I think Gamefreak is going to see that Palworld made $200 million in a week and realize that can try even less.

This post was last modified: Jan 23, 2024 at 7:19 PM by Vertette.

Can't believe we're doing this thing again but now the people we're feeling bad for are The Pokemon Company

for some reason pokemon fans like to pretend game freak is a small indie dev who keeps getting bullied by nintendo to release yearly games on no budget, excusing the bad performance and bugs in modern games. its stupid but this is just an extension of that mentality, "dont bully the million dollar devs"

Do people think that if they stopped buying pokemon games, the games would stop being made?

It seems like TPC has incentive to keep making the games regardless, they think the current quality level serves the market fine, and if they thought otherwise, they would probably increase the budget/timelines. As others have said, there's no reason for something to get better if people already buy the version that sucks

yeah i don't really care if the palworld devs are pro-AI or plagiarists or whatever, what matters is they added the most boring boilerplate ideas of the past decade and a half to pokemon instead of something cool or interesting

I think we're on the same page here. I hope a better dev team goes on to plagiarize The Pokemon Company in a less cringe way

That said, idk how plagiarism is supposed to work with digital assets. It's like the Ship of Theseus if you duplicated the ship into thin air without consuming any resources. It's not the same thing OR a different thing, it's infinitely reproducible which means the question of theft becomes meaningless

to me the most egregious thing about palworld is that seemingly everyone and their grandma was just waiting for 'worse pokemon with guns'. for some reason it reminds of when i was in middle and high school and people would pretend they grew up playing 'the OG' pokemon even though red came out when when I was 2 years old. Its just this desire to like pokemon but not actually engage with pokemon. which is so weird to me, if you dont like pokemon, thats fine. its not cool to like pokemon. anyway normally i dont want nintendo to continue their draconian legal practices but i hope the palworld devs go to forever jail times ten billion because i hate having to see their stupid game

oh and also i dont think pokemon can ever be good again unless nintendo goes back to having a seperate console and handheld but they will never do this. the limitations of handheld were why pokemon was so cool

the limitations of handheld were why pokemon was so cool

Damn, you must love Scarlet and Violet's framerate then

This post was last modified: Jan 25, 2024 at 11:09 PM by Spritanium.

Its just this desire to like pokemon but not actually engage with pokemon.

To me it seems more like a desire to engage with pokemon, and frustration that pokemon games cost $60 and are still just Red and Blue but they're 3D now

frustration that pokemon games cost $60 and are still just Red and Blue but they're 3D now

Out of the multiple issues Scarlet and Violet have, I'd hardly call "being too similar to Red and Blue" one of them.

frustration that pokemon games cost $60 and are still just Red and Blue but they're 3D now

Out of the multiple issues Scarlet and Violet have, I'd hardly call "being too similar to Red and Blue" one of them.

Yep, not close at all

Idk man, it's still just rock-paper-scissors with some coin flips right? The series hasn't really Evolved alongside the other greats

Usually an IP will undergo some dramatic transformation when it moves to 3D. Pokemon just became 3D for no reason and it looks worse than it did when it was 2D

This post was last modified: Jan 26, 2024 at 12:47 AM by Draku.

Idk man, it's still just rock-paper-scissors with some coin flips right? The series hasn't really Evolved alongside the other greats

Usually an IP will undergo some dramatic transformation when it moves to 3D. Pokemon just became 3D for no reason and it looks worse than it did when it was 2D

I don't think anyone is particularly upset about the core battle system. It's the presentation of it that upsets people, considering that Pokemon Stadium had far better animations and polish back on the fucking N64.

Super Mario Bros Wonder came out to beloved reception despite playing like a classic Mario game. There's a lot of doodads on top but the core's the same as ever. Yet, no one is calling that "just like SMB1". Similarly, Pokemon adds twists and turns and has kept major evolutions (like the physical+special split/Mario's wall jump + ground pound) but the core gameplay isn't broken so there's no need to fix it. Not a perfect comparison but you get what I'm trying to say.

