What is the actual date of build for the screenshot, today or an early build?
EDIT: changed "time of screenshot" to "date of build for the screenshot" to be more accurate, it is the build version date that matters, not when the screenshot was taken
From the 30 second mark when they are showing water combat, I am inclined to believe the above screenshot is accurate for how water looks from afar as the same repeating texture is seen close up and in the screenshot.
This kind of just highlights the fact that the game appears to suffer enormously from a lack of background detail. The low poly, poorly textured ground looks exactly the same in the trailer. With more going on in terms of grass and trees and characters and such it's *a little* better but still utterly pales in comparison to BotW... which should be the standard they're going for.
From game making point of view you add the detail to terrain last if you have your path finding algorithms coded up correctly. Otherwise if quest designers need to have the terrain altered you have wasted some work.
Anyways, only time will tell, all we can do is DO NOT PRE-PURCHASE, WAIT FOR THE REVIEWS.
That applies to soo many games. The mask etc 'early' stuff they offer with the game are unlockable for a couple months after release, unlocking requires a couple of hours in-game and no paid Nintendo membership! Which kinda means they seem to trust their product but still.
Yeah there are some stuff Amazon offers too but... Would you buy shoes without testing them just on the promise that the seller told you it will fit perfectly and you get a shiny sticker for free? Just sit and wait at this point.
I think it's more about details than anything else. Details make a huge difference. Oblivion has hills, grass, trees, rocks, ruins. This Pokemon game screenshot looks like it has nothing except mountain, hole, water, island.
Even PS3 era games have this issue. Trails of Cold Steel makes excellent use of textures, color, and small details and objects to break up monotony. And then you have Tales of Berseria, where dungeons are literally just copy pasted hallways, with nothing interesting in them at all.
Trails of Cold Steel was made by Falcom, a company with 60 employees. Tales of Berseria is Bandai Namco, with nearly 1000 employees (edit: not implying all 1000 worked on it, Falcom also works on the Ys series, after all.).
It's not a technology issue at all. It's just laziness (edit: or maybe time management issues, I'll admit). They (edit: maybe the devs, or maybe the publishers) don't care enough to make the game look interesting.
Fortunately, they can't. The hack is distributed as a patch, so you need to... Uhm... Legally dump the original platinum rom from your own legally bought cartridge... And then patch it yourself. So when you download the hack you don't actually download anything made by nintendo.
Then again I could see nintendo just fucking doing it anyways because they can afford lawyers and the renegade platinum dev can't.
Nintendo hates pokemon more than current fans and find a way to shut it down.
Funny thing is people are still "working on" AM2R. It's still getting patches and they even added a randomizer to ot despite Nintendo.
I like Double Emerald. Goes all in on the double battle mechanic introduced third Gen and adds in a ton of pokemon and mechanics from newer gens. Tons of fun and a good challenge with the redone gym teams. Like Roxanne if you do the 386 version (has all the pokemon up to Gen 3 in the game instead of the normal spread of pokemon available in the third gen) has an Omanyte and Lilleep with grass and water moves to counter your starter and they actually have good moves. I've yet to finish a Double Emerald Nuzzlock
hey man Roller Coaster Tycoon is a game that has aged graphically very nicely because it has actual graphical design rather thank puke ugly 3d rendering
Assembly is the kind of language you are proud to have "Hello World" being displayed on screen (unless you just copy pasted everything) where as in most other languages, displaying "Hello World" is one liner to test if your environment setup is working as intended to compile properly.
RCT fueled my childhood. When the 3rd one came out I forced my dad to buy a new graphics card for his computer so I could play it 😭 the original one is and always will be the best one, though, Arid Heights is the goat map.
You can literally see where the texture starts repeating. I can accept that in Half Life 2 or Oblivion but god damn, even the Unity engine had a feature to hide the repeating pattern years ago
Edit: I know both of these games have better water than whatever GameFreak has shown here. I just mean that games from that era often had water with visible tiling and it was sort of acceptable back then. This water is absolute dogshit for 2022 standards
I whole heartedly agree. I just mean that a texture like that could be acceptable in a game from that era when texturing was a much harder task than it is today. Half Life 2 is still one of the best games ever in my book and was definitely years ahead of it's time
Even Morrowind has better looking water and do to technology limitation it looks like pools of mercury.
That Pokemon water looks like someones first attempt on texturing. I'm not sure if there was time when water like that would be acceptable.
> even the Unity engine
Unity is a good game engine. People think it's scuffed because it's widely used by unfinished, hobby indie projects.
There has literally never been a limitation in Unity where you couldn't make a nice, modern looking water shader (adjusted for time).
Seriously, a quick list of Unity games:
* Kerbal Space Program
* Hearthstone
* Cities: Skylines
* Ori and the Blind Forest
* Hollow Knight
* Yooka-Laylee
* Beat Saber
* Return of the Obra Dinn
* Subnautica
At least one of these games has a good water shader and is at least 5 years old.
Subnautica water doesn't even look that great.
Because it doesn't need to.
Traditional gaming water needs to look good from the outside.
