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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Rise isn’t a good for comparison because Rise was designed for the switch. Or course it’s going to run exceptionally well on the Deck. It probably runs better than World, because World was designed for X1/PS4.
Edit: just to clarify I’m not defending the poor performance of Wilds, they did the exact same shit with World. I’m just clarifying that Rise performance was probably never going to happen.
The experiences people are reporting with this game are so strange to me.
I loaded the game today during a 1hr break at work on my Legion Go. It took ~10 minutes to do the shader compilation, I opted to turn frame generation on, and the game defaulted the settings to high, which felt awful. After turning the settings to low, turning the upscaling quality from “Max Performance” to just “Performance,” adjusting the sharpness up from 0.5 to 0.6, and then disabling other features I don’t care about (cloud textures? I barely look up) or outright hate (why games continue to push aggressive motion blurring is beyond me - it looks horrible), I started playing.
I experienced a stutter whenever I step into a new space, or load a new cutscene, but it smoothed out in a fraction of a second. While the graphics don’t look the best, the game plays smooth. I did the opening sequence with no stutters, got to the not-tetsucabra fight, and maintained 45+ fps throughout the entire fight, with no stutters or issues. At points, the monster ran into a cave, which aided my hand-held PC and kept the game running at a smooth 60fps for those sections. This is directly in-line with my experiences running the benchmark on Legion Go, which averaged ~45 fps on nearly identical settings.
I haven’t yet run the benchmark or played the released game on my home PC, sporting a Ryzen 7 5800 and a 3070 ti, but the demo, which was less optimized and frame generation did not work during, played “fine.” I was unimpressed with the performance relative to the graphical fidelity in that play (though I am of the opinion that the more gritty, realistic aesthetic is ugly relative to the vibrant worlds of Generations, or Rise and unapologetically think they look better than even World).I can’t say I had problems or felt that performance or visual quality would impede my enjoyment of the game.
This article notes specific stuttering and runs the frame health tests to demonstrate it. I suspect they’re onto something that I am not experiencing for some reason or another. That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title. I’m not sure what the deal with all the “ThAt’S nOt HoW fRaMe GeNeRaTiOn WoRkS!” screaming relevant to low end systems is about, as I am experiencing notable improvements through it.
I encourage people to test on their own hardware, rather than taking reviews at face value, as I’ve begun to believe that whatever issue is occurring is deeper than “Capcom didn’t optimize!” Use the benchmark, and take advantage of Steam’s refund policy.
You had to make the game look as terrible as possible and use fake frames to have an “enjoyable” experience. How is that acceptable? What about that is worth $70?
You should be getting a stable 60fps @ 1440p on medium settings with a 3070ti at the bare minimum. MH is not visually impressive enough to justify how demanding it is. If you think otherwise look at RDR2 performance.
That said, I ultimately think the 4k, 144+ fps gamers running expensive GPUs are offended that they can’t play this one on the highest settings, and are review bombing the hell out of this title.
I can understand. I haven’t played this game but I do have an expensive rig. If turning on dynamic lighting causes the game to stutter, then the dynamic lighting feature is broken. That’s not my machine’s fault. I don’t know exactly what settings aren’t working, but it seems like there are a few nobody can actually use. Negative reviews for a game with broken features is justified.
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 😎
While the win is good, the fact that it’s still a PEGI 12 game while FIFA is a PEGI 3 shows what an absolute joke the whole process is.
Australia had to deal with similar levels of bullshit for way too long before our ratings board finally capitulated to common sense and introduced an R18 rating (for games like The Last of Us, not even XXX content!).
We have an endemic gambling problem too, so I don’t foresee much common sense coming out of that mob anytime soon - either.
self censoring bodies like pegi are there to protect the industry, so it doesn’t get actual censorship from the government. EA is the industry. of course they get special treatment.
also gambling is the blueprint of AAA gaming now, so pegi loves it. they only do this shit to small devs so they can pretend to care while protecting industry giants from the actual scrutiny that they deserve.
Very true, same applies to the ESRB in the US. The ESA literally only formed the organisation to self-censor rather than leave it to the Gov’t following outrage over Mortal Kombat — if I’m remembering correctly?
Here in Australia, the ACB is a government body — but just about as useless, if not even more so! For the longest time, we had to have our games additionally censored because they were viewed as for children and therefore couldn’t depict excessive violence, any sexual themes or drug use. Manhunt, Grand Theft Auto 3 & Vice City were notable examples.
What am I getting at, even I don’t know. I guess to say that both implementations can be shit…? 🤷🏻♂️
Awesome to see them win this. If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit, the roguelike that uses playing cards in the same way Go-Fish does definitely shouldn’t be smacked over this.
Fuck EA and all the loot box game makers that don’t get hit with this crap
If other games can have poker or other cards games where the characters are gambling and not have that influence their shit
I doubt it though because the game doesn’t have any gambling in it at all. It just uses the imagery of poker, that’s it. I have no more of an idea how to play poker now than they did before spending 900 Brazilian hours on the game.
That’s what I’m saying tho, it’s bs that Belatro would get hit simply for the imagery they’re using, while other games get a lesser penalty when ACTUAL (both real money and in game currencies) gambling is happening.
eurogamer.net
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