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Game Developers on Pokemon SwSh Pokedex Cuts: "I'm Surprised They Didn't Cut It Years Ago" [USgamer]
- Thread starter Lady Bow
- Start date
Sakurai IS a workaholic.
It's not an argument or anything, the guy worked himself to injury before.
It's a documented fact that he usually goes beyond the reasonable to meet the standard he impose on himself.
For ill or for good, that's how SSB games are made and why they are the way they are in the same way a director shape the product he's making.
It's unreasonable that this still keeps happening and it's beyond shitty to expect anyone to do the same.
Don't be silly, of course he doesn't do it by himself.
Of course, Pikmins also give a hand
I guess tone doesn't translate well.
It's a game breaking glitch and probably one of the reasons they cut the 3D features in their games.
Heck they shipped X/Y with a gamebreaking bug forbidding player from saving anywhere the wanted, it's not that they're bad at making games, it's really that the constraint they ship the games under is rather demanding.
I don't think anyone ever ship an incomplete or buggy game because they don't give a shit or something.
I mean no, Games as a service have secondary revenue models in place...otherwise its just post launch support
sea of thieves and no mans sky come to mind as games that have recieved an insane amount of free post launch support, but I'd argue them being a 'service game' more that they took the time to realize the vision of what those games were meant to be through patching and/or added content. thats more an optional definition i suppose, but either way the rough launches and receptions of those games illustrated they needed to keep the team full time working to improve their product
very few games continue the kind of post launch support you're talking about, especially when we are talking bout having a secondary studio cranking out literal content to be added back into the main game free of charge, not unheard of but in general the 'good word of mouth' sales of future content or updates, dont make the kinda profit that you might think it does, but then again neither does paid DLC expansions anymore so what can ya do
sell some dances for those pokemon and ya got urself an excuse to get that extra time and money to produce tho...
But invest in what?
I think I'll raise eyebrows by saying that, but if they want to be able to scale the human animation process with the number of creatures, one path to follow would be to invest into AI-assisted animations. The R&D would take years to produce something passable though, but recent research showed a lot of promises on physics-based, learning-based animations that adapts on terrain and other parameters. It's probably the kind of experiment that they could start researching in spin-offs before integrating in the main games.
I wish I was good enough to start a thesis in that domain. As a programmer it's a very exciting prospect, that in the near future, a monster-collecting competitor with designs generation powered by AI will someday rise.
(I'd understand that animators would wince at the idea though, but quantity over quality might be a selling point sometimes.)
I said this exact shit as an animator when this whole thing came up.
If it wasn't a pokemon game, with that level of history and expectation, theres no way in hell any dev would say "Lets animate 900 different creatures with walking, running, idling, multiple attack animations, hit reactions, spawn animations death animations...." its madness. Absolute insanity.
Something had to break eventually, and going to HD was the breaking point. Thats why they started with a remake of Yellow. Thats why they had to cut back the pokedex dramatically
If it wasn't a pokemon game, with that level of history and expectation, theres no way in hell any dev would say "Lets animate 900 different creatures with walking, running, idling, multiple attack animations, hit reactions, spawn animations death animations...." its madness. Absolute insanity.
Something had to break eventually, and going to HD was the breaking point. Thats why they started with a remake of Yellow. Thats why they had to cut back the pokedex dramatically
Well obviously it won't be 80% heck, over 200 have already been confirmed (Assuming all evolution lines are in...)
Thing is, everyone's going to have different favourites. For some, maybe all their favourites get in, for others, maybe half get in, some might only get 1 of their old favourites in. We don't know until the game is out.
Come on, that was very clearly a facetious post.
Is this what the "/s" tag has done to us internet? Are we so reliant on people labeling their jokes now that we can't read obviously tounge-and-cheek posts like that without pulling out the "lol triggered."
This still doesn't explain why Masuda decided that every game from now on will rotate the Pokemon selection. They definitely won't change engine anymore so what's stopping them from making the remaining models and add them to the already existing ones?
Yea. I understand the point and I do get the anger especially for people who have saved these Pokemon for years and years.
GameFreak made a new engine for SwSh but they probably won't make another one for Gen 9 (XY/ORAS/USUM use the same one)
As long as they keep developing for Switch, it will remain the same.
Or not.
Maybe the next project they're working on will show them that they need to rework the engine in a way that means the rigging breaks if you try to just them as is.
Game development doesn't work like that, it's pretty clear that they improved the engine from gen VI->gen VII as well it doesn't specifically means that they just dumped their files from one project to another and called it a day too.
Sometimes new systems need to be added, take Lunala one of the cover legendaries of genVII.
the model have a changing shape going for it to get the stars texture going.
If that is not something they planned for GenVI, that means part of the rendering had to be rewritten for genVII and so that means that maybe they had to modify the data for the models of the existing pokemons so that it wouldn't break.