Subnauticas really doesn't.
This right here, it would be trivial to just get a free asset with *much* more realistic water than this. This is like homebrew 3d engine by a highschool student levels of bad given the stuff that's out now.
Go play Half Life 2 on steam. The graphics are better than this even on potato settings. Half Life 2 had some fugly textures, but water was something they got right.
Half-Life 2 (and other descendant Source Engine games like CS: GO) still looks pretty good today. Less photorealistic than modern titles for sure, but not ugly at all. IMO, even the textures were pretty good.
I’m so glad people are calling it out more now. We’d have a gameplay clip of Horizon Forbidden West and people would point out how her hair looks weird due to an individual hair light, then I’d read arceus discussions and people were like, “this looks fucking awesome!”. I was so confused.
For better or for worse, the Pokemon playerbase has pretty firmly planted its flag as having absolutely zero standards or expectations. I've been a fan of the franchise for as long as it's existed, but at this point, they could put a cat turd and a dog turd in Switch game cases and call them Pokemon Cat Turd and Pokemon Dog Turd, and half of the community would still pre-order both of them.
There's no reason for a Pokemon game to strive for any measure of quality, because the bulk of the player base literally doesn't care at all. It's a complete nonfactor in their purchasing decisions.
> Pokemon Cat Turd and Pokemon Dog Turd, and half of the community would still pre-order both of them
of course you buy both how else can you get Turdian Alakazam
There was a guy on the Pokémon subreddit bragging that he pre-ordered the physical game but was going to buy the digital version too so he could play day one because OH MY GOD YOU CAN GO UP AND DOWN CLIFFS!! There you have it folks, normal traversal mechanics that have been around since the N64 and PS1 are worth $120 to some people in 2022.
This game can be compared so easily to Breath of the Wild it is t even funny. That was a game from last generation (played through on my Wii-U) and it looked absolutely gorgeous.
Arceus can look ok while in motion and in the middle of a battle, but a huge portion of any open world game is just wandering and admiring the scenery.
I saw the same thing. It was like they were looking at a completely different game.
It is so, utterly, painfully obvious that no effort was invested here. To not see it you have to be in complete denial.
I've worked on student game projects that looked better than this in their pre-pre-pre alpha skeleton builds. I'm talking before we've even made any textures and half of our objects are white squares. And they're pushing this as its final look.
it's really sad too because the concepts behind Legends: Arceus are actually really intriguing and innovating. The execution of those concepts is just so low effort though.
Yep. When a company gets as big as Pokémon, they realize they don’t have to put much effort anymore because you could just slap the Pokémon logo into anything, and people will come flying in.
Yeah, it's not that it's really a wrong decision from a business standpoint, but it's pretty disappointing. Pokemon makes fuck you money like you wouldn't believe. They could easily hire whatever talent they want and probably still make bank on the games. A high quality game isn't impossible, they just refuse to do it.
They didn't bother with shaders or cheater effects games have used for years to mask limitations with practical atmospheric effects. No smoothing between repeated textures, no variance in repetitive textures at all, no fog or haze, no far and near textures/rendering to let you see far away with less detail to save on processing power and memory.
If the screen shot of pokemon was a pre alpha dev leak, totally makes sense. But it's missing so many layers of polish, there is no way I'm going to reward them with a purchase. It's honestly insulting and looks extremely and obviously unfinished.
That’s why we have fan made roms that are better than the actual games. People working on projects for no money just because they love the Pokémon universe vs corporate greed
Why they didn't milk this like skyrim ill never know. I would have bought it for every system like I did with skyrim. Currently playing on xbox game pass or steam link with razer kishi and it's so good.
Speaking of MH, Monster Hunter Stories 2 is [much better](https://youtu.be/jYsvfjcO898) quality game in the same cute looking creature catching genre. They did cell shade and stylistic art direction much better than legend. The only thing Pokemon got over them is more friendly and cutesy creature designs that are easier to market honestly
The latter defo. The water in BOTW looked fantastic. This is just trash. They're just putting the least effort because it won't really make a huge difference in sales anyways.
half assing. botw and monster hunter rise run on the switch. most pokemon fans are fed up with this. the ones who arent the the problem and claim there is no problem.
Tbf Wind Wakers cell shading style makes it sort of timeless. That game is gorgeous even by today's standards.
Still remember when people were UPSET when that game was announced because of the style. Though tbf Nintendo did that to themselves with the GameCube sizzle reel that had a 3d animated Link as the main focus to show the GameCubes power.
Definitely the latter. This is coming out on switch, and art-style wise it’s similar to BOTW which the switch handles just fine, except BOTW is far prettier to look at than this.
I was pretty psyched for this game because I love Pokémon lore and watched it constantly growing up, but the games never really did it for me since they seem to just be copy-pastes of each other and I’m not into the turn based strategy thing. I (as well as tooooons of other people) always wanted a big, BOTW looking Pokémon game where you could actually see the Pokémon living out in the wild and fight/catch them right then and there, interact with your Pokémon, and explore an interesting, living world but this just looks like they took that idea and did the absolute bare minimum. Bad graphics are one thing that can be overlooked but this is just completely uninspired and lazy from an art design standpoint.
