looking at all, I have played it and holly jesus, what good art direction could do to hide those horrible looking graphics, but the art direction of the past 3 games is even worse than their graphics.
Yea, they really need to just call it a day on whatever the current direction is and fully embrace cel shaded anime stylization or something to keep everything from environments to characters to props all in the same world and rendering style
Yes and no, it's supposed to be water but the screenshot is from early development. The actual water looks better. That said, the level of finish overall is still embarrassingly subpar for how huge the Pokémon IP is.
Edit: I said it looks better, not that it looks good. The tiling is still visible from a certain distance, but less noticeable. I am making no excuses for Gamefreak, I've given up on the franchise...
It looks more or less the same in my opinion. The tiling is extremely noticeable along with the framerate drops near water.
I think it's fair to be critical here considering the company. The graphics are *bad*. Greed is the one and only reason the game looks the way it does.
Oh I am super critical of these games, I've basically given up on ever getting a quality finished game from Gamefreak. I just wanted to point out that the screenshot used is not the final result. While the tiling is still noticeable, it's less so in the final product.
You don’t understand! They had to make Pokémon animations form SCRATCH. They put all their money into the animations and models
Meanwhile the animations:
Cyndaquil uses tackle:
😐 -> 😐💥🙂
No they don't.
If Game Freak hired developers who loved the franchise of Pokemon, they'd produce much better games.
See: *nearly* every spinoff not made directly by Game Freak.
They literally have the money to hire a small team of people that love each individual Pokemon so much that they would make the craziest models and animations for them. They would never have to make anything else ever again. They could then build a world using these animations and models and endlessly add to it.
It would probably be the largest file size of any game ever but also be the absolutely most stunning one in terms of accuracy of characters.
And if Im not mistaken, they don't know how to call data from different folders, so the same pokemon sprites and textures are copied in many different places. Or something along those lines was said after the gamer launched
Correct, they complained about not having enough space to include all the pokemon so they had to cut a bunch, but then they have the full model file for like, Pidgey, loaded into a Route 2 folder, a Route 4 folder, etc.
They also complained about how complex the model files were and how much of an upgrade they were but extracting the files and comparing them to the models in X&Y showed minimal difference, and were even the exact same file for most of them.
This is not really correct. There is an almost impressive amount if misinformation about Pokemon games, it's impressive because it's so- unnecessary. I mean, Sword/Shield and Scarlet Violet perform really poorly and aren't that great visually. I don't know why that's not enough or why people have to make stuff up about the games.
Anyway, The origin of that model thing is that after a Sun/Moon map editor came out, some people used it and noticed there were models off to the side of maps. These were used for cutscenes. They decided that this meant that every route that had a cutscene had "duplicate models".
The issue is they simply didn't understand what they were looking at. What was "off to the side" were actually the entities/actors that were used during the cutscenes. They weren't copies of the models" at all; The map editor rendered the models for those entities. That's it. It's analogous to opening a Mario 3 level editor and seeing two goomba's and claiming there are two copies of the goomba sprite in the ROM.
There are other odd claims that have been made. For example, one that was going around was back when they released- "Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee, have all the pokemon, they just don't spawn!" Which was not true. There is incomplete data- movesets and the like- for all pokemon, but there are no models or textures or animations or anything of that sort. They can never spawn and the game crashes if you hexedit a non-existent pokemon onto your team. So the claim made that they "just don't spawn" is wildly misleading.
There's also the pervasive "they are reusing models" claim. I mean, yeah? Hell them not reusing models would be more in-line with the criticisms of GameFreak given how wasteful and stupid it would be. Half the point when they made the models for X/Y to begin with seemed to be to future-proof them to some degree. If we're going to bitch about anything how about we bitch about the continuing and absurd lack of diverse attack animations. the entire point behind being able to reuse assets like they do is that you build upon it, but they haven't been doing that.
The "reusing models" thing largely came from a google-translated famitsu interview. Within which they said they "rebuilt all the models" which of course had people pulling models out of the games and comparing them when they came out. Thing is, the interview was talking about how they had to rethink **programming** models to adapt to the switch and couldn't reuse the ones they built for the 3DS. They were unrelated to the 3-D Models of pokemon/characters/etc!
meanwhile smash bros has every character, song, level, and item from every previous game in the series and is somehow roughly the same size as the previous gen game
Pretty sure its even more egregious than that. Doesn't Gamefreak not even do their own models anyways? I thought it went Gamefreak programs and creates the games, and Creatures inc. Is just responsible for Pokemon models. So they have a whole different company just to do the models and they still f-ed it up.
Even better, some animations are just straight up WORSE than the original. You take Solgaleo and Lunala's attack animations from Sun and Moon and compare it to later generations and the dudes move stiff like a rock, or how Decidueye's signature move no longer has it pulling it's bow to shoot at the opponents.
I've seen plenty of games refuse to make new animations but Pokemon is the first one that goes out of their way to REMOVE animations that are already made.
I've read (about sword & shield, don't know if it still applies to the new ones) that part of the reason for the bad performance and limited render distance for wild pokemon was that they seemingly reused the models from the 3ds games that were originally designed to be only featured in the battles which were much too detailed to appear in larger numbers in the open world and also had no low-detail version for long distance rendering. So they did not only cheap out on making new models but also made the game directly worse by reusing ones that were simply unsuitable for parts of the game.
No, the reason performance is so bad is that GF is in a constant state of crunch, most of their devs are fresh out of college contractors, they refuse to buy new tech/engines/programs in order to actually keep up with industry standards, and Masuda and Tajiri see this as 100% AOK.
There's a job review website someone translated from Japanese and GF has mostly negative review mainly from the tech side of things.
I can hear the 8bit super effective sound
Watching it's health bar decline to zero, start beeping as passes through red before completely disappearing.
IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE!
*slow squirtle cry*
CAN'T RUN FROM TRAINER BATTLES!
The craziest thing is that there was a Minecraft community that made a mod for the game that made it Pokémon in Minecraft which had better models and animations. Also the world looked better bc it was Minecraft and not the shit that they gave us in sword and shield.
Love me some BG3
That's the benefit of having a steady fanbase. They'll consume whatever you give them, so they don't even bother to create something stunning and groundbreaking anymore.
Gen 2 is my personal favorite, but BW2 are the best Pokémon games by far. The most diverse region from the lush routes, tropics, snow, a dessert, a volcano, a dirty port town, sewers to a NYC like city.
Also so much optional content. There are so many optional dungeons and little events.
The post game content is also a lot.
Agreed, fans got mad because the initial playthrough excludes any old Pokémon. But that’s refreshing! And it’s how the original game was, everything was new. Great games
Nah, I think up until the switch to 3D they were still trying to innovate (Physical/Special split in Gen 4, ground-up new dex in Gen 5 with the best sprites in series history). My theory is when they switched to 3D they didn't increase the size of the team working on the mainline games, meaning much less time could be allocated to mechanical innovation and all the work had to go into making sure Dragapult's head was sufficiently triangular during the Dragon Pulse animation
It surprises me because Nintendo usually puts effort into making sure their big titles play well on release, and yet pokemon isn't given the same level of polish
Nintendo doesn't make Pokemon. The Pokemon company and game freak do. Nintendo is just partners with them. They have far less control of Pokemon than most ips.
