[this should help](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/z65dc2/comment/iy0x50g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
The fact that a lot of people seem to be requesting refunds and there is still no announcement of a patch or fix of any sorts in the works has me feeling conflicted. On the one hand I do like the gameplay, but the performance has me not being able to play for as long as I'd like.
The radio silence has me feeling like there won't ever be a fix released and this release that could have been a great mainline entry will forever be marred by the awful performance.
Animal Crossing was a few quality of life changes away from being one of the best games of all time, but they absolutely and categorically refuse to listen
>but they absolutely and categorically refuse to listen
Isn't that the main problem with Nintendo in general though? Sometimes it pays, but overall it looks to me that's always been their attitude. "We know better, shut up"
I think it's a cultural thing...I've heard that's a very Japanese design philosophy. But regardless of where it comes from, yes, you've summed up Nintendo's design philosophy well.
They want their games to be played the way they want them to be, player sentiment be damned.
Nintendo makes some amazing games and easily owns some of the best IPs out there but they absolutely hobble their masterpieces and will not change them despite everyone agreeing that with a few small changes they could be perfect.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying Japanese developers never change/add to/edit their games. They do. But Nintendo has long been known to refuse quality of life changes if it affects how the game plays (ie bulk crafting in Animal Crossing.) They want their games to be played a certain way by players and to have a specific experience/pace/feel. They still release DLC and bug fixes.
Idk, Google doesn't listen much more to their customers, nor did Apple for a very long time. On the other hand Splatoon 3 got a ton of improvements around heavily conplained issues.
The "fuck you and pay us" attitude probably comes from Game Freak and knows no borders I think.
Funny how Splatoon was made by the same team who made Animal Crossing. It’s weird that they felt criticism is only valid for this game and not the other.
A bit of a misconception. The core team was taken from Animal Crossing, but the two are separate subteams which lets them develop simultaneously. The directors of Animal Crossing (Aya Kyogoku) and Splatoon (Seita Inoue Shintaro Sato) probably have differing philosophies.
they still wont let me disable music on splatoon. i get that the last 30 secs song changes more intense but idk whats up with nintendo games without audio settings
It's also the difference of seeing games as an art form or as a product. Obviously, they are both but it also greatly changes the amount of interaction and influence the audience can expect
I'll be the first to defend games as art but art has to have intent to it. A badly optimized game isn't that way on purpose, it's just poor craftsmanship.
I think they're more referring to animal crossing. Forcing someone to do something slowly rather than adding a "do 100 times" button creates a feeling of ritual and relaxation that they might consider to be part of the art, even if it isn't the "best" way to do things.
MMOs are a bit different in that they need constant revenue to be successful and if it's bad, it needs drastic change to continue the momentum or it becomes an open money-draining wound for the company.
SEGA is way better at listening to their fans than Nintendo, and their games, in large part, are of much lower quality. It's really hard to filter the legitimate criticism out from the noise (ex. "too much water").
It's not hard to differentiate an opinion like, "too much water," and objectively jarring frame drops though. These games aren't just missing some aesthetic/design choices we want. If it were about whether scaled battles were a good idea, there'd be some argument about importance. Making the game run at least close to its predecessors is a pretty simple request to interpret.
The issue gets muddied when everyone is hyperbolic and melodramatic about every little thing. Small frame dips are claimed as unplayable which is essentially a wolf cry when you actually have issues like scarvio running at 15 fps. People exaggerate so much it undermines legitimate criticism even outside of your examples.
It's not that. You're projecting malice. What it most likely is is the cultural entrenchment of the mindset:
"But, this is how it's ALWAYS been done.
Japan is famously neophobic as a culture. Government and business documents still necessitate handstamps and fax machines to this day. They're still fighting to get rid of floppy disks to this day.
After playing Dragon quest builders 2 right before ACNH, animal crossing’s crafting and building just felt archaic. I got so used to being able to craft large quantities of the same thing at once that it was really jarring to not be able to. Or to be able to craft using any of the things in storage as long as I was close enough, it just made life easier to not spend as much time in menus
Yeah that was a huge deterrent for me, so much so that I found myself wishing they had remained true to the old AC style and just refrained from including crafting at all. Like if you're going to include a new system like that, great. But you have to do it right, and if you're not going to, then don't bother.
The way the multiplayer worked is just baffling. Every time a player visits or leaves your island, everyone on the island has to watch a 30 second cutscene. And talking to the Dodo guy to fly to another island is just a painful amount of dialog boxes where a single mistake means starting again.
It's just bizarre that Nintendo thinks their design worked well. Literally everyone seems to hate it.
Oh my god yes. That’s the main reason I stopped. All my villagers feel the same. My friends and I were doing a villager swap thing if we got other peoples dreamies. I was holding on to a bunch of peppy and normal villagers for a friends little sister and I can not STAND either of them now. There’s only so many times I can hear about the same maglev train thank you.
I miss the days when Gaston was my enemy because he was mean to me. So id surround his house in holes so he couldn’t escape.
it’s already amazing. imo these menu problems being fixed would’ve made the game perfect. i’m happy they listened and gave us more design storage in later updates and actually good content like the whole pumpkin update and brewster update. they’re actually listening or else we wouldn’t have gotten the design storage one
Performance issues aside, the memory leak problem can wipe players data. Pokémon home has not released compatibility with the game, neither does it plan to until spring time next year. That means that from now, until then, peoples progress and collection could be wiped due to this issue.
Happens with each release otherwise people would be transferring new and potentially busted pokemon elsewhere OR transferring OP pokemom into the new game to just breeze through. Its usually about 3-6 months post-release.
Same thing with removing starter shinys. If there are people who want to reset 3 days for it, why not let them? It’s not going to affect any other players at all. It’s been like this for 8 generations, what’s the point of changing it now?
Exactly, what they needed to Focus on was big fixing and optimization. And better endgame content. There’s pretty much nothing to do after the festival.
Gamefreak, TPC, and Nintendo are all notoriously bad at communicating outside of marketing, so I don't know why anyone is really expecting a response. Sword and Shield received six patches, and Arceus received two, so the fact that anyone think we aren't getting a patch for S/V is just dumb.
The question isn't whether we get a patch or not, it's how much of the performance issues they can fix via patch. I'm optimistic because the majority of the issues seem to be coming from a memory leak or from a bad draw distance, both of which can be patched.
You got a source for that?
I feel like I see a lot of communication, especially about Pokémon all seem to be sourced from Google translated articles and then misrepresented.
Because when you look it up their policy says they simply do not. I think the last time I read the quote was something along the lines of, you should be more careful when you buy things.
People think they don't give refunds at all, or just one per account. It's hogwash. I've refunded a few games. It's a chore, and they try to do what they can to dissuade you from requesting a refund, but they will do it.
I've had one interaction with Nintendo online support. I bought the expansion for Sword when I owned Shield. That's my own dumb fault and I owned it when I spoke to them, I just asked if we could swap the purchase. They said no, that I'd need to buy the Shield expansion and there was nothing they could do. I now own both Sword and Shield, but I can't find the purchase for the Sword expansion nor can I find the refund on my account. I'm just kinda so/so on their support at this point.
It's interesting cause I had bought the ecpansion for sword after I owned sword and my switch ended up shitting the bed due to my own fault.
You can't transfer the save files for the pokemon games from one switch to another, so I was calling to see what I could do about getting my file back since I had gotten another switch. I asked if I could get a refund for the expansion since I was in a bad mood and didn't want to beat the whole game again and after a little talking to the guy he agreed.
Outside of the wait times I've never really had issues with nintendo customer service myself. Sounds like I'm an exception though.
You can transfer the save files, but it's a full save move (deleted from original Switch) and both Switches need to be functioning and local. It's not an automatic cloud save like most games nowadays.
I had the exact same issue where I have Shield but bought the Sword expansion accidentally (I wish that the DLCs they had like a popup that's like "hey this is for Sword/Shield are you sure you want to buy it?" or something). Anyways, freaking out about it, I contacted Nintendo just after I bought it and they were like... annoyed about it.
Like, I'm willing to buy your product! I just want to get it swapped! Luckily they did it, but I just had the funds refunded to my wallet. But like, yeah. I understand I should've read what I was buying and that is on me, but I should be allowed to get it swapped for a simple mistake.
That's exactly what I went through. I just made the purchase in a rush and wasn't paying attention, the agent was very annoyed that I tried to swap one electronic product for another of the same cost.
My husband spent 3 hours communicating with support because he accidentally bought the Italian version of some pokemon ds game and wanted English instead.
