I agree, the last genuinely pretty game was Emerald, imo. Diamond and beyond is where 3D assets started weakening the art direction, imo. Either keep the beautiful pixel art, or do proper cel shaded graphics, like windwaker. Personally, I’d stick with pixel art for the strongest possible art direction.
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.
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.
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.
Arceus was a fun break from the norm, and was even more fun once I played it on redacted 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
Spoilermega 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.
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.
“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?
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.
Meanwhile the game will break records and sell switch systems cause people are fucking morons.
I’ve said similar things about many switch games. Even Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom might be fun games, but they are legitimately crappie than they should be. The world’s are very empty and often times look like PS2 quality textures and shapes. The frame rates are also appalling at times. Like no consideration for performance and art direction with so much Nintendo trash, and people still eat it up.
It’s also ok to wish that they run at a consistently smooth framerate. It’s one thing to look like crap and it’s another to both look like crap and run like it too. I’ve been playing Palworld on medium for the past couple of weeks and it was pretty jarring going from that to seeing the Legends Z-A footage.
I agree. Pokemon once was my favorite video game series, but it has been technically and to some extent creatively stagnant for quite some years now. And whenever people point that out online, there is always a vocal horde of fans coming to Gamefreak’s defense, saying things like “Pokemon never looked good”. Which wouldn’t be a good argument, but it’s not even true. Pokemon games were never technically advanced, but they had a simple, clean look in the 2D/2.5D era. S/V has some really appallingly low-res textures in places that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the N64. It just looks muddy and inconsistent to a point where it’s distracting from the game itself. At the same time it runs at sub-30 FPS quite often.
Probably the only good looking Pokemon games we got this generation were the “Let’s Go” ones. Those had simple but consistently good-looking graphics just like the older titles.
Yeah, Pokemon had some nice 2D sprites. I yearn for a pokemon game that doesn't hold your hand and is challenging with nice sprite work. It'll never happen unless Game Freak lets the fans do something like Sonic Mania.
To be fair, it’s almost infinitely cheaper to hire a bunch of people to post in threads muddying the waters of any discussion than it is to fix any given issue. If any public criticism devolves into bickering, it’s hard for outside observers to make enough sense of it to heavily impact sales.
Look how well it worked for the election. With a proof of concept that dramatic lying around, what money-grubbing executive wouldn’t want to follow the example?
and then show a screenshot of a game that looks objectively worse than a low-budget movie tie-in from 2007. I mean look at the 1 tile, non-randomized, no noise, no depth, repeating light effect on the water with 0 effort put in to even make it look slightly good. The depth of field and fog looks like it is from pokemon pearl with a gaussian blur put on top of it.
That’s some good news. I was sad when the last game came out it was basically released within the same week that the visions series was no longer going to be created. I hope they make some more RPGs and try to make something new and original.
It seems better on launch with the nvidia driver for it than it was during the first open beta but I think they’re right with the overly aggressive culling and texture streaming causing issues. They said it’s still more than playable at 4k60 with my 3080ti and I’m having a blast
I updated my NVIDIA drivers to play and it broke display port support so I had to change the monitor cord to my motherboard display port and rollback drivers 😎
TBH I used to be a huge Monster Hunter fan, pre-ordered MH: World but it was such a huge disappointment that I will never purchase any capcom game ever again.
Anybody surprised about the state of wilds hasn’t been paying attention.
Yeah that game was unplayable for me. I rebind my keys, but there were functions hard bound to keys, probably from like debugging or something, so pressing them would execute two functions. Specifically it was camera rotation. That was disorientating as hell.
For one of my friends it kept crashing, and since you can’t save during the intro he had to play it 3 times or so.
MH: World is the only MH game I tried, out of curiosity. It ended up on my library at some point as a PS+ game. Got through the initial “story” thing, if you can call it that. The tutorial. Getting to the camp. The mandatory chat with 10 different people. Did the first real “hunt”.
It seemed to mind bogglingly boring, that after that mission, I just uninstalled the game.
Wilds looks amazing. Which makes me wonder if the games are sufficiently different that it might be worth give it a chance.
YOU HAD ONE JOB… to render a damn desert… that is mostly empty… this should work on literally 10 years old gpus with 2gb ram with 100+ fps… they are lazy, they are cheaping out on optimization, game textures do not even look good.
Absolute state of PC Gaming in 2025. It is piss poor, but keep upping ngreedia stock with those $1000 gpus to play vaseline mess with PS3 textures.
Have you ever worked on a game before? I’m curious how you think laziness plays into this when the entire industry is collapsing and everyone would love to hold on to their jobs.
agreed, making video games has gotta be the worst ROI software job in the world. bad hours, bad pay, bad management. anyone who wanted to be lazy could do so anywhere else but video games.
I upgraded my rig after the beta just for this game. I’m playing it with plenty of frames after the new drivers and dlss 4, no frame gen. I have an i9-1400kf and 4080, way out of average range. It defaults to ultra everything. It still looks like absolute shit. I can’t believe they released this.
It’s a major shame because combat feels amazing. But they are ship of Theseusing MH. So many little baffling decisions. The scout flies aren’t actually as bad as I thought they would be. But there is just so much shit on the screen all the time. And the available settings don’t help so mod is the only hope I guess. They redesigned the item box interface, so 15 years of muscle memory is worthless and I think they removed the ability to sort items cuz I haven’t found the button to do it yet. You can’t simply open the menu and look at your status to include food skill descriptions anymore (or I can’t figure out how). There is no MH language?!? At this point I feel lucky they left in cat noises for felynes cuz the subtitles of their dialogue show me I’d have refunded if it was stuck in English.
I had a sense of awe and…pride?… when world was such a hit after loving this niche title for so long. But I got a sense of the transformation that was coming due to westernization/casualization and it’s just a let down. Idk why they didn’t have faith in their original, more whimsical vision.
Yeah that’s just for the pouch, not the box. It looks like the categorized tabs are supposed to replace the need for auto sorting the box, but it doesn’t feel right with the aforementioned 15years of playing. Guess I’ll get used to it.
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Aktywne