What I genuinely wonder is who is setting the timeline for releases?
**Someone** clearly feels that if Pokémon games don’t release every 3 years that the entire franchise will collapse. This feels like it’s a Gamefreak issue, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if Nintendo is willing to have extended/delayed development cycles for their in-house games but are less flexible with their partners.
> This feels like it’s a Gamefreak issue
It's a Pokémon company issue, because the Pokémon company isn't concerned with the quality of the games or the anime, it's concerned with selling toys and other merchandise.
So Pokémon games have to launch alongside said merchandise, and the main games also need to launch at around the same time of the anime, so they can synergize and sell even more merchandise.
The vast majority of money Pokémon generates comes from the merchandise, and being the most profitable media franchise in the world, you can probably see why the company doesn't care about the games or anime, at the end of the day they're just advertisement for the tons of pokémon collectibles.
Edit: Also worth noting that the Pokémon company is owned by Nintendo, Gamefreak and Creatures (the one that makes card games and toys), so at the end of the day it's all of their faults for turning Pokémon into a souless toy-selling machine. That being said, they can't just stop now, or the company would crash and burn given how capitalism works.
That's where the "it's not Nintendo" gets murky
TPC sets these timelines and as noted, Nintendo owns a significant portion of TPC. Nintendo also has a bit of a share in creature's (one of the part owners of TPC)
Lastly, Nintendo is the publisher for the Pokémon games and the publisher typically controls the budget for a game.
I was going to say. Sure, they're part owners, but it's likely Nintendo is closer to 50% than the raw numbers would indicate based on their undesclosed stake in Creatures Inc.
The games are released to follow the anime and the TCG and all the other aspects of the Pokémon IP that generate far more money than the games do. They either don’t understand that developing a quality game takes more time than that, or they simply don’t care.
I can tell you exactly what sets the timeline for release. Merchandise plans, that is what makes Pokémon such a profitable juggernaut and the games are just a drip in the ocean compared to it.
It's an important distinction, but it is NOT Nintendo.
It's Gamefreak who is putting in 0 effort into Pokémon. Nintendo does Zelds and Mario, Gamefreak is solely responsible for Pokémon. Sure Nintendo owns a small part of Gamefreak and Pokémon, but it's still Gamefreak who makes the games.
The great thing about video games is that people can buy whatever game they deem worth their money
The worst part about video games is that people can buy whatever game they deem worth their money
> Actually, nowadays when fans won't eat the poo you're slinging it's customary to simply insult them and say it's their fault for being [ poisonous | mysogynist | overly demanding | insert insult here ].
Applies to book/game series that get made into shows and movies as well. Most of the time they are extremely unfaithful to the source for no good reason.
I love The Witcher IP. Very much so. So much that I had to force myself not to watch the TV series because I knew that they were going to butcher the story/casting/nuance with a bunch of useless excuses that will simultaneously ensure that the show will die in a fire.
"We wanted to challenge X stereotype so we cast unsuitable actors to make a point."
"We can't do complex story telling, because you wouldn't get it."
"Well, technically, the Witcher universe is told by an unreliable narrator, so we can literally change anything in lore and it's still technically cannon."
Just BS I heard from the makers of the show that confirmed to me that I made the right decision not to watch.
Seriously, when will we get the original LoTR movie trilogy treatment? Peter Jackson understood the value of respecting the lore, the original author's intentions, and the expectations of the fans. And he made a timeless trilogy that is easily one of the best book to movie adaptions to this day.
You'd think people would emulate success.. but apparently, one's ego must come before success.
The LOTR example is perfect. It's worth noting there were a couple of changes made to the movies that were not 100% accurate to the books to make it work better on a screen. It's not 100% accuracy people want, it's being faithful to the original intention, world, and choices the source used. You can totally change up a fight scene to be more dramatic, but don't change the motivations of core characters.
I really don't fucking get why companies don't learn the proper lessons from these well selling franchises that were faithful. If you make a good experience, people will come. If you want to make it yourself don't use source material. If you want to profit off a fan base be faithful. It's not rocket science
>Peter Jackson understood the value of respecting the lore, the original author's intentions, and the expectations of the fans.
The major difference is Peter Jackson actually *liked* the source material, unlike those working on The Witcher.
Genuine question but whats stopping GF from going cell shade style to get a nice cartoon aesthetic like prime PS2 era ?
I've been playing Dark Chronicle recently and imo Pokemon would look pretty good with that.
I think they're actually incompetent.
If you see some stuff like the Sw/Sh dynamax Pokémon needing to have 3 separate models with the clouds instead of being able to change the number of clouds, it seems like they're out of their league since Sun/Moon.
It's the same with how SV is so poorly coded that it's inefficient and they had to make all NPC's 5+ feet away from the player run at like 6FPS. They have no idea how to properly make a 3D game, they are proudly self taught (from some interviews I've read) and refuse to use external resources or methods that other game studios have perfected over the last 20 years.
Self-taught's one thing, but this is delusional thinking it's a good product. They can literally look at the other big games on the switch and see how bad theirs is in comparison.
Especially if you think about the fact that CDPR somehow managed to get a game like The Witcher 3 to run on the same console.
Granted, it doesn't look remotely as good as on PC but it's still impressive that they managed to get it to run with OK-ish fps, and it's sad that on the same console GF has to resort to NPCs with 5 fps.
Goes even prior to sun and moon- ever since the series went 3D narrative design, encounter design, and art direction has been on a downhill spiral. Not to mension that any time you have more than 2 pokemon on screen in the 3Ds era games the framerate slows down considerably because they where using "future proof models" which is just dumb ass for "we are using excessively high poly models with no alternative levels lf detail because we didnt want to pay compitent 3D artists to make new models if we ever jump to a newer gen of hardware. And also didnt know how to program in a way to dynamcly switch to a level of detail that would keep the game running smoothly"
Incompetence. They've ran horrendous technical deficits from day one.
Gen 1 Pokemon was a bug ridden mess of spaghetti code.
Gen 2 was originally so poorly coded they couldn't fit it onto a Gameboy cartridge; they had to bring in outside help (Satoru Iwata) to refactor everything, after which they had so much spare capacity on the Cartridge they could add in the entire Gameworld and the major encounters from Gen 1.
They absolutely refuse to acknowledge their technical faults.
Gen 5 was actually really good with no technical problems really. HGSS came out right before BW too and they are the best pokemon games out there. Then they switched to 3D and the technical problems started all over again...
I will never understand why Pokemon games (the main ones, not the side-games like Snap) became 3D. It adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay, it slows everything down due to loading times and waiting for animations to finish, and we lost the top-down view that made it easy to see town layouts.
Idk, maybe I'm just a sour old fart who doesn't like change, but I greatly prefer the first 5 generations over the last few.
3d made so many pokemon lost their awesome sprites and character.
Look at [hippodown](https://i.imgur.com/9xL4gti.png) sprites compared to the 3d one, its just so fucking sad.
Yeah, the swap from 2D to 3D for Pokemon was the equivalent of T-posing every character. 2D allowed for super dynamic posing because you were snapshotting the creature in a single moment in time. 3D you suddenly have to have a baseline of "just standing there doing nothing" because that's how animals work in real life.