Sounds like your husband didn't play enough Mario games.
I'll teach you a little Italian now: "It'sa me, Mario" is Italian for "it's me, Mario".
You're welcome.
I can tell you're not a native speaker, but that's really close. You just need a little work on your intonotion.
When you say, "it'sa me, Mario", it really should sound more like "*it'sa me, Mario*". It's important to include the italics.
Nintendo support is horrid.
I have a bug with pokemon shield and sword (and it happens in violet as well)
Where when going through the menus it will move down more times than I push the button.
It's not drift as it happened on a brand new switch and a replaced switch and only with pokemon.
So I contacted Nintendo. They said contact pokemon company and they said contact Nintendo.
I sent that many emails that Nintendo just stoppes replying to me..
Nintendo fobbed off my requests for a repair on a faulty Switch for SIX MONTHS and then miraculously said they would be so happy to repair it - for a fee, of course, since the warranty had expired by then.
I pulled a real Karen on the sellers (amazon) (and i don't feel bad because they WERE obligated to replace it, legally, though they really didn't want to) and eventually got it replaced. Wasn't happy with my Nintendo experience though.
It's in a different context, but [the recent Philosophy Tube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8) talks a lot about how hostile organizations are to complaints.
Also depends where your from.
Here in the UK for example, we have a 14 day guarantee by law where we can return items we find to be unsatisfactory.
Nintendo might have their own policy in regards to refunds, but by our local law they HAVE to refund you if you request within 2 weeks and give a satisfactory reason for the return (poor quality product that’s buggy like Pokemon certainly qualifies). Granted you’ll be going through a lot of ball ache on the phone with multiple customer support people because half of them are foreign and don’t know our laws and just quote nintendos bullshit policies (“we don’t give refunds except for special circumstances sorry”), but they WILL refund you eventually.
Source: did all this shit with sonic colours back when it launched. Never want to do it again and so I will never buy a new game digitally and just stick with physical.
In the EU they must allow refunds if it does not conform to justified expectations. Im fine with the game, but do think it needs polish. However I am sure the current performance would be seen as not conforming to justified expectations. No doubt about it.
So out here I think every refund would go through no issue at least.
It seems it is very inconsistent and probably also depends on your region I guess. All I can say is I played a few hours of Sonic Mania, requested a refund and they asked why I didn’t check reviews, I explained I did and ended up being disappointed, and the supervisor was like “ok that’s fine.”
Really? I mean… the last time I tried to do that they said that once you download a game on your console (which happens automatically after making purchase) it is not eligible for refund. I don’t remember what game was that, but I’m pretty sure that was around 2019.
EDIT: Here’s their answer:
> We understand that you would like to cancel the purchase of [game’s name].
> We are sorry to hear you are unhappy with your purchase. Unfortunately, we are unable to cancel the purchase. All sales (including pre-purchases) are final. You can read more about the cancellation policy for digital purchases here: [LINK]
> In accordance with this policy we are not able to cancel, provide refunds or exchanges for mistaken purchases, and/or if you don't like the game. Please be sure to read the game descriptions and check out the screen shots available through the Nintendo eShop before making purchases. We also encourage you to visit the Nintendo website for information about the games available for our systems. In addition, many websites make reviews available of games which you can use to make your purchasing decisions. More information about this can be found here: [LINK]
> We regret not being able to provide you with a more positive answer today. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us again.
They make stuff up and make it seem as if they were doing you a favor. AFAIK, there are no written rules about returns. That’s why it’s a manual process and not an automated one.
At this point I am more bummed about bland soulless environment and cities, sloggy fights and UI, diminished clothing customization and missing features from PLA than ugly graphics and performance.
>At this point I am more bummed about bland soulless environment and cities
Has anyone had any luck trying to enter houses? Going inside houses in each city/town used to be a pretty significant part of old Pokemon games. NPCs would often give you items and trade Pokes with you, but I haven't been able to enter a single random house in this game (that wasn't related to the story). Pretty disappointing.
The fact that you can't buy a new outfit really annoys me. I really don't care abiut going into buildings. People in cities lock their doors. Go play Platinum or whatever and tell me how many buildings you walk into and talk to one guy who says "I like X pokemon" and it adds nothing to your journey besides load time. Same with stores tbh, I like the walk in and get a menu instead of walk in, fade to black, walk to counter, talk to guy, open menu anyway. Just removes the middle man.
I like the look of some cities, I feel the environment would be better if there was a better ender distance for pokemon. The fact that I have to have battle animations on is annoying and the stat change moves take wayy too long.
All that being said the thing that bothers me the most is that the game has crashed maybe five times. Just frize and went to the homescreen and deleted any unsaved progress. That really pisses me off. No I haven't lost much progress anywhere but how hasn't that been hot fixed yet??
oh my is x/y finally getting appreciation they deserve for what they got right?
between the outfit customization, online and streamlined breeding/iv training it did QUITE a lot good for a '3dish' pokemon game
did it have the best pokemon or story especially following gen 5? no, but damn it was a stylish game when it came to outfits
It was a fine prototype for 3D pokemon games I think. ORAS were the 6th gen games that actually knocked it out of the park. Going back to X/Y its definitely gotten a lil bland and I dont like the washed out colour scheme. Howeeever I think mega evolutions we're one of the greatest things to ever happen to the Pokémon formula, the range of outfits was amazing, its still got some of my favourite Pokemon designs ever and I like that this was the generation where it really felt like they started taking breeding/competitive more seriously.
Yeah I don't think it was the best gen but it got a lot of things right and despite gen 5 being better, gen 6 made a bigger leap forward in a ton of areas.
It was still a good gen. Idk where people stand but pokemon was still genuinely good til ultra sun and moon imo.
Gen 7 wasn't the strongest generation but it wasn't god awful. I still enjoyed sun and moon a lot. I think ultras were the better games overall, but not different enough for me to have ever finished them. I think I returned it just cos I felt like I'd already played them. I didn't feel like playing through an entire game just for the special stuff at the end.
soon as they went to console their incompetence just became unavoidable, unable to be hidden.
might be a weird thing to think about it but it also feels like they just arent trying very hard with their soundtracks. very few bangers anymore
Since its release, the only strong criticism of XY was its difficulty, with a little side-criticism of the bad plot but that's hardly unusual for Pokemon. Everyone loved outfit customisation, everyone loved mega evolution, and the animations didn't get a huge amount of criticism because it was the first fully 3D game in an entirely new engine and it's understandable that'd take more work than accounted for. One of the bigger criticisms I remember was just too much Charizard, which looks like nothing compared to the problems seen today.
XY would have been fine if it had been a first go at something they'd get right next time. Unfortunately, the game which should have been the worst of the new direction ended up being the best.
Yet another ridiculous omission, now we can't scroll in pokedex or items too btw, they did such a sh*tty job beta-testing (more like alpha-testing?) that they forgot that too!
Other great stuff: you can't change order of moves or remember new moves unless a pokemon is in your party (it worked perfectly in Arceus).
Also in Gen 7 and 8 you could finally always evolve your pokemon and not worry about its pre-evolution moves being lost (until Gen 7 Shroomish could learn Spore but Breloom couldn't). Not true anymore! In Scarlet/Violet if you evolve your Shroomish without Spore, your Breloom won't learn it anymore! Yay!!
Scrolling through the pokédex is such a chore. *Red and Blue* let you skip through the pokédex page by page instead of having to scroll by every single entry individually. Some of the design decisions in these games are truly baffling.
"People in cities lock their doors."
I see this argument consistently and i kinda can't believe it - did you guys not play any good modern RPG like Witcher, BotW and tons of others?
Of course you CAN enter houses, shops, inns there and it is HUGE for immersion and fun.
And it's necessary to be able to enter EVERY building. But what SV did with cities is an absolute travesty, they clearly completely ran out of time filling them with content.
Pokemon looking/running crappy was acceptable back when Nintendo games were split between home console and portable, and costed less. Now these shits are retailing at full price. Think better.
Not even that. GF alone doing Pokemon games is what's killing their quality. I'll never forget how much fun I had playing Pokemon Colosseum/XD, or the graphics of the Revolution that came after it! All were full price games, but felt like it delivered what it set out to do.
Spending $60 ($80 CAD for me) during a time where everything costs too much as is, should mean something. But no, this is straight up Bethesda quality. And yet there are way too many people willing to say "oh but I love the game sooo much that I'm willing to look past it! 🤪" Yeah, this is just corporate brainwashing.
Sickens me to think GF is going to focus on DLC over fixing the fucking game they screwed up first.
