I know multiple people who complain about every release and then buy it, preferably both versions. A few even complaint there’s no third edition to buy anymore.
If anything, GF could reduce their quality even more.
Then there’s me: not buying the console or the game, playing it emulated at better fps and higher resolution for like 20 minutes just to say “I knew it” and never touching the game again.
I was disappointed with X/Y and gave them one last chance to change course.
The disappointing dungeons of X/Y had been replaced by nothing by straight lines with occasional fancy camera angles. The utter disgrace that was Z Cave as a super (only) dungeon was more than anything Sun/Moon offered.
For a game series meant to be about exploring and discovering monsters to collect, they’ve really let the exploration/discovery side down. Holding my console upside down is cool and all that, but gimmicks to sell strategy guides are no subsidy for actual explorable environments to lead to dynamic, emergent gameplay experiences.
Really want to make my take on a monster capture world explorer. I think there’s a lot of space for a spiritual successor to Pokémon.
They make a console that is underpowered but is still marketable because of its uniqueness, then they make first party games that require better performance than the console can deliver.
Pokémon is not a first party game, it’s developed by Game Freaks. And the Switch isn’t underpowered for this kind of games, there are lots of better looking games on it, such as Breath of the Wild, which is a launch title. Game Freaks is a terrible studio who can’t make a game run smoothly even with GameCube graphics.
Because graphics are the most important part of a game?
If the games are fun to play who cares if the graphics are bad? Scarlet and Violet were the best pokemon games since P:LA and that was the best since Gen 5.
Based on the limited information we’ve gotten about ZA there’s no reason as of yet to doubt that it won’t be comparable to P:LA and S&V in terms of enjoyability.
Complaining about the graphics of pokemon games or the bugginess of pokemon games is like complaining about CoD being an FPS or Assassin’s Creed having traversable terrain or Souls-likes being hard. At this point it’s a staple of the franchise with 40 games between the mainline games and major spinoffs establishing a trend of the games being thoroughly buggy messes and/or having shit graphics. There is absolutely no reason to expect any of that to change and constantly hearing complaints about it with every new game is getting fucking old.
While graphics generally aren’t important, they do become a glaring problem when the engine is poorly written. Pokémon Sword and Shield shed light on this problem because it was designed as an 3D open world game, meaning attention to detail was paramount. It needed to feel lived in, much like Breath of the Wild. Unfortunately, we got a barren and flat landscape that feels like it was ripped straight out of the DS.
I don’t disagree that the graphics could and probably should have been better. I do disagree with the idea that it’s anything more than a minor annoyance with no meaningful impact on the game.
However, regardless of what I think about it, my point was that at this point in the franchise, Gamefreak, the Pokemon Company, and Nintendo have demonstrated repeatedly since the very first game that optimization, stability, graphical fidelity, and any semblance of good development practices are not something they’re willing to commit to. Expecting that to change at this point is unreasonable and continuing to complain about it is demonstrably unproductive and just introduces pointless negativity into the pokemon community.
Until Sword and Shield, the games weren’t known to be ugly, buggy messes. People have, and continue to, praise the 2D pixel art of previous generations. Sun and Moon is an odd middle ground as some people started to not like the 3D direction, but thought it’d improve on a more powerful console, like the Switch. I don’t think it’s correct saying this is a staple of pokemon games. It’s a staple of modern pokemon games, which I absolutely disagree about the last 2 entries being the best. Far from it.
I was more thinking of the N64 and GameCube games (Stadium 1&2, Colloseum, and XD Gale of Darkness) when referencing older games with poor graphics specifically. All four of those games were graphically inferior to other titles on the same consoles.
However, every single release has been plagued by bugs that can result in completely corrupted save data, softlocks, and a wide variety of other unexpected behaviors. Major examples being MissingNo and the other glitch pokemon, bad eggs, a wide variety of exploitable, but potentially save corrupting bugs like the infinite item glitches in gens 1-3, and a whole host of bugs that break how moves are supposed to work in battle.
Hell, shinies were originally a graphical bug in gen 2.
How can Breath of the Wild which was originally a Wii U release looks so much more refined and artistically appealing while running better than anything Gamefreak has made in the last 8 years?
