MindFreak

Got the keys to the house on Friday and have spent the time since then to fix it. Laying new floors, taking down stuff, removed a door opening, and getting the house ready for being painted. The painter starts (or maybe he even has started) now. So now the process has finally started and we are now packing down stuff. We got 100 moving boxes and I reckon we have filled about 30 or 40 now. I'm a bit worried that we didn't get enough!

It surprisingly wasn't announced - it came out of the blue yesterday.

Oh, I agree. It's mainly the liveliness of the city, the environments and the effects, i.e. the visuals. I don't particularly like the art style and the game is probably not very good. But it goes to show how a monster collecting game could look like.

That... would make very much sense.

This got revealed at Gamescom yesterday: It's currently not clear if this will come to Switch (probably not, though). If Legends: Arceus looked half as clean as this, noone would complain...

Niantic keeps the extended interaction radius! That's great news!

I'm leaning towards the basic as well. It'll most likely meet my requirements. It wouldn't change anything. You get to buy the computer anyways (it's like £80 for a three years old MacBook Pro - that's basically giving it away). Of courrse, you can always say no to buying it but due to the market values of MacBooks I figure that would be stupid. I'll certainly buy the one I currently have as we have no spare computer in the house and we just sometimes need one for both of us.

X-Com but with Marvel? It certainly raised my interest, even without any gameplay. I look forwarrd to seeing more of it.

I have to pick a new computer for work for the next three years. I currently have a top-end MacBook Pro 15" from late 2018 with 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD HDD and an Intel i7 core @ 2.2 GHz. A fine machine but battery is dying and keyboard is a bit weird (repeating key syndrome). Now, I can choose between three MacBook Pro 16"s: A Basic, a Premium and a Premium+. Basic is well, almost identical to my current machine except a better graphics cars (Radeon 5300M, 4 GB) and 1 TB SSD HHD. Fine machine but not much of an upgrade. Then Premium is the Basic but with 32 GB RAM instead of 16 GB, and Premium+ has an Intel i9 processor and an even better graphics card (Radeon 5500M, 8 GB). The catch is that while Basic is free for me, Premium costs about £10 a month for 36 months and Premium+ is £15 a month, 36 months. If I choose to end my employment, the money is wasted. If I go through another three years, I can buy the machines for almost nothing - but they have also cost me some money. I don't quite know what to choose. My current setup is just fine but I could do with more RAM. I just don't want to pay extra for those RAM - especially since I'm uncertain that I'll stay there for three more years. If I hadn't just bought a house, I would just pick the Premium+ as the money wouldn't matter but I do feel that I should try to save some money now that we are moving. So I'm at a bit of a loss.

It's a spiritual successor.

I agree. But I watched a minute or two of pop-ins before I got that far.

To be fair, most examples in that video is just programming gone wrong. The animations are fine.

Spider-man: No Way Home (Don't know if this is still phase 4...)

We also keep saying that Game Freak is developing one of the most popular gaming franchises in the history of gaming and should therefore also have more money, manpower and time to work on their games. But alas, they are governed by outside forces. I agree. I don't think Legends: Arceus looks that bad, and I'm sure the game will look just fine once it releases. I just want more content and a good story with varied side-quests and an interesting gameplay outside battles. True. The battles are an important aspect of the games. And therefore the animations are also important, but developing the animations shouldn't take focus away from developing the rest of the game. Which is what it feels like happened to Sword/Shield, which is a shame.

Yeah, you import animations for Pokémon A, B, C the same way. So once import work is set up for Pokémon A, then B and C follow the same "API", so to speak. I would then expect that there is an internal event that triggers an animation, and that event is the same for each Pokémon. Then there may be variations - a lot of ifs to trigger special animations and some heights and special attributes that need to be somehow programmed (but if a Pokémon is an object, you can set some special attributes). But yeah, I know that it isn't trivial in that sense and that it requires a lot of work. But this work is almost solely for battles so I expect that the team working on the core game - everything outside the battles - is larger and more capable of creating a diverse, immersive and interesting game. However, over the last generations, I haven't really seen that. I do also understand that this is probably not Game Freak's fault. TPC may give them too tight a leash and that is really too bad. I want them to spend more time on each game to get them out - when they keep releasing "new" games every year, fatigue is also starting to show with the player base. I'm always in doubt whether I actually want to play the next game in the series because I don't care for whatever gimmick they try to throw at me, I just want to wander around in a world with Pokémon and experience a great story within that world - and not a story where the sole purpose is to become the best. I hope that Arceus may deliver that to me!