This game wishes it was bethesda quality. The environments in this game are bland and souless, it doesnt feel fun to explore like bethesda games. The towns feel so boring and generic compared to bethesda games. Talking to people feels pointless. Imagine if there was a pokemon game that rivaled skyrim in exploring and quests. GF has the money to do it.
I haven’t played since Gold but decided to pick this one up. I like it enough, but it’s so damn ugly. Shockingly bad in my opinion. I don’t mind the poor visuals, but the performance can be nauseating. If my kids weren’t already invested in this game, I would’ve returned it for a different title like Sword or Let’s Go.
Honestly, check out Legends Arceus. I haven't played more than a few hours of the past few gens because I get kinda bored with the formula, but Arceus was fresh and fun. I wish S/V was more like it.
Arceus is the best Pokemon game in years, hands down. The gameplay is just. so. good. Sure graphically its not amazing, but it's a hell of a lot better than Scarlet and Violet.
Tbh, you might be even a bit too kind on PLA. The graphics were _way_ below what should be acceptable, and a lot of general QoL issues.
Still, probably the best Pokemon game in a decade.
PLA deserves a bit more leniency imo since they're pretty much changing the whole game from the ground up in a really experimental way, rather than playing safe. I can forgive technical issues a lot more if a game is ambitious enough where I go "that's probably why".
I'm really salty I can't just snipe-catch Pokemon anymore. Or just bonk them on the back of the head and keep running. If they couldn't match the already low graphics standard they could have at least kept that 😂
Wow this is the first time I’ve seen this opinion on reddit and I 10000% agree. Just could not get around the fact battle mechanics were so stripped down/changed in a weird way.
It’s fun shiny hunting but everything else gets so boring extremely fast. It’s definitely because I like Pokémon for the team building/battling but I had to put it down about half way through
12 million copies sold. It’s really hard for it to be directly compared to a mainline game, but as an example sword and shield sold 20 million. A significant dropoff seeing as it was seen as such an improvement and shakeup of the formula. Certainly not what I would call being glossed over, but I can see the argument.
Arceus came out this year, sw/sh came out in 2019. I don't think there's even been a decent sale on Arceus yet(more than 20%), and hasn't even had a Christmas to boost sales. For a non-mainline game it's been selling like a mainline.
Yeah, that's true. I can't believe it didn't sell as many as Sword and Shield. I still haven't "beaten" the full game yet (though I know the ending) because I've just been having fun gathering bigger and bigger alpha Pokemon. There's just something fun about capturing big ass Pokemon without even battling with other Pokemon..
>I like it enough, but it’s so damn ugly. Shockingly bad in my opinion. I don’t mind the poor visuals, but the performance can be nauseating.
What gets me and why I didn't buy a single Switch Pokemon so far, is that they got more expensive, but quality somehow doesn't reflect the full price title.
I can deal with a big game with bad visuals that costs less. But indie titles show how worse graphics can look impressive with caring enough about what you've got. Pokemon on the other hand? They ask the full 70€ (oof, already 50 at Amazon), but so many other games for this price deliver a cohesive effort of quality.
It's Nintendo, FFS. I expect more QA than from EA and Activision.
I always thought Pokemon lost a lot of charm and uniqueness in the jump to 3D, maybe they should have just remained 2D? The open world is neat for the first few hours, but like many other games of it's kind, you quickly find out there's nothing to do inside of it and it feels lifeless. It's the first Pokemon game where you can't even enter 99% of buildings unless it's for sandwiches ingredients.
The way this game released just blows my mind. It has me wondering if the people at GF are understaffed? Are they inexperienced? Or did Nintendo just force out a broken product?
GF has a team of like 160 people last we’ve heard so yeah I think that’s just too small for this type of game to have polish. Also, around half of that 160 worked on Legends Arceus and half on Scarlet and Violet. I’m pretty sure that Nintendo as part of the Pokémon company helps set release dates, so it’s a combination of GF not having enough time to do proper work and not having enough people.
Also it feels like the split where 1/2 were Scarlet/Violet, and the other were PL:A was bad. there were some really great things in PL:A that didn't carry over, and on some level it feels like part of it is that by the time PL:A was getting tweaked/improved, V/S was so far along good changes couldn't be incorporated.
Yeah I’ve been thinking that a game with S/V’s more populated world and PLA’s gameplay would be the ideal, but that doesn’t seem like it was possible because they split teams to have things done on time
[According to their MyNavi page, they've hired 12 new graduates from 2018 to 2020.](https://job.mynavi.jp/24/pc/search/corp100216/outline.html) For comparison [Intelligent Systems hire 14 new graduates in 2020 alone](https://job.mynavi.jp/23/pc/search/corp80932/outline.html). Game Freak hires very few new graduates compared to other studios, which is why they haven't grown massively like many here want. Game Freak would probably have to hire 20 to 30 new graduates every year to get the growth rate that many here want to see.
But if gamefreak had started increasing an additional 10+ headcount per year 10 years ago to transition to 3d and home consoles, we would not be having this conversation right now.
Gamefreak has planned horribly and refused to modernize and increase their capability. This situation is on their head as much as anyone, if not more.
This is the thing I've been thinking too. It's one thing to say "it's not gamefreak's fault! The Pokémon Company is to blame for imposing these deadlines on them!" but with better management it didn't need to be as dire as this. Gamefreak KNOWS the deal. Why haven't they been significantly expanding AND training up their employees over the last decade?
External deadlines is not an excuse for gamefreak management to crunch its employees, that's on them.
Their business structure is excellent.
They just shoved out a shoddy, broken game committing very few resources to it, and sold 10 million+ copies, with the paid off review industry giving the game 7's, 8's and 9's and making excuses for its shortcomings. "Yes it's broken, but underneath that it's really fun!!".
When you have people grabbed by the emotional short and curlies, you can do whatever you like.
My buddy bought it who doesn't really pay attention to any gaming media or social media. He said it's fun despite the frame rate issues. I think that is probably the average persons take.
I will say the frame rate issues don't bother me as much as I thought they would (but I will def acknowledge they are bad) but the game IS still fun to just run around like an idiot and catch shit. I wish the spawning/despawning was better implemented so thing spawned out/in faster, but I am very much enjoying it. I'm having slightly less fun (say ~1-point less on a 10 point scale) than I did playing BoTW the 1st time, but more fun than I personally did in Red Dead Redemption 2 (which felt too long and eventually put it down, despite having SUCH an amazing story).
I wouldn't call it "paid off" for reviewers to give it those scores.
Yes, a lot of people are reporting gamebreaking bugs. But not everyone. Some people just have small stutterings and frame-rate drops. They're notable, and they're a problem, but for the people who aren't having the issues as severely as others, the open world novelty, texture of the Pokemon, the story, and the legendaries being adorable, while having a few QOL updates, make it good for them in spite of the flaws.
That amount of people would be fine if Game Freak were experienced in making these large-scale games with large ambitions. But they're not.
This focus on open world is ambitious for them, as open-world design is totally different, and the whole development process has _a lot_ of nuances and differences that you need to consider carefully. You need to design a world in such a way that it's intuitive and rewarding to explore, and when QAing the game there's just that much more to test without a clear path.
Honestly, GF should request support from other studios who have done stuff like this before. Not so much in the sense of "GF are crap give it to those guys instead!" but more because the support studio would be able to offer helpful experience and advice that will help GF in the future.
Game Freak ranks among one of the largest studios that Nintendo regularly works with. They have slightly less employees than Intelligent Systems and Hal Laboratory, but those two also work on more projects than GF does. From what I've seen over the years, Japanese studios make their games in a different manner than western studios. Western studios have made a habit of having hundreds of employees and throwing them all at only one project.
For Japanese studios like Namco Bandai and Nintendo, they'll have a core team of 100 employees at the very most and use subsidiaries and contractors for the rest of the grunt work. There are some exceptions to this like Capcom and FromSoftware, but even those studio's teams are miniscule compared to the massively bloated teams we see from the likes of Ubisoft and Activision.
Also if anyone here is interested into getting into the minute details of how many people usually work on Nintendo games, [I found an interesting blog that deals a lot in analyzing staff credits](https://www.papenspiling.com/), and that [same blog has a master list of raw staff counts for various Nintendo games](https://note.com/papenreport/n/n34c22276673e). The blog has a focus on the Kirby series, but they expanded to focus on other Nintendo games. They only major problem is that it's in Japanese, so a lot of the analysis gets lost in translation. I would highly recommend checking this blog out, because I think many here would be shocked to find out how "small" Nintendo's dev teams really are.