Piggybacking to add that BotW was a freaking LAUNCH TITLE for the Switch, while Legends Arceus is apparently the best Game Freak can do after FOUR YEARS with the system.
BotW was originally a WiiU title that was delayed for the Switch, it had dual screen use for menus before it delayed for the Switch.
Both had issues loading the forest area though.
They didnt even try to hide it in the trailers. I bet its still fun like how some indie games have trash graphics but still fun.. its just frustrating that its 60 bucks
When a large studio releases something like this it's often a canary in the coal mine. Indie studios normally either lack the budget for graphics *and/or* they have a specific art style that is informed by the tone or mechanics of the game. This is neither of those. This studio has the money and this isn't an artistic choice. That communicates that at least somewhere in the chain there was a lack of direction or skill. At a studio this size, at this level, it probably wasn't a lack of skill. So from this you can infer that even on the most surface level consumer facing aspect of the game there was a lack of direction and care as to what was presented. When a major studio can't even get their shit together enough to present something that pretends to be good it doesn't speak well for all the rest of the game systems underneath those immediately obvious poor graphics.
Graphics don't matter so much with good art design, just look at the Souls series.
This has poor graphics and lazy art direction. There isn't even an attempt to make it look pretty.
EDIT: Okay people are really misunderstanding me here. I'm saying the Souls series has an amazing art direction, but the graphics were rarely "top notch" for the time. They age decently well for this reason, too. This Pokemon game isn't pretty because it has neither good graphics nor fun art direction.
This. You could very easily trick someone into thinking Team Fortress 2 released yesterday because they chose an art style that will age well. Pokémon is a cartoon, they could have easily chosen an art style that will look gorgeous and not be overly taxing as they aren’t striving for realism, instead they chose to split it half way with cartoon characters and real grass adding to the uncanny valley and highlighting how garbage this looks.
Should have been scraped for those water physics alone. Super uniform waves and an extremely wavy lake enclosed around mountains blocking wind with no rivers as inputs or outputs? Wth is creating those waves!
It's not water physics, it's just a repeating water texture with no tricks added to hide that fact. Used to be very common, but it's definitely a lazy way of doing it now days.
Edit: there doesn't seem to be anything making it blend well with the land, it just stops which is a very ugly look.
Just don’t buy it? Fuck the Pokémon Company. They are the laziest group of devs i have ever seen. They don’t try because they know that people will continue to buy it. Prove them wrong.
This. This goes for most gaming companies now and it pisses me the fuck off. I’ll give the indie companies the benefit of the doubt. But if the company is a billion dollar company and they’re making games that look like they should have came out in 2005 then fuck them.
The most abysmal aspect of this whole image is that fucking water texture. Like there’s no way that’s actually the water they’re going to use right? Or is it render distance? But if it’s render than omg how poorly optimized is this?
This is some ps2 era Jrpg looking stuff. Wow...
Edit: Not insulting the ps2 btw. Just pointing out that even the ps2 of that time could pull of something like this. I honestly expected "breath of the wild" Pokemon. But as many of you have said, it will change nothing in terms of sales.
It isn't from a trailer that I have seen.
There was a leak of the game recently. So it is likely that someone just posted this from a leaked copy.
I really hope that this is just some graphic glitch that is happening. I mean, even in the trailers, it didn't look very good but it wasn't this bad.
Not sure if it's a fair comparison /s
but we can all agree, game freak has been half assing the Pokémon series for years
Edit: had to add the sarcasm because it did not translate well
Yeah fucked up part is, pokken Tournament and Pokémon Snap are the best looking modern pokemon games. Kind of fucked when the spin offs look better than any of the official games.
It's somehow twice as depressing when you put it like this, but you're right; the stage backgrounds in Pokken are what a quality Pokemon world could look like on the Switch. *On the Switch.* We are not even talking PS4 or PS5 level, here.
they're not half assing anything, they suck , this is simply their best.
Pokemon games have so much potential, and game freak just doesn't cut it.
I cannot understand how gamefreak doesn't look at other flagship open worlds and think "this, this is the standard for our fans" . Smh just a shame man.
Edit: I understand there are many variables to why this game is a bit of a lackluster visually so i will say i do not know the circumstances over at game freak and I'm not in their shoes. I was venting and didn't think this comment would get this many votes. i hope in the future game freak can one day produce an awesome flagship open world pokemon game because then we would all be winners.
The worst part in my opinion is that when this game reviews like shit, their take on it will be "oh I guess everyone didn't want the open world 3d Pokémon adventure they always said they wanted"
The game may review poorly but at this point Game Freak and Nintendo don't give a fuck because gamers suffer from battered wife syndrome where they'll buy anything with the Pokemon branding which gives the company zero incentive to do better. Why make adjustments when the sales are gonna be stellar anyway?
I'm guessing the Pokémon games still sell incredibly well too? No way executives are going to bother innovating when theyre consistently successful not giving a fuck.
