Dcubed

The thing is though, that Sword & Shield were already heading in this direction with the Wild Areas. Legends is simply the logical conclusion of that pathway. TPC even said that this is the next big step forward for the series in the Pokemon Presents video. Why should we doubt what they are saying here? And open worlds like this are much easier to make and design than traditional, handcrafted environments. Considering how much of a disaster of a time that Game Freak had making Sword/Shield? It makes sense that they would abandon the old approach in favour of the industry's current favourite trend. It's just much easier to make an open world game like this, where most parts of the environment are copy/pasted and procedurally generated; and you don't need to spend so much development time & effort on bespoke environments, assets & gameplay. This is what people want these days anyway, nobody appreciated what Sword/Shield even did anyway. The only reason why they would return to making traditional Pokemon games at this point is if Legends turns out to be a sales disaster... which will not happen. This game has 30+ million seller written all over it. Great news for everyone who loves these Ubisoft-esc open world games. Horrible news for those of us that can't stand them. All remakes. The only future that the Zelda series has is open world now. That, of course, doesn't proclude remakes & remasters of older titles; but new games that follow the traditional handcrafted mold? Forget it. You will never see them again. They're just too expensive & difficult to make in today's world, something that even Nintendo admitted during the BOTW GDQ post-mortem. The Last Guardian is probably the closest thing that we have to a traditional Zelda style game that was made for a HD console, and that took around 10 years to make! The same thing is now about to happen to Pokemon. We will still get remakes, but new games? Forget it. Sword/Shield was such a disastrous production that it pushed Game Freak to making a BOTW clone instead, and that'll be the series' future moving forward.

Pokemon Snap is secretly a Star Fox spinoff in disguise... It's a surprisingly fun arcade score attack game!

This isn't a spinoff. It's the next mainline game; and the future of the mainline series as a whole. Traditional Pokemon games are dead & buried now outside of remakes... just like what happened to Zelda (which is very fitting considering how much of a massive BOTW knockoff this game is!).

Yeah, no kidding! Talk about creepy timing!

Fucking hell! That actually looks great! I'd buy that on console for sure!

They'll probably announce more stuff as the year goes on. That Pokemon Green cartridge means something dammit!!

Yeah. If this is really a shot for shot remake, with none of the new gameplay additions & mechanics you'd expect from a Game Freak made remade? Then what's the point of it? Who cares about just having the exact same game with a new coat of paint and nothing else? I really, really hope that the new graphics aren't all that this "remake" brings to the table... Even the most slavish of remakes should bring something new of value to the table; something that genuinely enhances the gameplay of the game that it is remaking!

This... isn’t how I imagined that things would go! Game Freak not making it? Outsourcing it to someone else? And making it a nigh on shot-for-shot remake? Well this was unexpected! It’s very unlike past remakes... It’s sticking slavishly close to the original, to the point where I do wonder if this is just literally the original DS game with a new lick of graphical paint. I do hope that it actually does have new & modern gameplay mechanics introduced into the game. Would be a real shame if Gen 4 didn’t get the same gameplay overhaul that past remakes got... but on the other hand? Taking this approach allows them to actually have a shot at recreating ALL of the original content in Gen 4 in the world of HD development, without having to make massive sacrifices to get the game out of the door. Not sure how to feel...

Well... err... this didn’t pan out how I was expecting!

So they’ve finally done it... they’re actually making Pokemon of The Wild? Hard pass.

Yup. This was part of the Ransomware leak. Seems that everything in the Ransomware leak is real. Has been delayed mind you, was originally supposed to come out 6 months after the Switch version. It’s PC & Switch only. The ransomware leak made no mention of any other platform. Either way, it doesn’t matter. Switch is the only platform that can provide local wireless multiplayer, which makes the choice of platform an absolute no brainer for me.

Damn, it’s even worse than we were expecting... Japan Studio is basically totally dead outside of Team Asobo... Wow. End of an era. Funny to think that Sony now only have two Japanese studios (Team Asobo & Polyphony) against Microsoft’s one (Tango Gameworks). There really isn’t much to separate them anymore! Playstation is basically just Xbox now. It’s a western company for western gamers only.