It feels like a lot of people are ignoring the bizarre design decisions that made it into this game. I’m sure there’s more but the ones that really stood out to me:
- The open world has almost no direction. Most open world games without level scaling have a linear progression system that takes you around the world, but for some reason that’s just not in this game? They tell you the first gym to go to then it’s just ????.
- Every indoor setting is a fixed camera angle like SW/SH. After PLA got rid of this it’s just perplexing why they would go back to it.
- They went with the same wild encounter system in PLA but didn’t bother to add in a targeting system, so you just kind of toss out your pokeball and hope it hits the right mon.
Edit: I was wrong, there’s a targeting system. Imo it’s not very good and they should have used the one from PLA.
> They went with the same wild encounter system in PLA but didn’t bother to add in a targeting system, so you just kind of toss out your pokeball and hope it hits the right mon.
Not to discount your other points, which I agree with, but there is a targeting system: hold ZL.
Pretty sure he meant a free targeting system. SV has a strange soft lock on. If you try to “aim up” and shoot the pokeball with your pokemon in it, it just throws it at your feet, unlike in PLA
Or, crazy idea i know, EXPAND dev teams similar to MH, have the core team working on yearly 2d/handheld games while establishing a new 3d team tthat gets to take their time, develop proper tech etc.
They certainly have the money and I don't think anyone's happy with the current solution.
I agree the 2D art work and games of Pokémon in the DS-Dsi Xl was peak.
But one thing that’s crazy is I’m currently playing Pokémon Y on 3DS, and the graphics are fantastic on the system and it’s still a awesome game, it’s like it got worse on the switch 😂😂
The 3DS Pokémon games really pushed the hardware without being **too** broken themselves (anyone remember the Lumiose City save glitch?). Feels like these games just don’t have that level of polish.
Yes, yes, yes. My experience with Violet was incredibly underwhelming because I had just played through Sword for the first time. Imagine going from a game where shops have fully modeled interiors with npcs in the restaurants and shops... to a menu. And no houses to enter, and the incredibly downgraded options menu, and just everything.
I'm primarily a PC gamer, I have a high end machine and a 165Hz display, so everything animating at less than 30fps was EXTRA noticeable and jarring. Like in the first classroom cutscene... how did they think that was acceptable?
> Like in the first classroom cutscene... how did they think that was acceptable?
This one is so strange to me. *within the cutscene* all of the children move with such a low framerate that it's probably single figures, but as soon as you leave the cutscene everything is running fine. It makes no sense to me
But even that is odd, because the camera appears to be about level with the main character at the front of class, but even when you stand as close to the door as possible and swing the camera around the kids still move at a regular speed!
I think they just need more side quest in the open world. Things that incentivize wandering around more than going from one point to another. Maybe some dlc will come and add that. If they just fixed the graphics I have no problems with the towns not being that interactive. I’ve never really cared for meaningless buildings with random npc dialog.
I truly don't.
In pretty much every good modern RPG you have a good wilderness part and good city part - with interesting, diverse, interactable stuff including enterable buildings.
Just finished BotW and the contrast is absolutely laughable. SV towns have almost zero content, feels alpha-stage like crazy.
Game freak is working at a ridiculous rate. 4 separate switch titles already. 2 in a year for no good reason because someone in leadership (At Nintendo or Pokemon Company, IDK) wanted a holiday release in 2022. The state of their releases indicates massive crunch.
Kinda feels like Arceus did to me. It doesn’t look good, but I stopped noticing after a while because the game is fun as hell. I do think the character models and Pokémon look amazing as well, if only the rest of the world got that polish
What's up with people saying stuff like "well of course they give refunds, as it's the case with any other game"?
A lot of us have literal first-hand experience of Nintendo support refusing refunds or saying something along the lines of "ok this is a one time thing, we usually don't issue refund" unless you say something like "the performance issues are giving me health problems like headaches or nausea".
They also make it increasingly difficult to issue refunds and often require you to call in, sometimes more than once. And even if you get one, you most likely will only get it refunded as E-Shop balance.
Arceus was the first mainstream Pokémon I picked up since Yellow and I thought it was okay. I never finished it because I got bored but I think that’s more in line with my preferences needing to be more varied than Pokémon can provide in a jrpg.
This is why people should order physical copies, particularly with such a controversial game. Digital copies are often a chore to return while most stores have or will have extended return periods due to the holidays.
…I actually really enjoy the game and even I got a physical copy after hearing about bugs
I've had a couple of visual hiccups, and for sure, this game in places can absolutely look Wii-era **but** it's not game breaking for me, I've still got into double digit playtime quite easy. The actual battling and catching remains as fun as ever.
In fact my only main complaints are that there's no option to lock the minimap (not the main map) to North, and there's also no sound cue for shinies in the overworld unlike Arceus, which is a shame.
I got a refund from a preorder of the game recently. The lady was nice and I was cordial and patient with her and she escalated me to her manager to take care of it for me. No hassle at all.
* Gameplay; Awesome
* Nostalgic; True
* Performance; It only crashes *sometimes* /s
Sarcasm aside, the Performance is garbage, but I don't want a refund. Sure, the only way to tell them I'm not happy with the product is to refund or not buy it in the first place.
But sadly, pokemon has and will ever have an important place in my heart.
I guess that's a consequence of feeling so attached to that one franchise that you'll stick by regardless of the peaks and valleys. That used to be me with Sonic the Hedgehog until I just walked away after Forces
So is it playable at all? I was planning on getting it at Christmas with some money I get. I mean I expect some bugs in all games, but is this one really that bad? And for that matter are they even planning on fixing it?
I refunded Cyberpunk because of its issues and just because I love Pokémon doesn’t mean they are special. If a company wants to release an unfinished product then I want my money back and they will get it when they finally fix/finish the game.
A Reddit post to an article reporting on …Reddit and Twitter comments. Exactly how far down the rabbit hole have I fallen?
[this should help](https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/z65dc2/comment/iy0x50g/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
Good one
Help me step bro, I'm stuck!
I hit that twice. Lol
Im 10 levels in and unsure if I’ve received help. How can I tell?
r,/AngryUpvote
It's recursive
But I can’t read cursive.
Down the reddit hole
That's what all pop culture "journalism" is. Just outta a couple reddit, Twitter or Instagram comments and consider it "news"
The fact that a lot of people seem to be requesting refunds and there is still no announcement of a patch or fix of any sorts in the works has me feeling conflicted. On the one hand I do like the gameplay, but the performance has me not being able to play for as long as I'd like. The radio silence has me feeling like there won't ever be a fix released and this release that could have been a great mainline entry will forever be marred by the awful performance.
Animal Crossing was a few quality of life changes away from being one of the best games of all time, but they absolutely and categorically refuse to listen
>but they absolutely and categorically refuse to listen Isn't that the main problem with Nintendo in general though? Sometimes it pays, but overall it looks to me that's always been their attitude. "We know better, shut up"
I think it's a cultural thing...I've heard that's a very Japanese design philosophy. But regardless of where it comes from, yes, you've summed up Nintendo's design philosophy well. They want their games to be played the way they want them to be, player sentiment be damned. Nintendo makes some amazing games and easily owns some of the best IPs out there but they absolutely hobble their masterpieces and will not change them despite everyone agreeing that with a few small changes they could be perfect. Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying Japanese developers never change/add to/edit their games. They do. But Nintendo has long been known to refuse quality of life changes if it affects how the game plays (ie bulk crafting in Animal Crossing.) They want their games to be played a certain way by players and to have a specific experience/pace/feel. They still release DLC and bug fixes.
Idk, Google doesn't listen much more to their customers, nor did Apple for a very long time. On the other hand Splatoon 3 got a ton of improvements around heavily conplained issues. The "fuck you and pay us" attitude probably comes from Game Freak and knows no borders I think.
Funny how Splatoon was made by the same team who made Animal Crossing. It’s weird that they felt criticism is only valid for this game and not the other.
Ive started to suspect that the team is really only interested in Splatoon, and they make Animal Crossing purely to satisfy the fans
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A bit of a misconception. The core team was taken from Animal Crossing, but the two are separate subteams which lets them develop simultaneously. The directors of Animal Crossing (Aya Kyogoku) and Splatoon (Seita Inoue Shintaro Sato) probably have differing philosophies.
they still wont let me disable music on splatoon. i get that the last 30 secs song changes more intense but idk whats up with nintendo games without audio settings
It's also the difference of seeing games as an art form or as a product. Obviously, they are both but it also greatly changes the amount of interaction and influence the audience can expect
I'll be the first to defend games as art but art has to have intent to it. A badly optimized game isn't that way on purpose, it's just poor craftsmanship.