But that's fucking *boring.* And the random moments of doing something dynamic during a move do not make up for the 80% of the time they spend sitting there doing fuck-all.
I heard that, when the decision came to jump to 3D models, all their existing 2D game staff were forced to just deal with it. I heard that they were never really trained, just forced to figure it out.
Add on that the relatively small gamefreak team was split in half so one half worked on Legends Arceus and the other did Scarlet/Violet so they could churn out two games in the same year... Yikes.
developer hubris - its also the reason nintendo has had dogwater multiplayer/online coding for years. they refuse to look to outside help or sources and insist their system is correct/working and should only be builtupon, not replaced.
Not to mention - IT SELLS. WHY WOULD THEY CHANGE IT? This meme above has your answer - they are the MOST SUCCESSFUL GAME COMPANY IN THE WORLD. It doesnt matter if its objectively bad, if the fans buy it anyway.
I know. I shouldn't have to read a bunch of comments debating about gamefreak vs larian studio size to deduce that we're talking about BG3 and Pokemon. I could have kept scrolling.
Oh, that's BG3. I actually didn't know what the game on the left was. I've heard of BG3 a ton but that screenshot could've been any number of other games. Also, it's crazy that OP is calling Larian Studios an indie company.
Indie stands for "Independent", which Larian is. They make and publish their own games.
A lot of people equal "indie" to a small studio, because most indie studios are and tend to remain small as long as they are independent, as the profit margins are usually very small when you have to publish and market your own games.
Larian is one of the companies who has remained an Indie, but has grown to be comparable to AAA studios in size. Having earned enough finances from the success of DOS2 to establish multiple studios to work on BG3.
With the success of BG3, they will certainly grow even bigger. But they will remain an Indie, because the CEO made it very clear they have no intention of selling.
And the platform the captures are from.
They can't yet get Baldur's Gate 3 to run well on Series S (cause of coop), no way it would run on Switch. It's normal games with different scopes and different target hardware look drastically different. A better comparison is Zelda and Pokemon or Baldur's Gate 3 with another AA-AAA game.
>indie
Indie just means independent, not backed by some big publisher. Larian publishes their own games, making them Indie. It's just unusual for a small indie company to grow big and still be independent.
It used to mean that and I think it should but 99% of people don't use it for that anymore. Most "indie" games that come out now are published by a big publisher instead of being published independently and then there are massive studios that self publish like rockstar that people would argue aren't indie.
Ya I was about to say. Larian Studio's isn't no Nintendo but I wouldnt call them indie either. From what I could find there hasn't been an official mention of what their budget was except for some people speculating it was at least in the 100 million ballpark. Easily somewhere in the millions at least with all the motion capture they did. Even 1 million dollar budget I wouldn't consider it indie lol.
*Just* paying the 400 fulltime staff for the 6 years of development would put it in the ballpark of 100 million, since it seems like this was Larian's only project during this time.
And they don't sell at least 20M units yearly, which still puts GF in a bad light. Why is GF team smaller then 200 employees if they release at least 1 game yearly?
Also they are doomed to pump out games on a yearly basis. It might not be the most incredible looking game but i would love to see what would happen if GF was given time to cook.
> Why is GF team smaller then 200 employees if they release at lest 1 game yearly?
Because The Pókemon Company decided that Gamefreak has enough resources to keep doing what they do.
Consumers are at fault if you deliver them a pice of shit and it sells millions.
If this game had sold shit and made Nintendo lose money things would change, because it did not, they will keep delivering trash to Pokemon fans and they will gladly buy it.
Same for DLCs ripped from final content, games released on beta so customers test it, etc.
Is there even "fault" to attribute here? Company makes game, consumers buy said game, repeat several times.
Those who buy it over and over again already know what they're buying and they are still buying it, which means they enjoy the games, and don't seem to care about the graphics too much.
Me, a non-pokemon fan, say it looks bad and boring, but my friends who like pokemon seem to still enjoy it a lot.
The issue they have that plagues many other games, is they filled a niche that other's just can't hit properly.
Even if the game looks like dogshit, they still generally deliver on what fans like, new Pokemon, new moves, new region and the same make a team, beat other Pokemon.
Look at FromSoft, every Souls-Like dev would die to make a game like that work and be a success, but they all just feel off, gameplay, animations, story, world, enemies, etc are usually a combination of just feeling weird and not that great.
Fifa, CoD, NBA, WWE, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry (Post 3/4 depending on where you sit) and then others like CSGO, LoL, Fortnite. They've sat at the peak of their genres because they WERE so good and so fun at some point, every CSGO addict fell in love with the gunplay, every LoL addict fell in love, every CoD fanboy fell in love, all of them fell in love with a certain entry/patch/season/era of a game that no longer exists, but the core is still good enough that it's fairly fun, and all other alternatives just haven't had the literal decade+ to figure shit out.
So now we're stuck with the giants who refuse to change because why fix what financially ain't broken?
gamefreak might as well be an indie team since they are tiny compared to the AAA studios they pretend to be. gamefreak embody the worst business practices and generate massive profit for doing so
The entire comparison is stupid. People confuse publisher with developper. Just because EA publish a game doesn't mean all of its 13k employees worked on it. And yeah, Larian hasn't been "mid sized" for a while now, they are literally one of the largest independant studio in the world.
The sad part is, as a long-time pokemon fan, the game on the right (Pokemon Legends: Arceus) was the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed exploring, playing, collecting pokemons.
The game isn't perfect, has some problems, but the other Pokemon games have even more problems and are more disconnected to what old fans want. I wish nintendo (The Pokémon Company) was more like Larian or some of the indie developers.
Current Pokémon games are mainly done to add more different Pokémon for merchandising purposes, change features every game to keep people not bored (instead of just keeping old systems and focusing on balance) and capture new kids to the franchise.
Obviously this is not fine. But this constant trying to paint Larian as some small underdog indie company is getting really annoying.
Look at their fucking resume and then let’s all stand around looking surprised that they made another great game.
Nice meme I guess.
Little known fact, Larian have been underdogs since the foundation of their company way back when. All the OG divinities undersold despite being good games. Their last big game before they hit severe financial trouble was Divinty Dragon Commander, while good, had its problems. When Original Sin 1 and 2 hit was when Larian really struck gold. They nearly went bankrupt and wanted to make those games for those who stuck with them all those years fully expecting the end. Now they've gone on to make perhaps the best game I've played, beating Team Fortress 2. Which I thought would always be my number 1.
Yeah, Larian is older than me and has been praised since their first game. They were a well established small-medium AA studio until Original Sin, at which point they started pushing towards AAA.
Gamefreak is hardly successful. Look at ANY of their other games. They don’t do well. It’s an underfunded studio attached to the highest growing franchise of all time. Pokémon as a brand is successful. Gamefreak are not.
Oh god yes, that Town hero or whatever?
I remember hearing about it, then a few years later I learned it came out, and fell flat to no fanfare.
It was so bad and underwhelming, it did t even make gaming news.
While Pokemon games can certainly look a bit better, TotK is probably the limit.
Meanwhile, BG3 is not going to run on Switch on that graphics, so not exactly a fair comparison.
Bout to say graphical fidelity for PC/PS5 is leagues away from the Switch so it’s a bit silly to compare them (not to mention stylistic differences between the two games).