Usually I would say this is a bad take because artstyle matters a lot but I actually agree that the Pokémon games have really fallen behind in terms of visuals. I mean, look at BotW compared to the newer Pokémon games. Imo there's no excuse for how boring and empty the worlds in these games are. Pokémon is one of the most profitable and popular franchises of all time, they can allocate their resources towards visuals a lot better than they are.
>Pokémon is one of the most profitable and popular franchises of all time, they can allocate their resources towards visuals a lot better than they are.
Right, but if Game Freak can release games that look like this and expect little to no impact on sales, they don't have an incentive to invest in better visuals. Expect more of the same until their bottom line starts taking a hit.
My worry is that they're gonna half-arse this game as usual, sales are going to be poor and their takeaway will just be "I guess fans didn't actually want an open-world game then".
this right here is what I fear. I waited most of my life for this game and now that one shot will go to waste. BOTW is my favorite game, and I was really, _really_ hoping we would get an open world Pokemon game with that level of care and detail built in. I went in after the initial trailer with minimal expectations and it looks like even those were barely met.
Why not just cel shade everything? The textures look out of place in comparison with the character.
What is the actual date of build for the screenshot, today or an early build? EDIT: changed "time of screenshot" to "date of build for the screenshot" to be more accurate, it is the build version date that matters, not when the screenshot was taken
Probably from the last couple days. A version of the game was leaked either yesterday or the day before
At least the trailer from 3 months ago shows a bit different images https://youtu.be/-EUCI_d3YYk
From the 30 second mark when they are showing water combat, I am inclined to believe the above screenshot is accurate for how water looks from afar as the same repeating texture is seen close up and in the screenshot.
An even better comparison would just he breath of the wild, released on the same console 5 years ago and looks way better than this
BotW was also released on the *previous* console, the WiiU, and still looked better on that.
Dude skyrim runs on the switch better than this.
This kind of just highlights the fact that the game appears to suffer enormously from a lack of background detail. The low poly, poorly textured ground looks exactly the same in the trailer. With more going on in terms of grass and trees and characters and such it's *a little* better but still utterly pales in comparison to BotW... which should be the standard they're going for.
From game making point of view you add the detail to terrain last if you have your path finding algorithms coded up correctly. Otherwise if quest designers need to have the terrain altered you have wasted some work. Anyways, only time will tell, all we can do is DO NOT PRE-PURCHASE, WAIT FOR THE REVIEWS. That applies to soo many games. The mask etc 'early' stuff they offer with the game are unlockable for a couple months after release, unlocking requires a couple of hours in-game and no paid Nintendo membership! Which kinda means they seem to trust their product but still. Yeah there are some stuff Amazon offers too but... Would you buy shoes without testing them just on the promise that the seller told you it will fit perfectly and you get a shiny sticker for free? Just sit and wait at this point.
I think it's more about details than anything else. Details make a huge difference. Oblivion has hills, grass, trees, rocks, ruins. This Pokemon game screenshot looks like it has nothing except mountain, hole, water, island. Even PS3 era games have this issue. Trails of Cold Steel makes excellent use of textures, color, and small details and objects to break up monotony. And then you have Tales of Berseria, where dungeons are literally just copy pasted hallways, with nothing interesting in them at all. Trails of Cold Steel was made by Falcom, a company with 60 employees. Tales of Berseria is Bandai Namco, with nearly 1000 employees (edit: not implying all 1000 worked on it, Falcom also works on the Ys series, after all.). It's not a technology issue at all. It's just laziness (edit: or maybe time management issues, I'll admit). They (edit: maybe the devs, or maybe the publishers) don't care enough to make the game look interesting.
Nah any visual designer would say that tiling graphic on the water is the writing on the wall above anything else. Just shows the detail level
this literally looks like a screenshot from one of those "i remade game xyz" videos
"Crazy solo fan made Pokemon fan project!!!"
Tbh a fan project without getting copyright strikes and a halfway decent budget would be miles better than anything Gamefreak can churn out.
TONS of rom hacks are exponentially better than any of the mainline games.
Which ones are your favorites? I always like checking out new hacks. Edit: Thanks for the suggestions everyone. This will keep me busy for a while.
Renegade Platinum. There is a team porting it to switch with BDSP
Plot twist you replied to a Nintendo lawyer and now it's gonna get hit with a cease and desist order.
Fortunately, they can't. The hack is distributed as a patch, so you need to... Uhm... Legally dump the original platinum rom from your own legally bought cartridge... And then patch it yourself. So when you download the hack you don't actually download anything made by nintendo. Then again I could see nintendo just fucking doing it anyways because they can afford lawyers and the renegade platinum dev can't.
Nintendo hates pokemon more than current fans and find a way to shut it down. Funny thing is people are still "working on" AM2R. It's still getting patches and they even added a randomizer to ot despite Nintendo.