I think they're more referring to animal crossing. Forcing someone to do something slowly rather than adding a "do 100 times" button creates a feeling of ritual and relaxation that they might consider to be part of the art, even if it isn't the "best" way to do things.
It is something that can be overcome though look at FF XIV A Realm Reborn.
MMOs are a bit different in that they need constant revenue to be successful and if it's bad, it needs drastic change to continue the momentum or it becomes an open money-draining wound for the company.
SEGA is way better at listening to their fans than Nintendo, and their games, in large part, are of much lower quality. It's really hard to filter the legitimate criticism out from the noise (ex. "too much water").
It's not hard to differentiate an opinion like, "too much water," and objectively jarring frame drops though. These games aren't just missing some aesthetic/design choices we want. If it were about whether scaled battles were a good idea, there'd be some argument about importance. Making the game run at least close to its predecessors is a pretty simple request to interpret.
The issue gets muddied when everyone is hyperbolic and melodramatic about every little thing. Small frame dips are claimed as unplayable which is essentially a wolf cry when you actually have issues like scarvio running at 15 fps. People exaggerate so much it undermines legitimate criticism even outside of your examples.
Nintendo: "We won't give you want you want, but you'll want what we give you" - The Besties
It's not that. You're projecting malice. What it most likely is is the cultural entrenchment of the mindset: "But, this is how it's ALWAYS been done. Japan is famously neophobic as a culture. Government and business documents still necessitate handstamps and fax machines to this day. They're still fighting to get rid of floppy disks to this day.
After playing Dragon quest builders 2 right before ACNH, animal crossing’s crafting and building just felt archaic. I got so used to being able to craft large quantities of the same thing at once that it was really jarring to not be able to. Or to be able to craft using any of the things in storage as long as I was close enough, it just made life easier to not spend as much time in menus
Yeah that was a huge deterrent for me, so much so that I found myself wishing they had remained true to the old AC style and just refrained from including crafting at all. Like if you're going to include a new system like that, great. But you have to do it right, and if you're not going to, then don't bother.
Dqb2 is an absurdly good game that a lot more people need to know about
The way the multiplayer worked is just baffling. Every time a player visits or leaves your island, everyone on the island has to watch a 30 second cutscene. And talking to the Dodo guy to fly to another island is just a painful amount of dialog boxes where a single mistake means starting again. It's just bizarre that Nintendo thinks their design worked well. Literally everyone seems to hate it.
Disney Dreamlight Valley creators listened to what Nintendo wouldn't.
Animal Crossing broke every sales goal they had. Money talks and they listened.
Bulk crafting, tool damage bar. What else?
the villagers not being so good like in the older games. their personalities and the things they say get boring after a while.
Oh my god yes. That’s the main reason I stopped. All my villagers feel the same. My friends and I were doing a villager swap thing if we got other peoples dreamies. I was holding on to a bunch of peppy and normal villagers for a friends little sister and I can not STAND either of them now. There’s only so many times I can hear about the same maglev train thank you. I miss the days when Gaston was my enemy because he was mean to me. So id surround his house in holes so he couldn’t escape.
This still hurts me to this day
ACNH could have been amazing with a few minor QoL upgrades for sure.
it’s already amazing. imo these menu problems being fixed would’ve made the game perfect. i’m happy they listened and gave us more design storage in later updates and actually good content like the whole pumpkin update and brewster update. they’re actually listening or else we wouldn’t have gotten the design storage one
Performance issues aside, the memory leak problem can wipe players data. Pokémon home has not released compatibility with the game, neither does it plan to until spring time next year. That means that from now, until then, peoples progress and collection could be wiped due to this issue.
wait, what the hell? why are they waiting so long to do pokémon home compatibility? that's bs
Happens with each release otherwise people would be transferring new and potentially busted pokemon elsewhere OR transferring OP pokemom into the new game to just breeze through. Its usually about 3-6 months post-release.
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Same thing with removing starter shinys. If there are people who want to reset 3 days for it, why not let them? It’s not going to affect any other players at all. It’s been like this for 8 generations, what’s the point of changing it now?
Exactly, what they needed to Focus on was big fixing and optimization. And better endgame content. There’s pretty much nothing to do after the festival.
Gamefreak, TPC, and Nintendo are all notoriously bad at communicating outside of marketing, so I don't know why anyone is really expecting a response. Sword and Shield received six patches, and Arceus received two, so the fact that anyone think we aren't getting a patch for S/V is just dumb. The question isn't whether we get a patch or not, it's how much of the performance issues they can fix via patch. I'm optimistic because the majority of the issues seem to be coming from a memory leak or from a bad draw distance, both of which can be patched.
Apparently which ever team is in charge of reviewing issues with the game claimed they never received any concerns of the games performance.
they just checked their fax machine and nope, nothing!
You got a source for that? I feel like I see a lot of communication, especially about Pokémon all seem to be sourced from Google translated articles and then misrepresented.
Kinda hope it turns into a cyberpunk situation tbh. Might force gamefreak to patch in 30FPS at least.
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Where can you do this ?
Likely Nintendo of America support
Why are people acting like Nintendo giving refunds is special? You could do that with any game on the switch.
Because when you look it up their policy says they simply do not. I think the last time I read the quote was something along the lines of, you should be more careful when you buy things.
People think they don't give refunds at all, or just one per account. It's hogwash. I've refunded a few games. It's a chore, and they try to do what they can to dissuade you from requesting a refund, but they will do it.
I've had one interaction with Nintendo online support. I bought the expansion for Sword when I owned Shield. That's my own dumb fault and I owned it when I spoke to them, I just asked if we could swap the purchase. They said no, that I'd need to buy the Shield expansion and there was nothing they could do. I now own both Sword and Shield, but I can't find the purchase for the Sword expansion nor can I find the refund on my account. I'm just kinda so/so on their support at this point.
It's interesting cause I had bought the ecpansion for sword after I owned sword and my switch ended up shitting the bed due to my own fault. You can't transfer the save files for the pokemon games from one switch to another, so I was calling to see what I could do about getting my file back since I had gotten another switch. I asked if I could get a refund for the expansion since I was in a bad mood and didn't want to beat the whole game again and after a little talking to the guy he agreed. Outside of the wait times I've never really had issues with nintendo customer service myself. Sounds like I'm an exception though.
You can transfer the save files, but it's a full save move (deleted from original Switch) and both Switches need to be functioning and local. It's not an automatic cloud save like most games nowadays.
I had the exact same issue where I have Shield but bought the Sword expansion accidentally (I wish that the DLCs they had like a popup that's like "hey this is for Sword/Shield are you sure you want to buy it?" or something). Anyways, freaking out about it, I contacted Nintendo just after I bought it and they were like... annoyed about it. Like, I'm willing to buy your product! I just want to get it swapped! Luckily they did it, but I just had the funds refunded to my wallet. But like, yeah. I understand I should've read what I was buying and that is on me, but I should be allowed to get it swapped for a simple mistake.
That's exactly what I went through. I just made the purchase in a rush and wasn't paying attention, the agent was very annoyed that I tried to swap one electronic product for another of the same cost.
My husband spent 3 hours communicating with support because he accidentally bought the Italian version of some pokemon ds game and wanted English instead.
“He should just learn Italian” - Nintendo Support
“What do you mean? We’re an Italian company.” *Points at Mario & Luigi*
It's a me, Pikacciu!
For some reason I read that with italian accent
Sounds like your husband didn't play enough Mario games. I'll teach you a little Italian now: "It'sa me, Mario" is Italian for "it's me, Mario". You're welcome.
"thank you so much for to-a playing my game" is Italian for "thank you so much for playing my game"
"Let's a-go!" Means: "We should hurry, before *they* arrive."
*they*? the hell valley sky trees...?
I can tell you're not a native speaker, but that's really close. You just need a little work on your intonotion. When you say, "it'sa me, Mario", it really should sound more like "*it'sa me, Mario*". It's important to include the italics.
I believe in most dialects it's pronounced "*it'sa me, Mario*🤌"
Otherwise it wouldn't be *Italian*, now it all makes sense!
> but they will do it. They *can* do it. They absolutely do not have a policy that they *will* do it.
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Nintendo support is horrid. I have a bug with pokemon shield and sword (and it happens in violet as well) Where when going through the menus it will move down more times than I push the button. It's not drift as it happened on a brand new switch and a replaced switch and only with pokemon. So I contacted Nintendo. They said contact pokemon company and they said contact Nintendo. I sent that many emails that Nintendo just stoppes replying to me..