Right on cue. Return of Sinnoh. Let's... appear!

Whelp! That's the next GQTDM thread sorted then!

Really cool interview with Kevin Bayliss, the lead artist on Dinosaur Planet/Star Fox Adventures... https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/opinion/dinosaur-planet-leak/amp/?__twitter_impression=true Some choice excerpts...

No, it’s a point about price

Awesome!! Was getting worried that it’s never happen after Vicarious Visions got dissolved into Blizzard. First proper portable THPS game since Sk8land on DS? Think so! Perfect portable game!

I don’t really have the time to go into a deep dive on Skyward Sword’s level design myself; but Mark Brown gives a decent overview of Skyward Sword’s dungeons in an episode of Boss Keys... The overworld design though is remarkable as well; in how they blur the lines between dungeon & overworld, in how they eschew the need for obvious landmarking & player funnelling yet you never end up feeling completely lost, in how the various puzzles & challenges you need to accomplish within can be tackled in multiple ways, in how the same environments can be rejigged & repurposed for a variety of different gameplay types, and in how there are just SO MANY different gameplay mechanics/puzzles/challenges packed into every corner of every map! The best word I can use to describe Skyward Sword’s level design is dense. There is a ridiculous amount of gameplay & gameplay variety packed into every single map! It’s basically like a 3D Minish Cap (which has a similar approach to its level design; especially with its shortcuts - and what a surprise! Was also directed by the same person!); which too, traded breadth for depth. It’s brilliant, the micro level of detail in its level design is staggering! Nothing is placed or designed without purpose in this game. And it is the exact polar opposite of BOTW in terms of design philosophy.

Yes. Shiver Star is Earth following a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter... In short?

SMW is far too easy. You have too much air control and the cape basically trivialises most of the game. The level design is generally really creative and interesting, but outside of a few select levels? It lacks bite. Make all of her non-cutscene & story/progression related pop up appearances optional. Also remove the Fi advice icon indicator from the screen after 5 seconds if it the Fi button is not pressed by the player; add in an option on the pause menu to read past Fi messages that the player can choose at their leisure if they later decide that they want the advice after all. Also, text speed options are a must! At least have an option for fast text; or allow the player to fill out a text box immediately by pressing A.

By the standards of previous Zeldas? Sure. You could describe the overworld as "barren". And yet, BOTW doesn't get any flack for this, despite having not even a fraction of interesting things to find and do as in Twilight Princess within its complete wasteland of an overworld. The point I'm making here is about relative comparison. People's perspectives on Twilight Princess' overworld have changed in recent years because it's closer to what people are looking for in today's games. Breadth over depth. BOTW doesn't suffer from this comparison because it is in-line with modern game design trends within the industry at large. Meanwhile, Skyward Sword is basically as far away from modern open world game design trends as you can possibly get... As such, it's not surprising that people are much less kind to SS. This notion is absurd. Zelda games are held to a higher standard than basically any other game series out there, with even the tiniest of nitpicks blown massively out of proportion. Even the worst Zelda game is better than 99% of other games out there!

The way you fight it is different each time though. One of Skyward Sword's main design philosophies is about taking your knowledge of an existing space and using it to craft different types of gameplay; or even turning it on its head entierly and using it against you. This is why the game has you return to previous areas so often; with huge changes made to the environment on each visit. The Silent Realms only work the way they do because you are made intimately familiar with the areas themselves throughout the game; so the gameplay becomes focused around using your existing knowledge of the area to figure out how (there's the "how" again!) to get around to each of the tears of light without getting spotted/killed. Likewise, the same can be said of the other, similar, events throughout the game (Tadtones, Eldin Volcano being turned into a stealth mission etc); they all take advantage of your familiarity with the existing areas. If you were just chucked into a brand new area that you were unfamiliar with and asked to do the Silent Realm challenge? It'd be enormously frustrating trial & error gameplay that would feel unfair. The repeated boss fights are built around the same concept. Taking your knowledge of an existing boss encounter and using it against you by throwing new wrinkles into the mix each time. In essence, it's the same kind of appeal that makes a randomiser fun I suppose. Taking advantage of your existing knowledge and using it to craft new experiences that require you to re-interpret what you knew before... No wonder I love randomisers!