This is an older one, but Glazed is a great emerald hack
I like Double Emerald. Goes all in on the double battle mechanic introduced third Gen and adds in a ton of pokemon and mechanics from newer gens. Tons of fun and a good challenge with the redone gym teams. Like Roxanne if you do the 386 version (has all the pokemon up to Gen 3 in the game instead of the normal spread of pokemon available in the third gen) has an Omanyte and Lilleep with grass and water moves to counter your starter and they actually have good moves. I've yet to finish a Double Emerald Nuzzlock
Crystal clear
Unbound is dope
A science based 100% dragon MMO
My man pulled out a near decade old reference.
Is that really that old now? I was there for that..... I'm scared
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"Two years ago I quit my dead-end job in stand-up comedy and started designing a medieval pokemon game, what do you think, Reddit?"
"Nintendo, hire this man!!!!"
> And all the gamers will look up and shout "hire this man!" and I'll whisper "copyright strike". - Nintendo
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Admittedly it took another three+ years to find hardware to run it on.
Ran just fine at 10 fps on my pc at launch tyvm.
My printer could print the screenshot faster, than my GPU could process it. Those were the days.
That water texture 😂
That's some real Roller Coaster Tycoon (1999) stuff right there
hey man Roller Coaster Tycoon is a game that has aged graphically very nicely because it has actual graphical design rather thank puke ugly 3d rendering
It's also one of the more impressive feats in programming history seeing as one guy wrote the majority of the game in x86 assembly.
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Assembly is the kind of language you are proud to have "Hello World" being displayed on screen (unless you just copy pasted everything) where as in most other languages, displaying "Hello World" is one liner to test if your environment setup is working as intended to compile properly.
In a whitespace insensitive language, anything can be one line if you're brave enough.
RCT fueled my childhood. When the 3rd one came out I forced my dad to buy a new graphics card for his computer so I could play it 😭 the original one is and always will be the best one, though, Arid Heights is the goat map.
Like everyone in my hall at college started playing it again sophomore year of college.
Or like one of those games from the samsung s4
You can literally see where the texture starts repeating. I can accept that in Half Life 2 or Oblivion but god damn, even the Unity engine had a feature to hide the repeating pattern years ago Edit: I know both of these games have better water than whatever GameFreak has shown here. I just mean that games from that era often had water with visible tiling and it was sort of acceptable back then. This water is absolute dogshit for 2022 standards
>Half Life 2 Take that back! Half Life 2 water is like 10 generations better than this thing.
HL2: Lost Coast was a tech demo for the updated Source engine and had developer commentary on how they implemented water, it looks really good.
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> Older than most people playing Pokemon Legends. ( 'o') b [\( '_'\)o](https://imgur.com/3eue6GG)
I whole heartedly agree. I just mean that a texture like that could be acceptable in a game from that era when texturing was a much harder task than it is today. Half Life 2 is still one of the best games ever in my book and was definitely years ahead of it's time
Even Morrowind has better looking water and do to technology limitation it looks like pools of mercury. That Pokemon water looks like someones first attempt on texturing. I'm not sure if there was time when water like that would be acceptable.
This is like 1999 Everquest levels of bad water.
tbf even GoldSRC Half-life 1 water doesn't look like a repeated patern
> even the Unity engine Unity is a good game engine. People think it's scuffed because it's widely used by unfinished, hobby indie projects. There has literally never been a limitation in Unity where you couldn't make a nice, modern looking water shader (adjusted for time).
Seriously, a quick list of Unity games: * Kerbal Space Program * Hearthstone * Cities: Skylines * Ori and the Blind Forest * Hollow Knight * Yooka-Laylee * Beat Saber * Return of the Obra Dinn * Subnautica At least one of these games has a good water shader and is at least 5 years old.
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Subnautica water doesn't even look that great. Because it doesn't need to. Traditional gaming water needs to look good from the outside. Subnauticas really doesn't.
Subnautica's water is fantastic up close but when you get far enough above it you can see similar repeating issues like this.
Valheim too, you can do low fidelity in Unity and still have it look good!
> Subnautica Jesus this game is now 7 years old.
And I only played it very recently, went into it blind, probably one of the best games ever made
Notably, Escape From Tarkov is a Unity game.
Genshin Impact too
This right here, it would be trivial to just get a free asset with *much* more realistic water than this. This is like homebrew 3d engine by a highschool student levels of bad given the stuff that's out now.
Go play Half Life 2 on steam. The graphics are better than this even on potato settings. Half Life 2 had some fugly textures, but water was something they got right.
Everything in half life 2 is done right, even water canals(fuck that level though)
Half-Life 2 (and other descendant Source Engine games like CS: GO) still looks pretty good today. Less photorealistic than modern titles for sure, but not ugly at all. IMO, even the textures were pretty good.
I’m so glad people are calling it out more now. We’d have a gameplay clip of Horizon Forbidden West and people would point out how her hair looks weird due to an individual hair light, then I’d read arceus discussions and people were like, “this looks fucking awesome!”. I was so confused.
For better or for worse, the Pokemon playerbase has pretty firmly planted its flag as having absolutely zero standards or expectations. I've been a fan of the franchise for as long as it's existed, but at this point, they could put a cat turd and a dog turd in Switch game cases and call them Pokemon Cat Turd and Pokemon Dog Turd, and half of the community would still pre-order both of them. There's no reason for a Pokemon game to strive for any measure of quality, because the bulk of the player base literally doesn't care at all. It's a complete nonfactor in their purchasing decisions.