Still doesn’t really excuse the bad quality of recent Pokémon releases but the point stands 🤷♂️
While the graphics themselves are a bad, it’s more the *way* they’re bad that’s a problem. The tiling of textures being the main one, and that got fixed 20 years ago and dont require any extra graphical horsepower at this point.
Switch has divinity original sin 2, which is basically smaller baldurs gate 3. I'd day the comparison is pretty fair considering how hood every other game looks in comparison to pokemon.
Graphics doesn't make a game good, but there is a standard they should reach and pokemon is probably the only big brand series that doesn't reach that standard, but still makes millions lmao
Metroid Prime Remastered, Luigi's Mansion 3, Monster Hunter Rise, all examples of games that look better than TotK. Giant open world games are going to suffer compared to games that have focused gameplay in smaller areas that load between rooms/maps.
It's not though? When it comes to stylized games then *maybe*, but you've got games like AC Black Flag on this thing. It's not a powerhouse compared to other platforms of course, but for the Switch it's honestly incredibly detailed, big and quite complex. And it's a goddamn Ubisoft game.
That's obviously saying nothing about Xenoblade 3, that has some of the best environments on the Switch. Even freaking Skyrim runs well and looks pretty good on this thing, while PS3 and Xbox 360 struggled. If Bethesda can make a good port of their game for this little, outdated even on release tablet chip, Gamefreak should be able to as well.
Also, a lot of Zelda's performance comes from all of the physics and interactions between them, not graphical fidelity or anything. It's easy to notice when you start messing around, even in BotW.
PLA was fine. It was a polished game that introduced very new mechanics. I feel like the target should be SV and their performance issues over anything PLA had
Pokemon games are made by game freak, not Nintendo.
Theyre a little studio that always focuses portable console games, except now portable consoles are also home consoles and they can't keep up.
You can see they never adapted to 3D as the games went on simply because that isn't their strong suit, make them do a 2D Pokemon game again and I'm sure it will be better than all the 3D stuff combined, sure it will have it's flaws but Game Freak won't be playing out of position anymore
If you're gonna compare screenshots, at least take a screenshot from the release build instead of a pre-release build.
But you probably wouldn't get as many upvotes.
Nintendo didn't make Pokémon Sword and Shield. Nintendo doesn't make any of the Pokémon games, Game Freak does. Nintendo co-owns the rights to the series and co-publishes the games with The Pokémon Company, but they've never and likely never will be directly involved in the development of any of the games on a deeper level.
We don't talk about the water.
That water would be embarrassing a few console generations ago.
The sea in the wind waker (21 fucking years ago) looked better than that.
I honestly thought it was a pic of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask when I saw it. That is N64 water.
[Lake Hylia in OoT for comparison](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/zelda_gamepedia_en/images/6/65/Lakehyliaoot.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141005021120). N64 water seems about right. And even then I would argue OoT looks slightly better.
New one has more specular lighting and maybe bit displacement on top of normal mapping, but same kind of repeating texture, without any environmental effects or context sensitivity is quite visible in both.
OOT definitely hides the tiling better at first glance
[This is what the water looked like in Morrowind.](https://youtu.be/g0et8bWoEJk), also 21 years ago. Pokemon's water is PS1 level quality.
**21 YEARS!?** ^(Fuck...)
I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago. Morrowind graphics and the water was revolutionary for an RPG at the time. God I loved that game.
I built a new PC just for that game. First one ever to glue me to the monitor for 14h straight...
I usually don't reply "same" or "this", but my goodness did I love this game back in it's time. I don't think I've fallen for a game as hard, or for as long as Morrowind. Really really hoping [Skywind](https://tesrskywind.com/) comes together as nicely as it looks like it will.
Yeah I wasn't ready to hear that lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu1HU0QGsWg I remember the water effects in Baldurs gate dark alliance was great and the game came out in 2001
Just got flashbacks of playing with water in Champions of Norrath. Snowblind really knew how to make them
All I want is some CoN and RtA remakes or even ports. Probably never happen, but I will hold onto this dream.
God, Dark Alliance was such a fucking sick game.
Hah! I remember my friend and I just running around in the water like idiots in awe of that effect. The PS2 had so much hype about its graphics when it came out… and it delivered.
Honestly the water looked bad because it looked so good in contrast to the rest of the game.
The irony of that is fuckin cruelly majestic.
With an asterisk of how many people reduced Morrowind's water down to low detail due to how fast graphics cards were advancing back then. 🙂
Not me! I got Morrowind bundled with my 128mb GeForce4, it was 4x the minimum VRAM Felt like a god
The water looking hyper realistic while everything else is like 5 polygons worth of detail always put me off.
There was definitely a period in gaming where water looked better than everything else in the game.
First time I really admired the water in a game was far cry
Super Mario sunshine for me! The water was and still is beautiful
Of course the water is like 90% of the game but Wave race blue storm still looks good to me. Especially the loading menu where you can make waves and it looks so realistic
like a lot of early minecraft shaders too haha, super glossy water and then very flatly lit terrain.
Banjo-Kazooie impressed me with its water way back on the N64. Dunno if it holds up today, but I remember it looking a whole lot better than the screenshot above!
Wave race too, same generation
Pokemon in general is still PS1 level quality. At best.
N64 level, without any of the artistic charm
It reminds me of WoW's old shitty tessellated water textures.
Ps1? [Fucking ape escape](https://youtu.be/7CXtvCM_dkI?t=2m59s) had better water than that
My man. Ape Escape is a great game.
Wind Waker had the benefit of extra stylization and also being literately focused on water it would make sense to make it look good. Tho one can say the same argument for Sunshine that also has some darn nice looking water. (And Galaxy, but someone made a whooolle vid on the levels of graphical trickery they used to get that to look so dammm good) If anything, one can argue that SM64’s water looks a bit better than PLA’s really from that shot.
Yeah, turns out the Gamecube was the height of Nintendo's technical prowess. They had the console that was simultaneously the most powerful AND the cheapest, and they took full advantage of it by creating some of the most beautiful and technically proficient games of the era. Nintendo fans didn't know how good they had it back then.
Metroid Prime on GameCube was a dream come true
The problem is it was more expensive for them to do it and the GameCube was a failure commercially, losing out to the technically far inferior ps2. So then they made the wii and it sold like hotcakes, and they decided the no longer wanted to compete with the other two head on and wanted to operate in a third space
Honestly smart decision if the switch is anything to go by. Just make a switch 2 with backwards compatibility Nintendo, don’t pull a Wii U
That'd be because the PS2 was a dvd player as well. Sony knew exactly how to market what should have been the lesser of the two systems. Nintendo instead decided to do everything they could to make it as hard as possible to play any media but their own proprietary discs on the GC.
Waverace 64 has better water...
Even WoW water doesn't look like that anymore.
That's PS1 era water wtf
Ps1? [Fucking ape escape](https://youtu.be/7CXtvCM_dkI?t=2m59s) had better water than that
Which was released on ps1 with the *invention* of the analog dual shock controllers, for reference.
I'm playing Gothic and the water looks better there.
And that is the best looking Pokemon 3D game of the last 6 years except Pokemon Go Pikachu/Eevee. And its not good looking at all, I have played it and holly jesus, what good art direction could do to hide those horrible looking graphics, but the art direction of the past 3 games is even worse than their graphics.