Also because 2 games look similar doesn't mean that they share the same engine.
Famous example : Secret of Mana and Secret of Evermore by Squaresoft do not share code at all.
The latter was just made to look like the former.
Where does this 200 number come from?
By googling, some article say "less than 200 confirmed" (without being clear about what is being confirmed there), another unclearly says that the "number could already be well over 200".
200 old Pokémon is roughly 25% of the existing Pokémon.
Edit: I added up mentally the evolution lines from the list of encountered Pokémon in the second article, bringing me to at least ~151 old Pokémon "confirmed" to be in. (the 151 is a coincidence and I might have made mistakes)
Have you never heard of Poe's law?
It's not the "/s" tag (which is useful), it's that there are so many extreme voices on the internet that it's impossible to distinguish them from parodies anymore without a special signifier.
Generally, it's good netiquette to avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks without signifier, when you are on a forum that can represent a multitude of views, that's not completely homogenous.
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Yeah. Typically this is far from a drag and drop situation. But its also not a complete throw out situation. This is a total guess but I'm gonna run with what they have and what they might be having to do with existing pokemon assets.
They will first have to to take the model and update the topology on it. Then as a result potentially update some of the textures a little bit or a lot. From there the rigs likely are pretty busted so they might be able to take the existing skeleton for the rig but have to essentially reattach it in most cases and then go through the whole process that goes along with that.
Then from there if they are adding new bones in for the rig or doing any significant changes to it they may or may not be able to use any existing animations they have. So likely from that they will be doing at least some level of animation work even for the best cases. In the worst cases they might be redoing the entire set of animations for that individual pokemon model.
This is a bit of an oversimplification (and a guess without knowing what inhouse tools they have) - but its certainly not a drag and drop. Its also not entirely a throw out either. But even with that its an unbelievable workload.
I'm not a game dev by any metric, but typically wouldn't a competent developer create tools while developing their first HD title that could be used to make it a bit easier to do what you've described? Like, if they had to do it with 151+ Megas in PLG, shouldn't that have informed their planning for SWSH because they would have a good idea what their workload was gonna be ahead of time?
Gen 4 was the best this series ever looked and if anyone wanna tell me it's not, I will fight you with knives.
Gen V did it even better. It was incredible the progress from DP to B2W2.
And what are you imagining that will be different in the next game?
If they decide to incorporate some of the missing Pokémon from SwSh, it will most likely be at the cost of some of the Pokémon that are already done, because whatever amount of Pokémon they're doing for SwSh must be the ideal number, so anything beyond that point would be insane and would put the balance of the game at risk.
I have no fucking clue how you could read the entire OP and basically say "lazy devs".
Jesus Christ.
Oh almost definitely. They almost undoubtedly have a lot of custom tools in place to make it easier. I imagine though when they initially discussed the workload for taking the models they had from the 3DS titles and putting it in a new engine, they would have realised early on that it was an impossible task. From there its hard to say what their plan is, ideally the tools they built with Lets Go and/or with this project can allow for better scalability over time, but at a certain point they had to make the choice to do this. Its hard to say how well the tools they are building for this will scale to another generation, cause it also kind of depends on what is done with the next generation.
For now though its probably safe to say that whatever they've done with Lets Go and Sword/Shield is going to make it easier for them going forward with future titles on the Switch, no doubt. But that workload wont go away.
Additionally as of note to complicate things you'll also often find that multiple projects (almost all the time with studios) aren't developed in a perfectly linear fashion. This is why you can end up with weird situations where on those yearly release franchises one of the games has certain improvements or things in it graphically that the next one just bizarrely doesn't have. Sometimes they made tools or improvements with their version of the engine that isn't easily translatable (at least not in the stage in development the other project might be in)
EDIT: one thing to note though that I had already mentioned on the previous page is that even with good tools the problem is the bespoke nature of everything. If you were dealing with Pokemon that were largely similar in terms of how they walked (either bipedal or quadrapeds) but had weird shapes, then sure this is more doable. It's the fact that all Pokemon are so different that you can't just easily automate the process in any way with tools. THAT'S what makes it so damn hard.
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This might work better as a defense if the schedule they've been working on hadn't been kind of insane. Game Freak have somehow managed to release mainline (or "mainline" in the case of Let's Go) Pokémon games at the fastest rate that they've ever managed, all while switching over to an HD console. Even on the GB and GBA they never managed to crank them out quite this fast. If anything, this should be the point where the pace of the games should be decelerating a bit, but Game Freak/TPC seem dead set on doing the opposite.
Do we have any actual evidence they made a new engine rather than just upgrading their existing one like they've been doing since the GBA? Seems to act too suspiciously similar to the 3DS games in places for it to actually be fully new.