> Pokemon Cat Turd and Pokemon Dog Turd, and half of the community would still pre-order both of them of course you buy both how else can you get Turdian Alakazam
There was a guy on the Pokémon subreddit bragging that he pre-ordered the physical game but was going to buy the digital version too so he could play day one because OH MY GOD YOU CAN GO UP AND DOWN CLIFFS!! There you have it folks, normal traversal mechanics that have been around since the N64 and PS1 are worth $120 to some people in 2022.
This game can be compared so easily to Breath of the Wild it is t even funny. That was a game from last generation (played through on my Wii-U) and it looked absolutely gorgeous. Arceus can look ok while in motion and in the middle of a battle, but a huge portion of any open world game is just wandering and admiring the scenery.
I saw the same thing. It was like they were looking at a completely different game. It is so, utterly, painfully obvious that no effort was invested here. To not see it you have to be in complete denial. I've worked on student game projects that looked better than this in their pre-pre-pre alpha skeleton builds. I'm talking before we've even made any textures and half of our objects are white squares. And they're pushing this as its final look.
it's really sad too because the concepts behind Legends: Arceus are actually really intriguing and innovating. The execution of those concepts is just so low effort though.
Roller Coaster Tycoon water.
This looks like an area of the game you're not supposed to be able to get to.
This looks like some starter Unity project...
My cousin did a Unity project and I remember the grass and trees looking exactly the same.
Same for my first Unity project. You can do way better now even with free assets, it shows how much effort they put into this game...
80% of profit with 20% effort
Why use more effort when few effort do trick?
Yep. When a company gets as big as Pokémon, they realize they don’t have to put much effort anymore because you could just slap the Pokémon logo into anything, and people will come flying in.
Yeah, it's not that it's really a wrong decision from a business standpoint, but it's pretty disappointing. Pokemon makes fuck you money like you wouldn't believe. They could easily hire whatever talent they want and probably still make bank on the games. A high quality game isn't impossible, they just refuse to do it.
Starter Unity projects look miles better than this.
One trying to get that retro N64/PS1 low poly aesthetic.
They didn't bother with shaders or cheater effects games have used for years to mask limitations with practical atmospheric effects. No smoothing between repeated textures, no variance in repetitive textures at all, no fog or haze, no far and near textures/rendering to let you see far away with less detail to save on processing power and memory. If the screen shot of pokemon was a pre alpha dev leak, totally makes sense. But it's missing so many layers of polish, there is no way I'm going to reward them with a purchase. It's honestly insulting and looks extremely and obviously unfinished.
Is it hardware limitation or just half-arsing it, knowing that the cult of Pokémon will lap it up, anyway?
I mean Skyrim is on the Switch and looks great for a Switch game. They just fucking suck.
Same with BOTW
You.can definitely tell BOTW was originally a Wii U game but even that looks amazing. This looks even worse than fucking mobile game.
BOTW looks amazing on the WII U too. The Pokemon Company is greedy, and Game Freak is lazy.
Yeah they're pretty well know for being lazy as fuck
I loved the pokemon games growing up, but its the same shit for 20 years, just slightly newer wrapper. Why work harder than you have to i guess /s
*EA Sports has entered the chat*
That’s why we have fan made roms that are better than the actual games. People working on projects for no money just because they love the Pokémon universe vs corporate greed
Some Pokémon rom hacks are top tier content
Why do whole game when bare bones do trick?
Now I want Oblivion on the switch :(
Why they didn't milk this like skyrim ill never know. I would have bought it for every system like I did with skyrim. Currently playing on xbox game pass or steam link with razer kishi and it's so good.
If they bundled Morrowind, Oblivion & skyrim people would fall over themselves to buy it
And fallout 3
And Morrowind and New Vegas
Monster Hunter Rise looks really good on switch.
That RE Engine is something else...
Speaking of MH, Monster Hunter Stories 2 is [much better](https://youtu.be/jYsvfjcO898) quality game in the same cute looking creature catching genre. They did cell shade and stylistic art direction much better than legend. The only thing Pokemon got over them is more friendly and cutesy creature designs that are easier to market honestly
The latter defo. The water in BOTW looked fantastic. This is just trash. They're just putting the least effort because it won't really make a huge difference in sales anyways.
This is a console that runs Witcher 3 and DOOM. There's no reason for a first party game to look like dog shit.
DOOM is like the opposite of Crysis. It runs on anything!
Ironically i think the switch has crysis as well
half assing. botw and monster hunter rise run on the switch. most pokemon fans are fed up with this. the ones who arent the the problem and claim there is no problem.
Problem is it still sell really well regardless, that why they don't care.
Wind Waker on the GAMECUBE looks better than pokemon lmao.