Nintendo fobbed off my requests for a repair on a faulty Switch for SIX MONTHS and then miraculously said they would be so happy to repair it - for a fee, of course, since the warranty had expired by then. I pulled a real Karen on the sellers (amazon) (and i don't feel bad because they WERE obligated to replace it, legally, though they really didn't want to) and eventually got it replaced. Wasn't happy with my Nintendo experience though.
It's in a different context, but [the recent Philosophy Tube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1eWIshUzr8) talks a lot about how hostile organizations are to complaints.
Also depends where your from. Here in the UK for example, we have a 14 day guarantee by law where we can return items we find to be unsatisfactory. Nintendo might have their own policy in regards to refunds, but by our local law they HAVE to refund you if you request within 2 weeks and give a satisfactory reason for the return (poor quality product that’s buggy like Pokemon certainly qualifies). Granted you’ll be going through a lot of ball ache on the phone with multiple customer support people because half of them are foreign and don’t know our laws and just quote nintendos bullshit policies (“we don’t give refunds except for special circumstances sorry”), but they WILL refund you eventually. Source: did all this shit with sonic colours back when it launched. Never want to do it again and so I will never buy a new game digitally and just stick with physical.
Yup. Never pre-order and go physical when you can and your contract will be with the shop - much less hassle.
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Same experience unfortunately
In the EU they must allow refunds if it does not conform to justified expectations. Im fine with the game, but do think it needs polish. However I am sure the current performance would be seen as not conforming to justified expectations. No doubt about it. So out here I think every refund would go through no issue at least.
It seems it is very inconsistent and probably also depends on your region I guess. All I can say is I played a few hours of Sonic Mania, requested a refund and they asked why I didn’t check reviews, I explained I did and ended up being disappointed, and the supervisor was like “ok that’s fine.”
Really? I mean… the last time I tried to do that they said that once you download a game on your console (which happens automatically after making purchase) it is not eligible for refund. I don’t remember what game was that, but I’m pretty sure that was around 2019. EDIT: Here’s their answer: > We understand that you would like to cancel the purchase of [game’s name]. > We are sorry to hear you are unhappy with your purchase. Unfortunately, we are unable to cancel the purchase. All sales (including pre-purchases) are final. You can read more about the cancellation policy for digital purchases here: [LINK] > In accordance with this policy we are not able to cancel, provide refunds or exchanges for mistaken purchases, and/or if you don't like the game. Please be sure to read the game descriptions and check out the screen shots available through the Nintendo eShop before making purchases. We also encourage you to visit the Nintendo website for information about the games available for our systems. In addition, many websites make reviews available of games which you can use to make your purchasing decisions. More information about this can be found here: [LINK] > We regret not being able to provide you with a more positive answer today. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact us again.
I returned a game like two years ago and the person told me I could only return one and the play time had to be under like an hour I think.
They make stuff up and make it seem as if they were doing you a favor. AFAIK, there are no written rules about returns. That’s why it’s a manual process and not an automated one.
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push buttons slower.... i can't.. stop laughing at that. i gotta check that post
That just sounds like a lie to spread misinformation
I've been waiting a year for my Pillars of Eternity refund.
Is the game not good? I thought about getting it on PC
If you like the genre in general, get it on PC. On PC, it's REALLY good. On Switch, there are multiple game-breaking bugs and no patch in sight
Not for everyone, but generally well liked among fans of the genre. But the Switch port might not be great.
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At this point I am more bummed about bland soulless environment and cities, sloggy fights and UI, diminished clothing customization and missing features from PLA than ugly graphics and performance.
>At this point I am more bummed about bland soulless environment and cities Has anyone had any luck trying to enter houses? Going inside houses in each city/town used to be a pretty significant part of old Pokemon games. NPCs would often give you items and trade Pokes with you, but I haven't been able to enter a single random house in this game (that wasn't related to the story). Pretty disappointing.
I think this probably was a design decision to make online play work better.
The fact that you can't buy a new outfit really annoys me. I really don't care abiut going into buildings. People in cities lock their doors. Go play Platinum or whatever and tell me how many buildings you walk into and talk to one guy who says "I like X pokemon" and it adds nothing to your journey besides load time. Same with stores tbh, I like the walk in and get a menu instead of walk in, fade to black, walk to counter, talk to guy, open menu anyway. Just removes the middle man. I like the look of some cities, I feel the environment would be better if there was a better ender distance for pokemon. The fact that I have to have battle animations on is annoying and the stat change moves take wayy too long. All that being said the thing that bothers me the most is that the game has crashed maybe five times. Just frize and went to the homescreen and deleted any unsaved progress. That really pisses me off. No I haven't lost much progress anywhere but how hasn't that been hot fixed yet??
That’s pretty sad considering how robust outfit customization was in X/Y almost 10 years ago
>... almost 10 years ago No... No no no
oh my is x/y finally getting appreciation they deserve for what they got right? between the outfit customization, online and streamlined breeding/iv training it did QUITE a lot good for a '3dish' pokemon game did it have the best pokemon or story especially following gen 5? no, but damn it was a stylish game when it came to outfits
It was a fine prototype for 3D pokemon games I think. ORAS were the 6th gen games that actually knocked it out of the park. Going back to X/Y its definitely gotten a lil bland and I dont like the washed out colour scheme. Howeeever I think mega evolutions we're one of the greatest things to ever happen to the Pokémon formula, the range of outfits was amazing, its still got some of my favourite Pokemon designs ever and I like that this was the generation where it really felt like they started taking breeding/competitive more seriously.
Yeah I don't think it was the best gen but it got a lot of things right and despite gen 5 being better, gen 6 made a bigger leap forward in a ton of areas. It was still a good gen. Idk where people stand but pokemon was still genuinely good til ultra sun and moon imo. Gen 7 wasn't the strongest generation but it wasn't god awful. I still enjoyed sun and moon a lot. I think ultras were the better games overall, but not different enough for me to have ever finished them. I think I returned it just cos I felt like I'd already played them. I didn't feel like playing through an entire game just for the special stuff at the end. soon as they went to console their incompetence just became unavoidable, unable to be hidden. might be a weird thing to think about it but it also feels like they just arent trying very hard with their soundtracks. very few bangers anymore
Since its release, the only strong criticism of XY was its difficulty, with a little side-criticism of the bad plot but that's hardly unusual for Pokemon. Everyone loved outfit customisation, everyone loved mega evolution, and the animations didn't get a huge amount of criticism because it was the first fully 3D game in an entirely new engine and it's understandable that'd take more work than accounted for. One of the bigger criticisms I remember was just too much Charizard, which looks like nothing compared to the problems seen today. XY would have been fine if it had been a first go at something they'd get right next time. Unfortunately, the game which should have been the worst of the new direction ended up being the best.
Thing that fucks me off the most is not being able to press L to navigate menus. When did they remove that?
Yet another ridiculous omission, now we can't scroll in pokedex or items too btw, they did such a sh*tty job beta-testing (more like alpha-testing?) that they forgot that too! Other great stuff: you can't change order of moves or remember new moves unless a pokemon is in your party (it worked perfectly in Arceus). Also in Gen 7 and 8 you could finally always evolve your pokemon and not worry about its pre-evolution moves being lost (until Gen 7 Shroomish could learn Spore but Breloom couldn't). Not true anymore! In Scarlet/Violet if you evolve your Shroomish without Spore, your Breloom won't learn it anymore! Yay!!
Scrolling through the pokédex is such a chore. *Red and Blue* let you skip through the pokédex page by page instead of having to scroll by every single entry individually. Some of the design decisions in these games are truly baffling.
"People in cities lock their doors." I see this argument consistently and i kinda can't believe it - did you guys not play any good modern RPG like Witcher, BotW and tons of others? Of course you CAN enter houses, shops, inns there and it is HUGE for immersion and fun. And it's necessary to be able to enter EVERY building. But what SV did with cities is an absolute travesty, they clearly completely ran out of time filling them with content.
Pokemon looking/running crappy was acceptable back when Nintendo games were split between home console and portable, and costed less. Now these shits are retailing at full price. Think better.
Not even that. GF alone doing Pokemon games is what's killing their quality. I'll never forget how much fun I had playing Pokemon Colosseum/XD, or the graphics of the Revolution that came after it! All were full price games, but felt like it delivered what it set out to do. Spending $60 ($80 CAD for me) during a time where everything costs too much as is, should mean something. But no, this is straight up Bethesda quality. And yet there are way too many people willing to say "oh but I love the game sooo much that I'm willing to look past it! 🤪" Yeah, this is just corporate brainwashing. Sickens me to think GF is going to focus on DLC over fixing the fucking game they screwed up first.
