Comment on Pokémon games have become consistently ugly, and it's alright to wish they weren't

BmeBenji@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• MisshapenDeviate@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  That would be more valid here if Pokémon were focused on being fun. As a lifelong fan, modern Pokémon games are typically both ugly and not terribly fun. They make decent “turn off your brain” games, but the quality of game did not go up with the decrease in graphics.

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  • thejml@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    While it wasn’t necessarily pretty and had its share of glitches, I quite enjoyed Arceus. It was a nice break from the standard patterns it’s fallen into.

    Course I say that as someone who also enjoyed Sword and Shield after a skipping a few prior.

    Graphics definitely aren’t everything, but they could stop it With the half finished games with glitches.

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    • MisshapenDeviate@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Arceus was a fun break from the norm, and was even more fun once I played it on ::: spoiler redacted an emulator ::: to remove some of the performance issues my Switch had with it. I’m looking forward to Z-A exclusively because the impression Arceus made (well, and ::: spoiler spoiler mega evolutions ::: ).

      I’ve been playing a randomized (and slightly higher level enemy Pokémon) run of Shield after beating it once originally and being quite disappointed, and I’ve enjoyed that pretty thoroughly as well. The return of follower Pokémon in the DLC is something I’ve been asking for since HG/SS.

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  • BmeBenji@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah that’s fair. I haven’t cared about Pokemon since the remakes of Sapphire and Ruby during which I didn’t lose a single battle. It was a cool nostalgia trip but since there was absolutely no strategy necessary I never ever wanted to go back since there’s not enough reward for the time sink; it’s just not fun imo.

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• stray@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  “devs too focused on making a game pretty instead of fun” is talking about making the art photorealistic with fancy hair engines and such, when doing so doesn’t add meaningfully to the experience and only serves to needlessly complicate development and inflate the cost.

  We can tell that making all these 3D models and animations is a problem for the devs because they’ve said so repeatedly. They’ve even said they can’t have every Pokemon in the same game as a result. Instead of the lovely pixel art of FRLG we have a mish-mash of dead-eyed, poorly-animated cartoons with PSP-quality “realistic” terrain that grate against each other. And for what? Why do 3D when you can only do 3D so poorly?

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• drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

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  Or like this.

  So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

  To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird. If a character is a low rez blocky mass representing a person it doesn’t look that weird if they teleport into a car, but if they’re nearly photorealistic you suddenly need a highly detailed animation of them opening the car door and climbing inside, one for each size and shape of car that exists. You also need a system that can smoothly transition the character from standing there to playing that “entering car” animation without it jerking or looking weird. And you need to tweak their pathfinding to make sure the way the character walks up to the car looks natural, so they don’t approach from an odd angle that would demand the aforementioned system rotate them in an unnatural way to get them lined up.

  Now multiply all those concerns with everything a character needs to interact with in however many gameplay sequences or environments they exist in. Instead of just creating some level geometry and plopping down some NPC entities now making a level is an entire ordeal.

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• algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  New pokemon games are neither so that doesn’t really work

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• loren@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Games don’t need to be graphically ground breaking to be fun but the art should at least not be repulsive and/or incoherent as fuck like modern Pokemon games.

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