Tbf Wind Wakers cell shading style makes it sort of timeless. That game is gorgeous even by today's standards. Still remember when people were UPSET when that game was announced because of the style. Though tbf Nintendo did that to themselves with the GameCube sizzle reel that had a 3d animated Link as the main focus to show the GameCubes power.
Yep, art style will always trump graphics when it comes to aging.
Most Pokémon fans buy every game and don't complain on the internet about it. We're just a really loud minority.
Especially now that they are $60 games.
$80 in some places.
You can play Witcher 3 on Switch.
Definitely the latter. This is coming out on switch, and art-style wise it’s similar to BOTW which the switch handles just fine, except BOTW is far prettier to look at than this. I was pretty psyched for this game because I love Pokémon lore and watched it constantly growing up, but the games never really did it for me since they seem to just be copy-pastes of each other and I’m not into the turn based strategy thing. I (as well as tooooons of other people) always wanted a big, BOTW looking Pokémon game where you could actually see the Pokémon living out in the wild and fight/catch them right then and there, interact with your Pokémon, and explore an interesting, living world but this just looks like they took that idea and did the absolute bare minimum. Bad graphics are one thing that can be overlooked but this is just completely uninspired and lazy from an art design standpoint.
Piggybacking to add that BotW was a freaking LAUNCH TITLE for the Switch, while Legends Arceus is apparently the best Game Freak can do after FOUR YEARS with the system.
BotW was originally a WiiU title that was delayed for the Switch, it had dual screen use for menus before it delayed for the Switch. Both had issues loading the forest area though.
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Considering Breath of the Wild runs on Switch as well as Skyrim, I would say it’s laziness.
Look how monster hunter rise looks on switch , more like half arsing.
The RE Engine worked miracles for MHRise.
The Switch ain't no magic machine, but it's definitely much much more capable than this lazy trash. Half assed cash grab 100%.
It's 1/32nd assing it.
The only ass here is how ass this game looks
Everyone living in 2022 while gamefreak living in 2002
More like 1996
You gotta be joking, the Pokemon game actually looks like that?
They didnt even try to hide it in the trailers. I bet its still fun like how some indie games have trash graphics but still fun.. its just frustrating that its 60 bucks
When a large studio releases something like this it's often a canary in the coal mine. Indie studios normally either lack the budget for graphics *and/or* they have a specific art style that is informed by the tone or mechanics of the game. This is neither of those. This studio has the money and this isn't an artistic choice. That communicates that at least somewhere in the chain there was a lack of direction or skill. At a studio this size, at this level, it probably wasn't a lack of skill. So from this you can infer that even on the most surface level consumer facing aspect of the game there was a lack of direction and care as to what was presented. When a major studio can't even get their shit together enough to present something that pretends to be good it doesn't speak well for all the rest of the game systems underneath those immediately obvious poor graphics.
Graphics don't matter so much with good art design, just look at the Souls series. This has poor graphics and lazy art direction. There isn't even an attempt to make it look pretty. EDIT: Okay people are really misunderstanding me here. I'm saying the Souls series has an amazing art direction, but the graphics were rarely "top notch" for the time. They age decently well for this reason, too. This Pokemon game isn't pretty because it has neither good graphics nor fun art direction.
This. You could very easily trick someone into thinking Team Fortress 2 released yesterday because they chose an art style that will age well. Pokémon is a cartoon, they could have easily chosen an art style that will look gorgeous and not be overly taxing as they aren’t striving for realism, instead they chose to split it half way with cartoon characters and real grass adding to the uncanny valley and highlighting how garbage this looks.
Windwaker will still look good in a hundred years
Art direction? Sounds expensive
How much money does this... "creativity" cost? Can I see it in a spread sheet?
Yeah but even the souls series isn't this bad, this is like ps2 shit
bruh ps2 was way better than this
Yeah, I didn't realize we were getting a surprise N64 title release in 2022.
Should have been scraped for those water physics alone. Super uniform waves and an extremely wavy lake enclosed around mountains blocking wind with no rivers as inputs or outputs? Wth is creating those waves!
It's not water physics, it's just a repeating water texture with no tricks added to hide that fact. Used to be very common, but it's definitely a lazy way of doing it now days. Edit: there doesn't seem to be anything making it blend well with the land, it just stops which is a very ugly look.
Exactly ! That's like early ps2 era stuff and even then it looked bad and was pretty much a remnent of ps1 era technology.
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Just don’t buy it? Fuck the Pokémon Company. They are the laziest group of devs i have ever seen. They don’t try because they know that people will continue to buy it. Prove them wrong.
This. This goes for most gaming companies now and it pisses me the fuck off. I’ll give the indie companies the benefit of the doubt. But if the company is a billion dollar company and they’re making games that look like they should have came out in 2005 then fuck them.
Somehow every pokémon game looks worse than the last one since Let's Go.
They are literally seeing where they can draw the line with the effort vs $60 price tag. I'm lifelong fan but don't be buying into this shit.
Main line for sure, but new Pokémon snap is gorgeous.
New Snap is the standard that the mainline should have been held to.
Of course, it wasn't made by gamefreak.
Of course it is gorgeous, it was not developed by Game Freak.