Yeah.. They (and Creatures) made 721 HD models from scratch in 2 years.
Maybe so. The thing is this isn't like a unique occasion where they weren't able to include all the Pokémon just in these games, or that they couldn't find a way to somewow make it happen now, but everything will be back to normal in the following games. I think it's a decision they took just to avoid an eventual catastrophe when there's actually too many Pokémon to handle.
What I mean is I doubt there was a problem with some Pokémon in particular that couldn't be imported and updated or something like that. Even if everything went smoothly from the 3DS to the Switch, I'm almost sure they would've cut the Pokémon anyways.
We also were promised the missing Pokémon may appear in the future. So that means whatever they've done for the Pokémon that will appear in SwSh will be done for the missing Pokémon eventually, in other games. So they just needed to take more time, if they actually wanted to include everyone, like, it's definitely not an impossible task. But I doubt that was even in their plans if they were thinking about cutting Pokémon since SM.
It sure is something, huh.
This is what gets me. With X/Y they created over 700 high quality models completely from scratch, with no existing assets to fall back on. But now with Sword/Shield it's somehow a completely impossible and unreasonable task to just update the existing asset library, and anyone who suggests otherwise is an entitled armchair dev.
Some (technical) context from here:
If anyone is interested in how to deal with the files from dump, check this out. More stuff about this can be found on vg-resource.com
Of course we don't know (yet) what Sword & Shield is using, but it's probably the same engine and model formats as Let's Go. I would imagine they had problems due to changing formats (for the second time). Whether they really needed/benefited from doing that we can't say, but I sincerely doubt it. It seems to be a case of "not invented here syndrome" flowed by "let's rewrite everything" after the first format didn't work out so well...
If anyone is interested in how to deal with the files from dump, check this out. More stuff about this can be found on vg-resource.com
Of course we don't know (yet) what Sword & Shield is using, but it's probably the same engine and model formats as Let's Go. I would imagine they had problems due to changing formats (for the second time). Whether they really needed/benefited from doing that we can't say, but I sincerely doubt it. It seems to be a case of "not invented here syndrome" flowed by "let's rewrite everything" after the first format didn't work out so well...
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Are people just not old enough to have jobs? Yes having an unmanageable workload is a real thing.
The workload was unmanageable mainly because they've been setting increasingly unrealistic deadlines for themselves, though. Like, they actually spent more time developing these games when they were working on the DS than they did on 3DS and now Switch, and the games are clearly suffering for it.
Yeah that's one way to look at it. I think people would be just as pissed if pokemon were delayed this year significantly as well. Their choice seems to be to just move forward not having to worry about hundreds of pokemon at once. I don't think we'll see crazy results for it right away but to go with what you're saying, I can only imagine their 'self made' unmanageable workload will be eased and allow their available resources to be used in better ways.
I'm mainly replying to the people here who think that workloads can be infinite and time isnt an expendable resource.
Yeah, of course lol. Most people aren't angry that they are cutting Pokémon. They're angry about the cuts AND that we are still being served shit like Blastoise Hydro Pumping from his head. Don't care if it is GF, Nintendo, or TPC responsible, these games need more time in the oven and all three of those companies can afford it
I really look forward to seeing how long it takes modders to put back in all the missing mons. Can't imagine the reactions if it turns out to be relatively simple process and the results even come close to approaching the levels of quality found in galardex-mons.
It seems like you have trouble reading posts in this thread, I even said it was never lazy devs but game freak handling this whole situation like they have in such poor form and how people are blindly defending them is really bad as well.
It will take them about as long as it did to do the same with Let's Go.
Are we? I didn't even think Squirtle etc was confirmed for the games yet?
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We're actually overdue for a gap year. If they hadn't announced Sword and Shield super early, no one would have noticed if they waited until 2020.
If sciresm is serious about it, I give it less than a year from launch.
Same here, just vote with your wallet guys, if you don't like their decision then don't buy the game which i'm gonna do.
Yeah, like what was even the point to hype it so much? Maybe we could've had Let's Go Johto this year instead or something lol
No there's not. Up to Gen VII there were 809. So far some Pokémon from Gen VIII have been revealed, but I doubt they'll be more than 80 in total. Thus I don't think the grand total will be greater than 900.
It's the alternative forms of some Pokémon which some might consider as increasing the number to 1000. Some do change models, others are just different color schemes (like Deerling and Vivillon)
"It feels like gamefreaks doesn't want to put the work in"
I can read just fine, thanks.
i guess the "future proofing" they did with the XY models never took into account jumping to a HD console 2 gens ahead of the 3DS so soon. they probably expected another handheld with Vita-level power or less after the 3DS and not the Switch. guess it is indirectly another casualty of the failure of the Wii U.