In comparison to XC2 or 3, the recent pokemon games look like an insult, and a bad joke. I’m still mindblown by that Nintendo greenlit those releases, given how specific they are with other first-party game designs
IIRC BOTW was built on MonolithSoft’s engine (the devs behind Xenoblade) so in fairness, those games are more-so the same exception rather than the rule. That said, even without the comparison, GameFreak clearly did not properly optimize the Pokemon games on switch, with stuff like loading the whole map’s ocean at any given time.
also mr masuda said he was tired of pokemon in general, and will make this slop, this was all the way back sword and shield, when he shocked everyone about the half the dex being left out.
Dammit, I was going to make a joke about how Mario64 is blocky but was revolutionary at the time. Whereas gamefreak games are an inspiration, that ANYONE can make video games. Even if you’re 30 years behind the times.
Low bars for entry with high community trustworthiness, you can make a .ca account really easily and most lemmy users have a positive opinion of .ca and its users.
Nah you are right but they actually do, but valve has also always done that. Dunno why you are so hated but I think it has to do with epics exclusive deals
Valve has made an emasculatingly large amount of money this way. Following in the footsteps of Id Software, Valve has been very open with their development tools. I don’t know about the very earliest copies but the ZOMG GOTY edition of the original Half Life included its SDK on the disc. Counter Strike and Team Fortress started out as mods that Valve just…hired.
Releasing the tools to their customer base and then hiring the cream that rises to the top is a strategy I struggle to get mad at.
Thinking back, HL had a ridiculous quantity of high quality mods and TCs back in the day. Hell, Valve have even allowed HL to be remade and sold on steam.
Only a corporate officer that is fully enslaved by the lawyers of that corpo will not see how it’s good business when humans engage with your product. When gamers play and interact with your code. It’s pure folly to cite some trade war or corporate war with another corpo. No dude. Share with also other devs. Be a fucking human. You are not a corpo slave droid. I am so glad that valve is not publicly traded. Holy shit it must take a lot to be the leading company in this market and not bend to capitalist pressures
Yeah, as a resident Valve hater I agree it’s a weird thing to get angry over.
If there was anything to get angry over is that I bought this game in a box (stand alone because I was too broke for Orange Box!) with an understanding that it’s an online multiplayer shooter. Meaning, there are servers you join manually from a list, shoot at other guys for a bit and return to that server or not based on how good time it was. This functionality has been ripped out of the game and replaced with some weird algorithm. Before that Valve broke their own design promises of clear silhouettes which made the game less accessible. The game has been dead, riddled with bots farming in-game items that can be traded for real money that Valve added to the game because they could. If it was any other game I wouldn’t care but TF2 started out as an amazing game that was mangled beyond recognition by Valve greed.
They should have released TF2 source code this way 10 years ago. They’re probably doing this now because income from TF2 related items on Marketplace is laughably small compared to their other titles.
Yeah it was rough for a year or two there… but Valve did a massive banwave and now I’ve only seen a group of bots join my server twice in the last year, and we could kick them easily
I’m a Valve stan but it’s disgusting how they’ve abused and neglected TF2. It would unironically be significantly better if they just rolled back every change since 2016.
Jokes aside. It’s an interesting distinction to make. Even though the source code is freely available, it doesn’t mean developers have free reign to do anything they want like they could with open source software. Apart from special circumstances, everything made with the source code will still be mods.
You can’t do whatever you want with open source either. One big stipulation of copyleft licenses is the share-alike clause, which means you can’t make modifications and then decide your program is now closed-source, so it protects the code from being enclosed again.
I mean yes you can make whatever modifications you want, generally, but it’s not totally unrestricted.
Sort of, but those let you use the pre-existing codebase for each game as is. This lets you play with the inner workings. You could do something drastic like implant rollback netcode, add new classes, wild shit.
I would say the marketplace is a form of enshittification. They’re not burrowing headfirst into the shit like some platforms, but it’s an inevitable trend regardless.
Plus who knows what happens when gabe isn’t around any more. Best case scenario is he leaves the company to the workers as a co-op and then it has a chance to be a lasting legacy, but maybe it goes to someone who puts it up to be publicly traded and that’s game over.