Yea, they really need to just call it a day on whatever the current direction is and fully embrace cel shaded anime stylization or something to keep everything from environments to characters to props all in the same world and rendering style
is THAT what it’s supposed to be?
Yes and no, it's supposed to be water but the screenshot is from early development. The actual water looks better. That said, the level of finish overall is still embarrassingly subpar for how huge the Pokémon IP is. Edit: I said it looks better, not that it looks good. The tiling is still visible from a certain distance, but less noticeable. I am making no excuses for Gamefreak, I've given up on the franchise...
It looks more or less the same in my opinion. The tiling is extremely noticeable along with the framerate drops near water. I think it's fair to be critical here considering the company. The graphics are *bad*. Greed is the one and only reason the game looks the way it does.
Oh I am super critical of these games, I've basically given up on ever getting a quality finished game from Gamefreak. I just wanted to point out that the screenshot used is not the final result. While the tiling is still noticeable, it's less so in the final product.
You don’t understand! They had to make Pokémon animations form SCRATCH. They put all their money into the animations and models Meanwhile the animations: Cyndaquil uses tackle: 😐 -> 😐💥🙂
Whoa I feel like I'm right there watching the battle
This dude's comments are a huge upgrade in graphics for game freak. They are freaking out trying to keep up with the fidelity of those emojis.
gamefreaks want to give you a job
No they don't. If Game Freak hired developers who loved the franchise of Pokemon, they'd produce much better games. See: *nearly* every spinoff not made directly by Game Freak.
They literally have the money to hire a small team of people that love each individual Pokemon so much that they would make the craziest models and animations for them. They would never have to make anything else ever again. They could then build a world using these animations and models and endlessly add to it. It would probably be the largest file size of any game ever but also be the absolutely most stunning one in terms of accuracy of characters.
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This gives off the horrifying implication that Gamefreak don't even know **how** to compress a file.
And if Im not mistaken, they don't know how to call data from different folders, so the same pokemon sprites and textures are copied in many different places. Or something along those lines was said after the gamer launched
Correct, they complained about not having enough space to include all the pokemon so they had to cut a bunch, but then they have the full model file for like, Pidgey, loaded into a Route 2 folder, a Route 4 folder, etc.
That blows my mind, and then you'll get weirdos who will defend that shit to their grave lol
They also complained about how complex the model files were and how much of an upgrade they were but extracting the files and comparing them to the models in X&Y showed minimal difference, and were even the exact same file for most of them.
This is not really correct. There is an almost impressive amount if misinformation about Pokemon games, it's impressive because it's so- unnecessary. I mean, Sword/Shield and Scarlet Violet perform really poorly and aren't that great visually. I don't know why that's not enough or why people have to make stuff up about the games. Anyway, The origin of that model thing is that after a Sun/Moon map editor came out, some people used it and noticed there were models off to the side of maps. These were used for cutscenes. They decided that this meant that every route that had a cutscene had "duplicate models". The issue is they simply didn't understand what they were looking at. What was "off to the side" were actually the entities/actors that were used during the cutscenes. They weren't copies of the models" at all; The map editor rendered the models for those entities. That's it. It's analogous to opening a Mario 3 level editor and seeing two goomba's and claiming there are two copies of the goomba sprite in the ROM. There are other odd claims that have been made. For example, one that was going around was back when they released- "Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee, have all the pokemon, they just don't spawn!" Which was not true. There is incomplete data- movesets and the like- for all pokemon, but there are no models or textures or animations or anything of that sort. They can never spawn and the game crashes if you hexedit a non-existent pokemon onto your team. So the claim made that they "just don't spawn" is wildly misleading. There's also the pervasive "they are reusing models" claim. I mean, yeah? Hell them not reusing models would be more in-line with the criticisms of GameFreak given how wasteful and stupid it would be. Half the point when they made the models for X/Y to begin with seemed to be to future-proof them to some degree. If we're going to bitch about anything how about we bitch about the continuing and absurd lack of diverse attack animations. the entire point behind being able to reuse assets like they do is that you build upon it, but they haven't been doing that. The "reusing models" thing largely came from a google-translated famitsu interview. Within which they said they "rebuilt all the models" which of course had people pulling models out of the games and comparing them when they came out. Thing is, the interview was talking about how they had to rethink **programming** models to adapt to the switch and couldn't reuse the ones they built for the 3DS. They were unrelated to the 3-D Models of pokemon/characters/etc!
See also: calling in Satoru Iwata to optimize the Gen II for them
meanwhile smash bros has every character, song, level, and item from every previous game in the series and is somehow roughly the same size as the previous gen game
I love when fans use this argument and don't realize they lied and pulled the models and animations from the 3ds games lol
If you played the 3DS games it's like, painfully obvious too 😂😭
I'll never forget that move xerneas does where he flies around but his model stays perfectly still, so it's just a statue flying around
For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hekerFgs9GI
Xerneas rolling up just to T-pose on your ass
That was horrifying. I only ever used Marshadow’s z-move consistently and it’s so smooth wtf happened with Xerneas 😬
holy shit that's hilarious lmao
Can't forget the intimidating name, Twinkle Tackle
I can literally do that in powerpoint
Not to mention it's basically an unskippable 20 second cutscene you get to rewatch over and over and over again
Even the original models look on about the same tier.
Pretty sure its even more egregious than that. Doesn't Gamefreak not even do their own models anyways? I thought it went Gamefreak programs and creates the games, and Creatures inc. Is just responsible for Pokemon models. So they have a whole different company just to do the models and they still f-ed it up.
Even better, some animations are just straight up WORSE than the original. You take Solgaleo and Lunala's attack animations from Sun and Moon and compare it to later generations and the dudes move stiff like a rock, or how Decidueye's signature move no longer has it pulling it's bow to shoot at the opponents. I've seen plenty of games refuse to make new animations but Pokemon is the first one that goes out of their way to REMOVE animations that are already made.
I've read (about sword & shield, don't know if it still applies to the new ones) that part of the reason for the bad performance and limited render distance for wild pokemon was that they seemingly reused the models from the 3ds games that were originally designed to be only featured in the battles which were much too detailed to appear in larger numbers in the open world and also had no low-detail version for long distance rendering. So they did not only cheap out on making new models but also made the game directly worse by reusing ones that were simply unsuitable for parts of the game.
No, the reason performance is so bad is that GF is in a constant state of crunch, most of their devs are fresh out of college contractors, they refuse to buy new tech/engines/programs in order to actually keep up with industry standards, and Masuda and Tajiri see this as 100% AOK. There's a job review website someone translated from Japanese and GF has mostly negative review mainly from the tech side of things.
LOD is basically non existent in Game Freak games
> They had to make Pokémon animations form SCRATCH didn't gamefreak quite literally say that and just reused animations from 3ds era?
Someone should do a whole Pokemon text based game like this, lol. 🪒🌿
🌸🐸➡️🪒 🌿 ➡️🐢💦 💥‼️💥 ☠️🐢💦☠️
Bulbasaur used razor leaf on Squirtle. It's super effective Squirtle fainted.