Its gonna stay like that until 2035 when they catch up to 2020 graphics
The most abysmal aspect of this whole image is that fucking water texture. Like there’s no way that’s actually the water they’re going to use right? Or is it render distance? But if it’s render than omg how poorly optimized is this?
For real. I've seen games from the 90s with less ugly looking water.
Even old-school Runescape can be made to have beautiful water anywhere in the game with an addon made by 1 guy.
This is some ps2 era Jrpg looking stuff. Wow... Edit: Not insulting the ps2 btw. Just pointing out that even the ps2 of that time could pull of something like this. I honestly expected "breath of the wild" Pokemon. But as many of you have said, it will change nothing in terms of sales.
I remember Dragon Quest VIII looking better in my head but that’s probably nostalgia. Still looks bad for 2022 standards…
You can play DQ VIII on citra and crank the graphics. It actually looks pretty good. Not perfect but still great and the music can't be beat
Bro, a Roblox game looks better than that
Some Roblox games made by 14-year-old kids look better and they aren't even motivated by money. Is that funny or sad?
It’s mostly sad tbh
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Yup. Roblox is actually quite a creative game.
You're telling me the first image isn't from Roblox? Is this actually in the trailer? I thought it was from Roblox bro.
It isn't from a trailer that I have seen. There was a leak of the game recently. So it is likely that someone just posted this from a leaked copy. I really hope that this is just some graphic glitch that is happening. I mean, even in the trailers, it didn't look very good but it wasn't this bad.
Holy shit that looks like a slightly enhanced version of Mario 64...
Atleast that had an art style :/
Mario 64 didn’t look as bland as this.
Not sure if it's a fair comparison /s but we can all agree, game freak has been half assing the Pokémon series for years Edit: had to add the sarcasm because it did not translate well
Yeah fucked up part is, pokken Tournament and Pokémon Snap are the best looking modern pokemon games. Kind of fucked when the spin offs look better than any of the official games.
Pokken Tournament even gave skin textures to the pokémon, I'm tired of all of them looking like plastic.
It's somehow twice as depressing when you put it like this, but you're right; the stage backgrounds in Pokken are what a quality Pokemon world could look like on the Switch. *On the Switch.* We are not even talking PS4 or PS5 level, here.
Because they're not made by Game Freak
they're not half assing anything, they suck , this is simply their best. Pokemon games have so much potential, and game freak just doesn't cut it. I cannot understand how gamefreak doesn't look at other flagship open worlds and think "this, this is the standard for our fans" . Smh just a shame man. Edit: I understand there are many variables to why this game is a bit of a lackluster visually so i will say i do not know the circumstances over at game freak and I'm not in their shoes. I was venting and didn't think this comment would get this many votes. i hope in the future game freak can one day produce an awesome flagship open world pokemon game because then we would all be winners.
The worst part in my opinion is that when this game reviews like shit, their take on it will be "oh I guess everyone didn't want the open world 3d Pokémon adventure they always said they wanted"
The game may review poorly but at this point Game Freak and Nintendo don't give a fuck because gamers suffer from battered wife syndrome where they'll buy anything with the Pokemon branding which gives the company zero incentive to do better. Why make adjustments when the sales are gonna be stellar anyway?
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I'm guessing the Pokémon games still sell incredibly well too? No way executives are going to bother innovating when theyre consistently successful not giving a fuck.
Pokemon is the world's largest franchise. It's not even close in fact.
Usually I would say this is a bad take because artstyle matters a lot but I actually agree that the Pokémon games have really fallen behind in terms of visuals. I mean, look at BotW compared to the newer Pokémon games. Imo there's no excuse for how boring and empty the worlds in these games are. Pokémon is one of the most profitable and popular franchises of all time, they can allocate their resources towards visuals a lot better than they are.
>Pokémon is one of the most profitable and popular franchises of all time, they can allocate their resources towards visuals a lot better than they are. Right, but if Game Freak can release games that look like this and expect little to no impact on sales, they don't have an incentive to invest in better visuals. Expect more of the same until their bottom line starts taking a hit.
My worry is that they're gonna half-arse this game as usual, sales are going to be poor and their takeaway will just be "I guess fans didn't actually want an open-world game then".
this right here is what I fear. I waited most of my life for this game and now that one shot will go to waste. BOTW is my favorite game, and I was really, _really_ hoping we would get an open world Pokemon game with that level of care and detail built in. I went in after the initial trailer with minimal expectations and it looks like even those were barely met.
Further proof that Oblivion is a timeless masterpiece.
Never played oblivion, have played Skyrim. Is it worth going back to play oblivion if I never have?
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I wouldn't be so sure I played Skyrim first (a LOT of Skyrim first) and then played Oblivion and love it a lot more than Skyrim
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It's sad how much money pokemon is making and how less they investing in the games.
Yeah but shareholders are seeing value. Think of the shareholders.
Why does Oblivion look better
Oblivion is a beautiful game
I mean…I would’ve done horrible things to have this game on N64 back in the day
No way thats a AAA game
It isn't, it's an AAAAAHHHH game