Sword and Shield were far too safe and DID try to staunchly keep to feeling like Red/Blue, but Scarlet/Violet are one of the rare times they actually underwent major innovations and tried to add new gameplay conventions. It's not perfect and the main problem with the game is that despite being open-ended it still has a set level curve for each area, but they're getting there.

to me the most egregious thing about palworld is that seemingly everyone and their grandma was just waiting for 'worse pokemon with guns'. for some reason it reminds of when i was in middle and high school and people would pretend they grew up playing 'the OG' pokemon even though red came out when when I was 2 years old. Its just this desire to like pokemon but not actually engage with pokemon. which is so weird to me, if you dont like pokemon, thats fine. its not cool to like pokemon. anyway normally i dont want nintendo to continue their draconian legal practices but i hope the palworld devs go to forever jail times ten billion because i hate having to see their stupid game

tbf I was really young when OG pokemon came out but I still played gen 1 and gen 2 first, and I knew lots of other kids who had those games as well

I think a lot of people kind of overlook this when looking back at the 2000s because of how prevalent PC is nowadays and how generally few exclusives there are now comparatively (as well as cross generation/platform games) but unless your parents were fairly well off, there was a good chance you'd be stuck on older hardware from a previous generation or buying cheap older games well into the lifespan of the next generation

There was WAY more backwards compatibility. When the GBA was out, GBC games were cheaper than dirt. When the DS was out, GBA games were cheaper than dirt - and each of them played the previous generations. It wasn't weird back then to have a PS1 when the PS2 was out, or a Gamecube and PS2 when the Wii was out. Half the time they had different versions of the same games anyway.

We're kind of getting back to that now because the PS5 has no games and many people just have a PS4, but you're get looked at like a crazy person if you still had a Wii U in 2020, whereas having a GBC in like 2002 as your main handheld was "normal" enough.

my tl;dr though is that owning and playing older games and hardware was way more normal than it is now, and plenty of kids played OG pokemon 5+ years after it came out just because it was more normal back then to do so. Nowadays video games are such a big household thing but until like... the late 2000s maybe, the medium was "new" enough that parents would just buy you whatever was cheapest without really thinking about it and that was your video game system for the next 3 years.

Yeah my first GBA game was Pokemon Gold. I didn't know it wasn't a GBA game and I didn't learn the difference for years. Then when the DS game out my GBA carts kept getting used for years (though I was always pissed it didn't support the GB/GBC ones)

I was using a GBA to play GBC games and a DS to play GBA games, and it's super cool that was even possible

A pokemon game used to be like a tamogachi-type thing where you could expect to carry it around forever.

Nowadays video games are more like Cinematic Experiences. I think for Pokemon in particular that represents a good opportunity to branch in two different directions, one "handheld-first" series that is sprite-based and focused on battling, with all 80 million monsters included; and one "console-first" 3D series that leans more into the anime/manga aesthetic, picks maybe 100 monsters to feature in a game and gives them each a personality

This post was last modified: Jan 27, 2024 at 4:18 AM by sealelement.

i think it's criminal that there isn't a dedicated competitive pokemon title where you can just throw together teams like battle simulators and set rules and conditions and bans.

i got into watching competitive pokemon youtubers way back during the pandemic and there's SO MANY legitimately fun ways to play the game like pokemon draft leagues or older generation formats or wacky rulesets like almost any ability that could absolutely be implemented in a commercial product! there's so much potential here for an officially supported "esport" approach to pokemon that fits perfectly into the "live service" model, and there's definitely a market for it.

there's also potential to implement stuff like battle facilities and co-op through that and saving famous teams as battle facility opponents, which could ease the large majority of pokemon fans who don't interact with this stuff into trying this entirely new side of pokemon!

it's money being left on the table. smogon has proven that it's possible to make this happen and that there are people who are passionate enough to make even the old generations work in simulation, and stuff like pokemon masters and the pokemon moba prove that people are willing to engage with something outside of the traditional release 2 games model. i know this would require game freak to have a brain but dammit if it's not a shame that this doesn't exist. see you guys later this year when they announce pokemon copper and pokemon lead for december, taking place in the former soviet union