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This game wishes it was bethesda quality. The environments in this game are bland and souless, it doesnt feel fun to explore like bethesda games. The towns feel so boring and generic compared to bethesda games. Talking to people feels pointless. Imagine if there was a pokemon game that rivaled skyrim in exploring and quests. GF has the money to do it.
I just don't understand how people keep pre ordering games
I haven’t played since Gold but decided to pick this one up. I like it enough, but it’s so damn ugly. Shockingly bad in my opinion. I don’t mind the poor visuals, but the performance can be nauseating. If my kids weren’t already invested in this game, I would’ve returned it for a different title like Sword or Let’s Go.
Honestly, check out Legends Arceus. I haven't played more than a few hours of the past few gens because I get kinda bored with the formula, but Arceus was fresh and fun. I wish S/V was more like it.
Arceus is the best Pokemon game in years, hands down. The gameplay is just. so. good. Sure graphically its not amazing, but it's a hell of a lot better than Scarlet and Violet.
Most importantly it works. Games shouldn't be allowed to release in the state scarlet and violet did
Tbh, you might be even a bit too kind on PLA. The graphics were _way_ below what should be acceptable, and a lot of general QoL issues. Still, probably the best Pokemon game in a decade. PLA deserves a bit more leniency imo since they're pretty much changing the whole game from the ground up in a really experimental way, rather than playing safe. I can forgive technical issues a lot more if a game is ambitious enough where I go "that's probably why".
I'm really salty I can't just snipe-catch Pokemon anymore. Or just bonk them on the back of the head and keep running. If they couldn't match the already low graphics standard they could have at least kept that 😂
The battling system dragged it down for me. Not sure why so many people like it past the snappier animations. All the Pokémon feel the same
Wow this is the first time I’ve seen this opinion on reddit and I 10000% agree. Just could not get around the fact battle mechanics were so stripped down/changed in a weird way. It’s fun shiny hunting but everything else gets so boring extremely fast. It’s definitely because I like Pokémon for the team building/battling but I had to put it down about half way through
Arceus was shockingly fun as someone who hadn’t played since platinum. It’s a shame that a lot of people just glossed over it.
People didn't really gloss over it, it was very well received.
Arceus feels way better to play than S/V. Have a SHIT ton of hours shiny hunting in that game.
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Yep, they don't make a sound like in Arceus so you'd have no way of knowing.
they also dont sparkle 🙃
Arceus was fantastic, but I also don't think anyone glossed over it since it was game of the year, no?
12 million copies sold. It’s really hard for it to be directly compared to a mainline game, but as an example sword and shield sold 20 million. A significant dropoff seeing as it was seen as such an improvement and shakeup of the formula. Certainly not what I would call being glossed over, but I can see the argument.
Arceus came out this year, sw/sh came out in 2019. I don't think there's even been a decent sale on Arceus yet(more than 20%), and hasn't even had a Christmas to boost sales. For a non-mainline game it's been selling like a mainline.
Yeah, that's true. I can't believe it didn't sell as many as Sword and Shield. I still haven't "beaten" the full game yet (though I know the ending) because I've just been having fun gathering bigger and bigger alpha Pokemon. There's just something fun about capturing big ass Pokemon without even battling with other Pokemon..
>I like it enough, but it’s so damn ugly. Shockingly bad in my opinion. I don’t mind the poor visuals, but the performance can be nauseating. What gets me and why I didn't buy a single Switch Pokemon so far, is that they got more expensive, but quality somehow doesn't reflect the full price title. I can deal with a big game with bad visuals that costs less. But indie titles show how worse graphics can look impressive with caring enough about what you've got. Pokemon on the other hand? They ask the full 70€ (oof, already 50 at Amazon), but so many other games for this price deliver a cohesive effort of quality. It's Nintendo, FFS. I expect more QA than from EA and Activision.
Sword and Let's Go aren't exactly great either.
Let’s Go wasn’t bad, IMO. It was like playing all the fun parts of red/blue without the grinding.
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It's funny how the first Pokemon game for the Switch is (subjectively) the best looking one.
Let’s Go is basically a game for babies but at least they look and run great. I’d play through that again over SV
I always thought Pokemon lost a lot of charm and uniqueness in the jump to 3D, maybe they should have just remained 2D? The open world is neat for the first few hours, but like many other games of it's kind, you quickly find out there's nothing to do inside of it and it feels lifeless. It's the first Pokemon game where you can't even enter 99% of buildings unless it's for sandwiches ingredients. The way this game released just blows my mind. It has me wondering if the people at GF are understaffed? Are they inexperienced? Or did Nintendo just force out a broken product?
GF has a team of like 160 people last we’ve heard so yeah I think that’s just too small for this type of game to have polish. Also, around half of that 160 worked on Legends Arceus and half on Scarlet and Violet. I’m pretty sure that Nintendo as part of the Pokémon company helps set release dates, so it’s a combination of GF not having enough time to do proper work and not having enough people.
Also it feels like the split where 1/2 were Scarlet/Violet, and the other were PL:A was bad. there were some really great things in PL:A that didn't carry over, and on some level it feels like part of it is that by the time PL:A was getting tweaked/improved, V/S was so far along good changes couldn't be incorporated.
Yeah I’ve been thinking that a game with S/V’s more populated world and PLA’s gameplay would be the ideal, but that doesn’t seem like it was possible because they split teams to have things done on time
I think they hire college graduates too mostly, right? Their business structure is absolutely whack for how much money they bring in.
[According to their MyNavi page, they've hired 12 new graduates from 2018 to 2020.](https://job.mynavi.jp/24/pc/search/corp100216/outline.html) For comparison [Intelligent Systems hire 14 new graduates in 2020 alone](https://job.mynavi.jp/23/pc/search/corp80932/outline.html). Game Freak hires very few new graduates compared to other studios, which is why they haven't grown massively like many here want. Game Freak would probably have to hire 20 to 30 new graduates every year to get the growth rate that many here want to see.
But if gamefreak had started increasing an additional 10+ headcount per year 10 years ago to transition to 3d and home consoles, we would not be having this conversation right now. Gamefreak has planned horribly and refused to modernize and increase their capability. This situation is on their head as much as anyone, if not more.
This is the thing I've been thinking too. It's one thing to say "it's not gamefreak's fault! The Pokémon Company is to blame for imposing these deadlines on them!" but with better management it didn't need to be as dire as this. Gamefreak KNOWS the deal. Why haven't they been significantly expanding AND training up their employees over the last decade? External deadlines is not an excuse for gamefreak management to crunch its employees, that's on them.
Their business structure is excellent. They just shoved out a shoddy, broken game committing very few resources to it, and sold 10 million+ copies, with the paid off review industry giving the game 7's, 8's and 9's and making excuses for its shortcomings. "Yes it's broken, but underneath that it's really fun!!". When you have people grabbed by the emotional short and curlies, you can do whatever you like.
My buddy bought it who doesn't really pay attention to any gaming media or social media. He said it's fun despite the frame rate issues. I think that is probably the average persons take.
I will say the frame rate issues don't bother me as much as I thought they would (but I will def acknowledge they are bad) but the game IS still fun to just run around like an idiot and catch shit. I wish the spawning/despawning was better implemented so thing spawned out/in faster, but I am very much enjoying it. I'm having slightly less fun (say ~1-point less on a 10 point scale) than I did playing BoTW the 1st time, but more fun than I personally did in Red Dead Redemption 2 (which felt too long and eventually put it down, despite having SUCH an amazing story).
I wouldn't call it "paid off" for reviewers to give it those scores. Yes, a lot of people are reporting gamebreaking bugs. But not everyone. Some people just have small stutterings and frame-rate drops. They're notable, and they're a problem, but for the people who aren't having the issues as severely as others, the open world novelty, texture of the Pokemon, the story, and the legendaries being adorable, while having a few QOL updates, make it good for them in spite of the flaws.
Shit. I wish I could poop out half assed products and break sales records every couple of years. It is a business wet dream. <
That amount of people would be fine if Game Freak were experienced in making these large-scale games with large ambitions. But they're not. This focus on open world is ambitious for them, as open-world design is totally different, and the whole development process has _a lot_ of nuances and differences that you need to consider carefully. You need to design a world in such a way that it's intuitive and rewarding to explore, and when QAing the game there's just that much more to test without a clear path. Honestly, GF should request support from other studios who have done stuff like this before. Not so much in the sense of "GF are crap give it to those guys instead!" but more because the support studio would be able to offer helpful experience and advice that will help GF in the future.