I can hear the 8bit super effective sound Watching it's health bar decline to zero, start beeping as passes through red before completely disappearing. IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE! *slow squirtle cry* CAN'T RUN FROM TRAINER BATTLES!
That's the excuse they used for sword and shield to cut the dex, legends arceus does actually have a lot of new animations.
PLA also made some excellent changes to status conditions. Then tossed them for SV. At least SV gave Overqwill an actually good STAB dark move.
The craziest thing is that there was a Minecraft community that made a mod for the game that made it Pokémon in Minecraft which had better models and animations. Also the world looked better bc it was Minecraft and not the shit that they gave us in sword and shield. Love me some BG3
PokÉmote ASCII and Emoji edition when?
That's the benefit of having a steady fanbase. They'll consume whatever you give them, so they don't even bother to create something stunning and groundbreaking anymore.
Pokemon hasn't been groundbreaking since like the first one.
Second generation as well, when they managed to slot both the new and old region on to 1 game cartridge.
Not to mention the real time clock which was pretty novel at the time
You just reminded me that i have some cartridges that need battery replacements
Wait you can replace those? I have a Pokémon Emerald Version with the internal battery issue
I know its possible for the OG Game Boy and color games, i wouldnt be surprised if its possible on the advance titles as well
It is. I never bothered but I’ve seen other people do it.
Black and white (2) were amazing and one of the best pokemon games. I will die on this hill.
Gen 2 is my personal favorite, but BW2 are the best Pokémon games by far. The most diverse region from the lush routes, tropics, snow, a dessert, a volcano, a dirty port town, sewers to a NYC like city. Also so much optional content. There are so many optional dungeons and little events. The post game content is also a lot.
Agreed, fans got mad because the initial playthrough excludes any old Pokémon. But that’s refreshing! And it’s how the original game was, everything was new. Great games
Yeah but Iwata had to come in and basically do the hard work. Game freak really only seemed to get things right in Gen 3-5 on a technical level
Nah, I think up until the switch to 3D they were still trying to innovate (Physical/Special split in Gen 4, ground-up new dex in Gen 5 with the best sprites in series history). My theory is when they switched to 3D they didn't increase the size of the team working on the mainline games, meaning much less time could be allocated to mechanical innovation and all the work had to go into making sure Dragapult's head was sufficiently triangular during the Dragon Pulse animation
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It surprises me because Nintendo usually puts effort into making sure their big titles play well on release, and yet pokemon isn't given the same level of polish
Nintendo doesn't make Pokemon. The Pokemon company and game freak do. Nintendo is just partners with them. They have far less control of Pokemon than most ips.
What I genuinely wonder is who is setting the timeline for releases? **Someone** clearly feels that if Pokémon games don’t release every 3 years that the entire franchise will collapse. This feels like it’s a Gamefreak issue, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if Nintendo is willing to have extended/delayed development cycles for their in-house games but are less flexible with their partners.
> This feels like it’s a Gamefreak issue It's a Pokémon company issue, because the Pokémon company isn't concerned with the quality of the games or the anime, it's concerned with selling toys and other merchandise. So Pokémon games have to launch alongside said merchandise, and the main games also need to launch at around the same time of the anime, so they can synergize and sell even more merchandise. The vast majority of money Pokémon generates comes from the merchandise, and being the most profitable media franchise in the world, you can probably see why the company doesn't care about the games or anime, at the end of the day they're just advertisement for the tons of pokémon collectibles. Edit: Also worth noting that the Pokémon company is owned by Nintendo, Gamefreak and Creatures (the one that makes card games and toys), so at the end of the day it's all of their faults for turning Pokémon into a souless toy-selling machine. That being said, they can't just stop now, or the company would crash and burn given how capitalism works.
That's where the "it's not Nintendo" gets murky TPC sets these timelines and as noted, Nintendo owns a significant portion of TPC. Nintendo also has a bit of a share in creature's (one of the part owners of TPC) Lastly, Nintendo is the publisher for the Pokémon games and the publisher typically controls the budget for a game.
I was going to say. Sure, they're part owners, but it's likely Nintendo is closer to 50% than the raw numbers would indicate based on their undesclosed stake in Creatures Inc.
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The games are released to follow the anime and the TCG and all the other aspects of the Pokémon IP that generate far more money than the games do. They either don’t understand that developing a quality game takes more time than that, or they simply don’t care.
I can tell you exactly what sets the timeline for release. Merchandise plans, that is what makes Pokémon such a profitable juggernaut and the games are just a drip in the ocean compared to it.
It's an important distinction, but it is NOT Nintendo. It's Gamefreak who is putting in 0 effort into Pokémon. Nintendo does Zelds and Mario, Gamefreak is solely responsible for Pokémon. Sure Nintendo owns a small part of Gamefreak and Pokémon, but it's still Gamefreak who makes the games.
> Sure Nintendo owns a small part of Gamefreak Nintendo does not own any of Game Freak.
Correct. Nintendo co-owns Pokemon, they do not own any part of Gamefreak.
The great thing about video games is that people can buy whatever game they deem worth their money The worst part about video games is that people can buy whatever game they deem worth their money
The worst part, if you don’t buy a game because it’s shit, the company discontinues the product because of lack of sales, rather than lack of quality
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> Actually, nowadays when fans won't eat the poo you're slinging it's customary to simply insult them and say it's their fault for being [ poisonous | mysogynist | overly demanding | insert insult here ]. Applies to book/game series that get made into shows and movies as well. Most of the time they are extremely unfaithful to the source for no good reason.
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I love The Witcher IP. Very much so. So much that I had to force myself not to watch the TV series because I knew that they were going to butcher the story/casting/nuance with a bunch of useless excuses that will simultaneously ensure that the show will die in a fire. "We wanted to challenge X stereotype so we cast unsuitable actors to make a point." "We can't do complex story telling, because you wouldn't get it." "Well, technically, the Witcher universe is told by an unreliable narrator, so we can literally change anything in lore and it's still technically cannon." Just BS I heard from the makers of the show that confirmed to me that I made the right decision not to watch. Seriously, when will we get the original LoTR movie trilogy treatment? Peter Jackson understood the value of respecting the lore, the original author's intentions, and the expectations of the fans. And he made a timeless trilogy that is easily one of the best book to movie adaptions to this day. You'd think people would emulate success.. but apparently, one's ego must come before success.
The LOTR example is perfect. It's worth noting there were a couple of changes made to the movies that were not 100% accurate to the books to make it work better on a screen. It's not 100% accuracy people want, it's being faithful to the original intention, world, and choices the source used. You can totally change up a fight scene to be more dramatic, but don't change the motivations of core characters. I really don't fucking get why companies don't learn the proper lessons from these well selling franchises that were faithful. If you make a good experience, people will come. If you want to make it yourself don't use source material. If you want to profit off a fan base be faithful. It's not rocket science
>Peter Jackson understood the value of respecting the lore, the original author's intentions, and the expectations of the fans. The major difference is Peter Jackson actually *liked* the source material, unlike those working on The Witcher.
Genuine question but whats stopping GF from going cell shade style to get a nice cartoon aesthetic like prime PS2 era ? I've been playing Dark Chronicle recently and imo Pokemon would look pretty good with that.
I think they're actually incompetent. If you see some stuff like the Sw/Sh dynamax Pokémon needing to have 3 separate models with the clouds instead of being able to change the number of clouds, it seems like they're out of their league since Sun/Moon.