Okay. My point is still valid, though. If they are working as most software companies do, though, they have a team allocated for animations and such. They should invest more in that team if there is so much work. And then the other teams, working with core gameplay, overworld, side-quests and actual content in the game should work on making the games actually good. If the majority of the company works on animations, they are prioritising in a weird way internally. I know that this stuff is important, and I remember the feeling I got when I played Pokémon Stadium and everything was brought to 3D - it was awesome! And the battles should look like that. But it shouldn't be what makes up 90 % of the work on a new game, if they do that, they are doing it wrong. I look forward to seeing more of Legends: Arceus, because I believe that is has the potential to be a really great take on the Pokémon franchise going forward, going away from grid-based routes and restricted areas and intro a more open world (which is not the genre open world - I can agree with @Glen-i on that many open-world games are just too empty with little to do (though I do enjoy Witcher 3 and BotW)).

Alright. I may have misunderstood but I thought @Glen-i said that Creatures were only doing the 3D models, not the animations. So if what you're saying is true, then awesome. I don't know much about importing 3D models into software but I would expect them to behave in more or less the same way. I'm not saying there is almost no work involved but I would expect it to be like "import one - the rest is trivial" kind of work. Then each attack should have an attribute that would trigger the right animation on each Pokémon (physical, special). Yeah, of course, QA is quite some work but that shouldn't occupy more than a few testers. And if this indeed takes up so much of their time, they should hire more people to do this stuff, or hire more people to focus on the core gameplay stuff, like adding content. Just to be clear, I am a software engineer myself so I have at least some insights into software development, even though it's in a totally different kind of business than games development. I think Legends: Arceus is the ambition we were all hoping Game Freak would have and I acknowledge that something went amiss with the development of SwSh, which were barren and boring. But we then get sad because what we've seen makes Legends: Arceus look a bit empty and shallow.

Well, physical space is not that much of a problem. Sure, it takes some space but the images can be compressed, and they can always go for a bigger cart if they need to. Loading the animations is not much of a problem either, as we've seen. My point is that spending development time on animations shouldn't take focus away from developing the core game and adding stuff to the core game. If that is the case, they should hire someone to do it for them (or hire more 3D artists).

Animation of Pokémon should and could (I hope) be outsourced. Software companies outsource more important stuff to places like India all the time. Game Freak could hire an external company to animate all existing Pokémon and then just focus on the new ones, meaning less work in the future. (Sure, shit happens like we saw with Sword and Shield where their previous work was wasted but that shouldn't happen again!) If Game Freak is occupied with all of those animations, they are focusing on the wrong part of game development, in my opinion. Furthermore, most people complain about lack of content and new things in the games.

A remaster of Quake has just been released on Switch. Gyro aiming, online, DLC and mods. £10.

We're nearing the date for the takeover of our new house - September 1st officially but the seller believes he can be out next week sometime. I just got home from a meeting with him, he has like 10 chairs and a dining table left along with a few small things. I'm just thinking, I can swing by during the weekend and help him out if that means I can get the keys on Monday! How can he spend a week moving so little? XD

Yeah, I believe I should play it! It looks good. It's on my wishlist and will be bought when a good offer comes around.

We got a new trailer yesterday from the Presents. I guess discussions should be in this thread instead of the Presents-thread: It's a much better trailer with much more substanse. It looks like there at least is something to do in the game but I want to know more about that. If you just roam the world and catch Pokémon, that may become a bit boring after a while. There is, however, an indication of a story with those red-eyed Pokémon. This trailer at least got my attention and has more details.

It's also very important for a game like Pokkén to be balanced to stay interesting. In Legends: Arceus, it's not that important and could be programmed much faster. But yeah, having an anime-like combat system would perhaps be asking too much of the game.