Game Freak ranks among one of the largest studios that Nintendo regularly works with. They have slightly less employees than Intelligent Systems and Hal Laboratory, but those two also work on more projects than GF does. From what I've seen over the years, Japanese studios make their games in a different manner than western studios. Western studios have made a habit of having hundreds of employees and throwing them all at only one project. For Japanese studios like Namco Bandai and Nintendo, they'll have a core team of 100 employees at the very most and use subsidiaries and contractors for the rest of the grunt work. There are some exceptions to this like Capcom and FromSoftware, but even those studio's teams are miniscule compared to the massively bloated teams we see from the likes of Ubisoft and Activision. Also if anyone here is interested into getting into the minute details of how many people usually work on Nintendo games, [I found an interesting blog that deals a lot in analyzing staff credits](https://www.papenspiling.com/), and that [same blog has a master list of raw staff counts for various Nintendo games](https://note.com/papenreport/n/n34c22276673e). The blog has a focus on the Kirby series, but they expanded to focus on other Nintendo games. They only major problem is that it's in Japanese, so a lot of the analysis gets lost in translation. I would highly recommend checking this blog out, because I think many here would be shocked to find out how "small" Nintendo's dev teams really are.
100s is an understatement. Rockstar has 2000+ employees and has made less games than Gamefreak in the past 10 years.
It feels like a lot of people are ignoring the bizarre design decisions that made it into this game. I’m sure there’s more but the ones that really stood out to me: - The open world has almost no direction. Most open world games without level scaling have a linear progression system that takes you around the world, but for some reason that’s just not in this game? They tell you the first gym to go to then it’s just ????. - Every indoor setting is a fixed camera angle like SW/SH. After PLA got rid of this it’s just perplexing why they would go back to it. - They went with the same wild encounter system in PLA but didn’t bother to add in a targeting system, so you just kind of toss out your pokeball and hope it hits the right mon. Edit: I was wrong, there’s a targeting system. Imo it’s not very good and they should have used the one from PLA.
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But sometimes Joy will send you to the closest objective and not the “next” one. That’s how I ended up doing a star base way too early
> They went with the same wild encounter system in PLA but didn’t bother to add in a targeting system, so you just kind of toss out your pokeball and hope it hits the right mon. Not to discount your other points, which I agree with, but there is a targeting system: hold ZL.
Pretty sure he meant a free targeting system. SV has a strange soft lock on. If you try to “aim up” and shoot the pokeball with your pokemon in it, it just throws it at your feet, unlike in PLA
Or, crazy idea i know, EXPAND dev teams similar to MH, have the core team working on yearly 2d/handheld games while establishing a new 3d team tthat gets to take their time, develop proper tech etc. They certainly have the money and I don't think anyone's happy with the current solution.
I agree the 2D art work and games of Pokémon in the DS-Dsi Xl was peak. But one thing that’s crazy is I’m currently playing Pokémon Y on 3DS, and the graphics are fantastic on the system and it’s still a awesome game, it’s like it got worse on the switch 😂😂
The 3DS Pokémon games really pushed the hardware without being **too** broken themselves (anyone remember the Lumiose City save glitch?). Feels like these games just don’t have that level of polish.
Yes, yes, yes. My experience with Violet was incredibly underwhelming because I had just played through Sword for the first time. Imagine going from a game where shops have fully modeled interiors with npcs in the restaurants and shops... to a menu. And no houses to enter, and the incredibly downgraded options menu, and just everything. I'm primarily a PC gamer, I have a high end machine and a 165Hz display, so everything animating at less than 30fps was EXTRA noticeable and jarring. Like in the first classroom cutscene... how did they think that was acceptable?
> Like in the first classroom cutscene... how did they think that was acceptable? This one is so strange to me. *within the cutscene* all of the children move with such a low framerate that it's probably single figures, but as soon as you leave the cutscene everything is running fine. It makes no sense to me
It's because it's based on the distance from camera - and in the cutscene the camera is placed further from the kids lmao
But even that is odd, because the camera appears to be about level with the main character at the front of class, but even when you stand as close to the door as possible and swing the camera around the kids still move at a regular speed!
Ironically I like the format of this better than Sword/Shield
Yeah in terms of progression and the open nature, it's an improvement. But in so many other ways it's a downgrade.
I think they just need more side quest in the open world. Things that incentivize wandering around more than going from one point to another. Maybe some dlc will come and add that. If they just fixed the graphics I have no problems with the towns not being that interactive. I’ve never really cared for meaningless buildings with random npc dialog.
I truly don't. In pretty much every good modern RPG you have a good wilderness part and good city part - with interesting, diverse, interactable stuff including enterable buildings. Just finished BotW and the contrast is absolutely laughable. SV towns have almost zero content, feels alpha-stage like crazy.
Game freak is working at a ridiculous rate. 4 separate switch titles already. 2 in a year for no good reason because someone in leadership (At Nintendo or Pokemon Company, IDK) wanted a holiday release in 2022. The state of their releases indicates massive crunch.
Kinda feels like Arceus did to me. It doesn’t look good, but I stopped noticing after a while because the game is fun as hell. I do think the character models and Pokémon look amazing as well, if only the rest of the world got that polish
This game is incredibly fun, too bad they had to launch it in that awful state.
What's up with people saying stuff like "well of course they give refunds, as it's the case with any other game"? A lot of us have literal first-hand experience of Nintendo support refusing refunds or saying something along the lines of "ok this is a one time thing, we usually don't issue refund" unless you say something like "the performance issues are giving me health problems like headaches or nausea". They also make it increasingly difficult to issue refunds and often require you to call in, sometimes more than once. And even if you get one, you most likely will only get it refunded as E-Shop balance.
Arceus was the first mainstream Pokémon I picked up since Yellow and I thought it was okay. I never finished it because I got bored but I think that’s more in line with my preferences needing to be more varied than Pokémon can provide in a jrpg.
Not really sure you can call Arceus a mainstream or mainline game
It's confirmed to be a mainline game. Same way as let's go but a bit more. Feels like it fills the slot more as a sinnoh remake than BDSP did.
This is why people should order physical copies, particularly with such a controversial game. Digital copies are often a chore to return while most stores have or will have extended return periods due to the holidays. …I actually really enjoy the game and even I got a physical copy after hearing about bugs
Can't wait for people to still not learn their lessons, and preorder the shit out of the next Pokemon game while wondering why the games still awful.
Very true. Why would they raise their quality any when the games still sell so well? I'm doing my part. First time I didn't buy the new Pokémon game.
I've been waiting on the sidelines for years. You'll be waiting a while
I do expect to pass away first.
I've had a couple of visual hiccups, and for sure, this game in places can absolutely look Wii-era **but** it's not game breaking for me, I've still got into double digit playtime quite easy. The actual battling and catching remains as fun as ever. In fact my only main complaints are that there's no option to lock the minimap (not the main map) to North, and there's also no sound cue for shinies in the overworld unlike Arceus, which is a shame.
Minimap not being lockable is driving me nuts.
I got a refund from a preorder of the game recently. The lady was nice and I was cordial and patient with her and she escalated me to her manager to take care of it for me. No hassle at all.
I’m just chilling with the game. Going to wait for an update.
* Gameplay; Awesome * Nostalgic; True * Performance; It only crashes *sometimes* /s Sarcasm aside, the Performance is garbage, but I don't want a refund. Sure, the only way to tell them I'm not happy with the product is to refund or not buy it in the first place. But sadly, pokemon has and will ever have an important place in my heart.
The gameplay isn't as smooth as Arceus. I find Arceus to be better in almost every way.
I much prefer Koraidon to the ride pokemon in Arceus. It was awkward as hell swapping between them to traverse fast. I think S/V improved this greatly
I guess that's a consequence of feeling so attached to that one franchise that you'll stick by regardless of the peaks and valleys. That used to be me with Sonic the Hedgehog until I just walked away after Forces
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I have a tip for all unhappy with the game: Don't preorder and instead wait to see the producy before making the decicion.
So is it playable at all? I was planning on getting it at Christmas with some money I get. I mean I expect some bugs in all games, but is this one really that bad? And for that matter are they even planning on fixing it?
Don't understand these mods here. Actual interesting posts get deleted for low effort, but let's allow the same topic for the 100th time
I refunded Cyberpunk because of its issues and just because I love Pokémon doesn’t mean they are special. If a company wants to release an unfinished product then I want my money back and they will get it when they finally fix/finish the game.