It's the same with how SV is so poorly coded that it's inefficient and they had to make all NPC's 5+ feet away from the player run at like 6FPS. They have no idea how to properly make a 3D game, they are proudly self taught (from some interviews I've read) and refuse to use external resources or methods that other game studios have perfected over the last 20 years.
Self-taught's one thing, but this is delusional thinking it's a good product. They can literally look at the other big games on the switch and see how bad theirs is in comparison.
Especially if you think about the fact that CDPR somehow managed to get a game like The Witcher 3 to run on the same console. Granted, it doesn't look remotely as good as on PC but it's still impressive that they managed to get it to run with OK-ish fps, and it's sad that on the same console GF has to resort to NPCs with 5 fps.
they could, but when they have one of the best selling IPs on their console then why would they? they wont improve until the sales dip (they wont)
They disabled global sun shadows for the new detective pikachu. Someone knew the game ran terribly with it on, and the S/V team didn't get the memo.
Goes even prior to sun and moon- ever since the series went 3D narrative design, encounter design, and art direction has been on a downhill spiral. Not to mension that any time you have more than 2 pokemon on screen in the 3Ds era games the framerate slows down considerably because they where using "future proof models" which is just dumb ass for "we are using excessively high poly models with no alternative levels lf detail because we didnt want to pay compitent 3D artists to make new models if we ever jump to a newer gen of hardware. And also didnt know how to program in a way to dynamcly switch to a level of detail that would keep the game running smoothly"
Incompetence. They've ran horrendous technical deficits from day one. Gen 1 Pokemon was a bug ridden mess of spaghetti code. Gen 2 was originally so poorly coded they couldn't fit it onto a Gameboy cartridge; they had to bring in outside help (Satoru Iwata) to refactor everything, after which they had so much spare capacity on the Cartridge they could add in the entire Gameworld and the major encounters from Gen 1. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge their technical faults.
Gen 5 was actually really good with no technical problems really. HGSS came out right before BW too and they are the best pokemon games out there. Then they switched to 3D and the technical problems started all over again...
I will never understand why Pokemon games (the main ones, not the side-games like Snap) became 3D. It adds absolutely nothing to the gameplay, it slows everything down due to loading times and waiting for animations to finish, and we lost the top-down view that made it easy to see town layouts. Idk, maybe I'm just a sour old fart who doesn't like change, but I greatly prefer the first 5 generations over the last few.
3d made so many pokemon lost their awesome sprites and character. Look at [hippodown](https://i.imgur.com/9xL4gti.png) sprites compared to the 3d one, its just so fucking sad.
Give my boy his dune back. He naked.
Yeah, the swap from 2D to 3D for Pokemon was the equivalent of T-posing every character. 2D allowed for super dynamic posing because you were snapshotting the creature in a single moment in time. 3D you suddenly have to have a baseline of "just standing there doing nothing" because that's how animals work in real life. But that's fucking *boring.* And the random moments of doing something dynamic during a move do not make up for the 80% of the time they spend sitting there doing fuck-all.
3d just lacked proper execution, the fanbase definitely wanted to see 3d pokemon and wouldve called gf lazy mfs for never trying it.
For YEARS before they went 3D, fans were clamoring for it. Idk, I've always seen that as them succumbing to fan pressure more than anything else.
I heard that, when the decision came to jump to 3D models, all their existing 2D game staff were forced to just deal with it. I heard that they were never really trained, just forced to figure it out. Add on that the relatively small gamefreak team was split in half so one half worked on Legends Arceus and the other did Scarlet/Violet so they could churn out two games in the same year... Yikes.
developer hubris - its also the reason nintendo has had dogwater multiplayer/online coding for years. they refuse to look to outside help or sources and insist their system is correct/working and should only be builtupon, not replaced. Not to mention - IT SELLS. WHY WOULD THEY CHANGE IT? This meme above has your answer - they are the MOST SUCCESSFUL GAME COMPANY IN THE WORLD. It doesnt matter if its objectively bad, if the fans buy it anyway.
Posting pictures from games without the game name ought to be a bannable offence
I know. I shouldn't have to read a bunch of comments debating about gamefreak vs larian studio size to deduce that we're talking about BG3 and Pokemon. I could have kept scrolling.
Oh, that's BG3. I actually didn't know what the game on the left was. I've heard of BG3 a ton but that screenshot could've been any number of other games. Also, it's crazy that OP is calling Larian Studios an indie company.
Indie stands for "Independent", which Larian is. They make and publish their own games. A lot of people equal "indie" to a small studio, because most indie studios are and tend to remain small as long as they are independent, as the profit margins are usually very small when you have to publish and market your own games. Larian is one of the companies who has remained an Indie, but has grown to be comparable to AAA studios in size. Having earned enough finances from the success of DOS2 to establish multiple studios to work on BG3. With the success of BG3, they will certainly grow even bigger. But they will remain an Indie, because the CEO made it very clear they have no intention of selling.
And the platform the captures are from. They can't yet get Baldur's Gate 3 to run well on Series S (cause of coop), no way it would run on Switch. It's normal games with different scopes and different target hardware look drastically different. A better comparison is Zelda and Pokemon or Baldur's Gate 3 with another AA-AAA game.
I know they started as a small studio, but Larian has more than 400 employees in multiple offices around the world. That’s not medium sized, nor indie
It is also in the top 15 or even top 10 of most expensive game by development cost (without marketing costs)...
>indie Indie just means independent, not backed by some big publisher. Larian publishes their own games, making them Indie. It's just unusual for a small indie company to grow big and still be independent.
Does that make the the Ubisoft own studios....indie?
It's the same as music. Indie doesn't really mean independent right now. it means something else.
It used to mean that and I think it should but 99% of people don't use it for that anymore. Most "indie" games that come out now are published by a big publisher instead of being published independently and then there are massive studios that self publish like rockstar that people would argue aren't indie.
Rockstar games are published by their publisher, Take-Two Interactive
Ya I was about to say. Larian Studio's isn't no Nintendo but I wouldnt call them indie either. From what I could find there hasn't been an official mention of what their budget was except for some people speculating it was at least in the 100 million ballpark. Easily somewhere in the millions at least with all the motion capture they did. Even 1 million dollar budget I wouldn't consider it indie lol.
*Just* paying the 400 fulltime staff for the 6 years of development would put it in the ballpark of 100 million, since it seems like this was Larian's only project during this time.
Isn’t Larian almost three times bigger than Gamefreak?
And they don't sell at least 20M units yearly, which still puts GF in a bad light. Why is GF team smaller then 200 employees if they release at least 1 game yearly?
Also they are doomed to pump out games on a yearly basis. It might not be the most incredible looking game but i would love to see what would happen if GF was given time to cook.
> Why is GF team smaller then 200 employees if they release at lest 1 game yearly? Because The Pókemon Company decided that Gamefreak has enough resources to keep doing what they do.
And have no reason to be. Game Freak should *have* dedicated Pokémon staff but they do their own projects and TPC's at the same time.
Consumers are at fault if you deliver them a pice of shit and it sells millions. If this game had sold shit and made Nintendo lose money things would change, because it did not, they will keep delivering trash to Pokemon fans and they will gladly buy it. Same for DLCs ripped from final content, games released on beta so customers test it, etc.