They always have been though. That has been their philosophy since the very beginning (though admittedly much less so these days - as they are now starting to follow industry trends more and are focusing more on the "what" and "why" with games like BOTW and Mario Odyssey; as the "how" gets pushed more and more into the background as even perfunctury in some cases - Age of Calamity springs to mind as perhaps the most obvious example; where the game is sold almost entierly on the notion of fleshing out the story, characters and world of BOTW, rather than its fairly rote gameplay). Me personally? I hate this ongoing trend. The "how" is, by far, the most interesting part of a game to me; and it saddens me to see this become less and less of a factor worth looking at with Nintendo's Switch releases. Why should I give a shit about your "impressive" huge open world with tons of AAA voice acted cutscenes if there is fuck all interesting to actually do in that world? You could cut out the entierty of BOTW's world outside of The Great Plataeu and 99% of its gameplay/"how" would still be intact. Skyward Sword is one of my favourite games because it is focused so much on the "how"; with some of the most utterly sensationally fantastic level design I've ever seen in a game.

Yeah, I agree with the general sentiment that they need to speed things up. There's a lot of unneccessary tutorialising and things that slow down the game that could stand to be streamlined. As for the repeated boss fights? I doubt that they'd change them, but they could distinguish them a bit more. The idea behind them is to take something you're already familiar with and to have you approach it in a new way (which is the way that the entire world is designed; each area is designed in such a way that the experience changes drastically throughout the game and turns your existing knowledge against you); so finding more wrinkles to throw in could make those boss fights even better.

Another thing that irritates me is just how divorced from context the decisions made regarding Skyward Sword's structure that the discorse has become. Skyward Sword's world design was a direct response to critisism made regarding Twilight Princess. Looking back on that game, the idea that TP's world could be considered "barren" today is absolutely laughable, considering how "small" and dense it is compared to the open world games of today; but that was indeed the overriding discourse at the time. Twilight Princess' main point of comparison back then was TES4: Oblivion; but open world RPGs simply weren't in vogue like they are today, and traditional "linear" games were still very popular. As Skyward Sword was coming to be though? It had the unfortunate timing of coming out alongside TES5: Skyrim, which absolutely exploded the popularity of open world games (while the Assassin's Creed games also steadily grew in popularity); with GTA 5 and Minecraft firmly solidifying open worlds as "The Future" of all video games. By comparison? Skyward Sword looked like a dinosaur, a game made completely out of its time. And as the industry trends firmly shifted over almost entierly to the open world formula, so too did people's tastes. All of a sudden, people no longer appreciated quality level design anymore (well; I mean, level design has never truly been understood or appreciated by the masses, but any notion of it was firmly chucked out of the window now!). All people wanted was the Gee Whiz factor of a massive world that stretched as far as the eye could see. Surprise surprise, Twilight Princess suddenly garnered a LOT more respect than it did upon release; and now everybody turned against Skyward Sword. Skyward Sword's linearity was designed to directly address the critisism surrounding Twilight Princess. Smaller and denser was the order of the day here; but that just so happened to come about precisely when people wanted their butter spread over 1,000 slices of bread instead. And though Aonuma has always gone out of his way to listen to feedback (arguably too much) when designing new entries in the series? BOTW wasn't just a matter of listening to feedback... It did something that Nintendo normally prides itself on never doing... ... it directly chased industry trends... So it's no wonder why BOTW is so beloved now. It just did what all the popular games of the time were doing. And that's why it doesn't suffer from The Zelda Cycle like how all the other entries in the series did. But Skyward Sword's linearity wasn't a matter of Nintendo being "outdated" or "out of touch"; it actually came from listening too closely to feedback if anything else! Small and dense is NOT a bad thing! It might be the polar opposite of what is hip and trendy today, but it makes for a FAR more interesting and compelling game overall.