The steam marketplace is an attempt to monetise the user base by creating a bunch of microtransactions and taking a cut for the store. They have created a speculative market, which is essentially gambling, and made it available to minors. This market is designed to exploit people’s psychological weaknesses.
Yes, users and devs get a cut too, and that’s better than some sites will do to you, but creating a market also has a bunch of externalities - extra problems that are offloaded onto other people and not borne by valve.
So suddenly we’ve got a bunch of scammers creating accounts to make money, which obviously can scam users, plus it generats spam, and it creates a need for user-hostile security. Now I can’t friend my kid’s account without spending money on it for instance,
Also there’s the item spam. Now when I get a notification I don’t know if it’s a community forum reply, or just more worthless junk in my inventory. The inventory could have just been a way to store game gifts and other things of actual value, now I never look at it because it’s just full of trash.
Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.
And like I said, it’s not as bad as other places. Steam is still the best distribution platform out there, but it has enshittified a little bit. It has to, because the interests of the owners and the interests of the users are fundamentally at odds - more money spent means more money for the owners.
Some of these are minor inconveniences, but that’s how enshittification happens. It’s little, creeping annoyances that get worse and worse until it starts to make people look for alternatives.
Ok, maybe my definition of enshittification is off then. I thought it was when some company offers some product/service for a certain price (or free), then gradually removes features from that product/service while increasing the price. Am I off?
If that definition is right, I don’t understand how the steam marketplace, a completely optional (borderline tangential) part of the steam platform, qualifies as enshittification.
And I’m not trying to defend the steam marketplace, I think it’s stupid and terrible and at minimum needs age restrictions. But like, you can absolutely just not use it and your experience using the steam platform is totally unaffected.
That’s one way it happens, but in general the term appears to be about decline in quality for the purposes of profit-seeking, regardless of whether services were offered for free or not.
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Other articles I looked at seem to agree with this basic concept.
And like I said, spam from scammers and inbox spam are examples of shittiness that seep in regardless of if you engage or not. There is no “no marketplace plz” option, and even if there were scammers can still send you friend request spam.
Eh, maybe I’m being pedantic, but I still don’t really see how the addition of the steam marketplace is an example of the steam platform declining in quality. It was a feature that they added a long time ago, and it doesn’t interfere with or worsen the experience of buying, organizing, or playing my video games. Sure it’s a needless addition (in our opinions), but one that I can easily ignore because it’s so isolated from the main product. Plenty of other products and services out there have features that some don’t like or don’t use, but that isn’t the same thing as enshittification. And I feel like the spam would happen regardless of if the marketplace was there or not. That feels more like a moderation problem, not an enshittification problem.
Sure, if you ignore the worst parts of it that I explicitly laid out and only focus on how it makes you feel personally, then I can see how you might feel that way.
I’m not ignoring anything, I just don’t agree that the steam marketplace, and all the stuff you’re talking about related to the steam marketplace, fits either of our definitions of enshittification.
Okay, I don’t understand how and you haven’t explained it, you’ve just said that you don’t personally care about it, which isn’t an argument I can respond to. You’re free to have your opinion, but I don’t see how it’s relevant here.
It was a feature that they added a long time ago, and it doesn’t interfere with or worsen the experience of buying, organizing, or playing my video games… Plenty of other products and services out there have features that some don’t like or don’t use, but that isn’t the same thing as enshittification.
Yes, you ignored the worst parts of it in favour of things you could dismiss for yourself, and then you ignored me pointing that out. I’m not going to keep explaining this to you any further.
The only one ignoring things is you. You’re ignoring my whole point. Which is that your personal bar for enshittification is lower than any of the definitions we’ve given in this thread, because it’s basically “anything I think is bad is enshittification”
Yes, I’m so angry and salty that I checks notes wrote a detailed and even-handed analysis of the situation with appropriate caveats. How dare I state facts with sources and explanations of my reasoning.
I’m just absolutely raging. It’s embarrassing, frankly. I’m making a fool of myself. I can’t believe I lost control like that and said words that I believe to be true. Who does that? Unhinged behaviour. Just wild. I should be banned.
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