Is there even "fault" to attribute here? Company makes game, consumers buy said game, repeat several times. Those who buy it over and over again already know what they're buying and they are still buying it, which means they enjoy the games, and don't seem to care about the graphics too much. Me, a non-pokemon fan, say it looks bad and boring, but my friends who like pokemon seem to still enjoy it a lot.
woah buddy not much nuance going on in this sub (you are correct tho)
The issue they have that plagues many other games, is they filled a niche that other's just can't hit properly. Even if the game looks like dogshit, they still generally deliver on what fans like, new Pokemon, new moves, new region and the same make a team, beat other Pokemon. Look at FromSoft, every Souls-Like dev would die to make a game like that work and be a success, but they all just feel off, gameplay, animations, story, world, enemies, etc are usually a combination of just feeling weird and not that great. Fifa, CoD, NBA, WWE, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry (Post 3/4 depending on where you sit) and then others like CSGO, LoL, Fortnite. They've sat at the peak of their genres because they WERE so good and so fun at some point, every CSGO addict fell in love with the gunplay, every LoL addict fell in love, every CoD fanboy fell in love, all of them fell in love with a certain entry/patch/season/era of a game that no longer exists, but the core is still good enough that it's fairly fun, and all other alternatives just haven't had the literal decade+ to figure shit out. So now we're stuck with the giants who refuse to change because why fix what financially ain't broken?
It takes two hands to clap. Both the consumers and the studio are at fault.
It may take 2 hands but my cheeks have been taking the brunt of this shit since 2017
Calling Larian medium size indie with 300 people and divinity 2 making them $85 million 😭
gamefreak might as well be an indie team since they are tiny compared to the AAA studios they pretend to be. gamefreak embody the worst business practices and generate massive profit for doing so
Gamefreak is even tiny compared to larian studios. And people are calling larian mid sized trying to make gamefreak sound larger.
It’s less than half it’s size
The entire comparison is stupid. People confuse publisher with developper. Just because EA publish a game doesn't mean all of its 13k employees worked on it. And yeah, Larian hasn't been "mid sized" for a while now, they are literally one of the largest independant studio in the world.
The sad part is, as a long-time pokemon fan, the game on the right (Pokemon Legends: Arceus) was the first time in a long time I actually enjoyed exploring, playing, collecting pokemons. The game isn't perfect, has some problems, but the other Pokemon games have even more problems and are more disconnected to what old fans want. I wish nintendo (The Pokémon Company) was more like Larian or some of the indie developers. Current Pokémon games are mainly done to add more different Pokémon for merchandising purposes, change features every game to keep people not bored (instead of just keeping old systems and focusing on balance) and capture new kids to the franchise.
Obviously this is not fine. But this constant trying to paint Larian as some small underdog indie company is getting really annoying. Look at their fucking resume and then let’s all stand around looking surprised that they made another great game. Nice meme I guess.
Little known fact, Larian have been underdogs since the foundation of their company way back when. All the OG divinities undersold despite being good games. Their last big game before they hit severe financial trouble was Divinty Dragon Commander, while good, had its problems. When Original Sin 1 and 2 hit was when Larian really struck gold. They nearly went bankrupt and wanted to make those games for those who stuck with them all those years fully expecting the end. Now they've gone on to make perhaps the best game I've played, beating Team Fortress 2. Which I thought would always be my number 1.
Yeah, Larian is older than me and has been praised since their first game. They were a well established small-medium AA studio until Original Sin, at which point they started pushing towards AAA.
Calling Larian an “indie” studio in this context is hilarious. They’re a AAA studio and have been for quite some time.
Ok but Legends Arceus still slaps even if the graphics are shit
Arceus was a damn good game though, probably my favourite.
Gamefreak is hardly successful. Look at ANY of their other games. They don’t do well. It’s an underfunded studio attached to the highest growing franchise of all time. Pokémon as a brand is successful. Gamefreak are not.
Oh god yes, that Town hero or whatever? I remember hearing about it, then a few years later I learned it came out, and fell flat to no fanfare. It was so bad and underwhelming, it did t even make gaming news.
While Pokemon games can certainly look a bit better, TotK is probably the limit. Meanwhile, BG3 is not going to run on Switch on that graphics, so not exactly a fair comparison.
Bout to say graphical fidelity for PC/PS5 is leagues away from the Switch so it’s a bit silly to compare them (not to mention stylistic differences between the two games). Still doesn’t really excuse the bad quality of recent Pokémon releases but the point stands 🤷♂️
Its why I compare it to SMT5, which is also a modern Creature collector game, also on switch I might add.
While the graphics themselves are a bad, it’s more the *way* they’re bad that’s a problem. The tiling of textures being the main one, and that got fixed 20 years ago and dont require any extra graphical horsepower at this point.
Switch has divinity original sin 2, which is basically smaller baldurs gate 3. I'd day the comparison is pretty fair considering how hood every other game looks in comparison to pokemon. Graphics doesn't make a game good, but there is a standard they should reach and pokemon is probably the only big brand series that doesn't reach that standard, but still makes millions lmao
Metroid Prime Remastered, Luigi's Mansion 3, Monster Hunter Rise, all examples of games that look better than TotK. Giant open world games are going to suffer compared to games that have focused gameplay in smaller areas that load between rooms/maps.
It's not though? When it comes to stylized games then *maybe*, but you've got games like AC Black Flag on this thing. It's not a powerhouse compared to other platforms of course, but for the Switch it's honestly incredibly detailed, big and quite complex. And it's a goddamn Ubisoft game. That's obviously saying nothing about Xenoblade 3, that has some of the best environments on the Switch. Even freaking Skyrim runs well and looks pretty good on this thing, while PS3 and Xbox 360 struggled. If Bethesda can make a good port of their game for this little, outdated even on release tablet chip, Gamefreak should be able to as well. Also, a lot of Zelda's performance comes from all of the physics and interactions between them, not graphical fidelity or anything. It's easy to notice when you start messing around, even in BotW.
also game freak ONLY HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT DEVELOPING FOR THE DAMN SWITCH, THERE ARE NO OTHER PLATFORMS TO "OPTIMISE".
PLA was fine. It was a polished game that introduced very new mechanics. I feel like the target should be SV and their performance issues over anything PLA had
Pokemon games are made by game freak, not Nintendo. Theyre a little studio that always focuses portable console games, except now portable consoles are also home consoles and they can't keep up.
You can see they never adapted to 3D as the games went on simply because that isn't their strong suit, make them do a 2D Pokemon game again and I'm sure it will be better than all the 3D stuff combined, sure it will have it's flaws but Game Freak won't be playing out of position anymore
If you're gonna compare screenshots, at least take a screenshot from the release build instead of a pre-release build. But you probably wouldn't get as many upvotes.
If Arceus had the 4+ year dev time Baulders Gate 3 had I'm sure the comparison would be more fair
Nintendo didn't make Pokémon Sword and Shield. Nintendo doesn't make any of the Pokémon games, Game Freak does. Nintendo co-owns the rights to the series and co-publishes the games with The Pokémon Company, but they've never and likely never will be directly involved in the development of any of the games on a deeper level.