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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - New Pokémon Legends Arceus trailer

I mean yeah, it could definitely look better, but people gave Fire Emblem Three Houses a pass on its poor graphics, and Sword and Shield sold over 20 million copies while looking worse than this.

At least they're improving, however gradually.

I think the more important thing is that this looks like my far the most innovative main series entry in terms of gameplay and concept since the original Red/Blue nearly 30 years ago.



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Otter said:

Honestly the first Pokemon game that has grabbed my attention in a decade. Not as pretty as Snap but the gameplay formula looks great. Honestly, I think it'd do the game favours to delay it into the summer to polish visuals but I'll probably skip this entry and wait for more amvitious sequel (hopefully on new hardware). Extremely positive reviews may sway me but I think there are more promising games arriving 2022 that will make skipping this easy.

I am on the same boat. Exploration can fit nicely in the Pokemon universe, let's see how the handle the progression. You can certainly see some BotW inspirations like the looming Mount Fuji at the background. Still not sure about the period setting, the pokeballs seem funnily out of place... how do they work in the past but be filled with futuristic technology? Might wait for the next iteration as well, newer hardware could brute force Gamefreak to improve further the open world scope.



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As someone who remembers 'lego' hair and hexagonal wheels in the ps1/n64 era I'm really not fussed by the graphics. Surely nobody plays pokemon for graphics anyway??

Legends is the only spin off Pokemon title I've been interested in for many years, loved the music in the trailer too. Fingers crossed for decent gameplay/story!



IcaroRibeiro said:
Jumpin said:

That's not right, there are several excuses.

First, what you're saying about Kena isn't accurate. It's true, the core dev team is a small, a 29 person studio, but the bulk of the art budget is being handled by Sony and outsourced studio Sparx, which is nearly three times larger than all of Gamefreak combined. Additionally, PS5 is three and a half years newer than the Switch, runs on 200 watts while Switch maxes out at 18, and the console itself is about 115 times larger. There is a notable reason for the difference in graphical fidelity between the two consoles.

Then there is the creators of the game itself which likely includes long time Pokemon artist Ken Sugimori in creating Arceus. Maybe he and the team isn't interested in handing the art to another team. Who knows? Maybe they enjoy doing it to create their baby rather than adopting - not that there's anything wrong with adoption, it's just not for everyone.

That's three fairly big excuses right there.

It's possible for Game Freak to Sparx to do the art and make the game for PS5, but it's obvious why they don't want to.

The size of Sparx is a misguided-information. Well, they can now have everyone in this studio working on Kena? Of course. Are they though? I doubt. Once the game is finished and info about the staff working on the game we can possibly compare with Pokemon dev teams. Your stating PS5 specs is also misleading, as the game will be released on PS4

They are outsourcing Diamond and Pearl remakes so outsourcing isn't the problem here, more likely they just don't want to spend more money hiring a more skilled technical studio to make the models. On Sword and Shield (a game with lackluster graphics) the character modeling, motion designing and map development teams had at least 30 to 50 members each, while network, engine, field programming, UI and battle system teams had at best 8 members each. The message is clear, core programming can be done with small teams (it's a turn based JRPG with a simplistic engine after all), while graphics needs big teams and higher expenses and you can't really workaround those costs

Still, Pokemon Sword and Shield have a fairly big graphical team. For instance, the number of people working on graphics teams for Sword and Shield was about 120 people, you can check yourself. For instance, Immortal Fenyx rising is an open-world Zelda-like game that runs on Switch as had about 100 people working on graphics, animations and models, I found that here

So indeed, it's perfectly possible to make beautiful looking an open-world Switch game with a one hundred man staff. So the only one (truthful) excuses for Game Freak are:

1) They don't have the proper know-how to build high quality graphics and character modeling, and after half a decade working on games for Switch they still not learned because they don't care or are just plain incompetent

2) They don't want to increase the budget to make their games looks better hiring more skilled studios to do their jobs

I also wants to add, Sword and Shield had A THOUSAND people working on it. And not only 20% of them worked on the game itself the other were PR guys, localization workers, distribution, animation designers (for anime series/movies), product designs (for merchan), maybe the games looks ugly because the games themselves are just not their priority. 

Moot point, they don’t need to use all 400 of the staff for my point to be true and yours about them having only a small team to be false. And even if you believe they’re showing the PS4 footage instead of the PS5 footage, the PS4 is also considerably more powerful than the Switch.

And just because they’re outsourcing for a remaster of an already existing game, doesn’t mean Sugimori will to want to do the same thing for a new game with a new gameplay approach. Maybe this is the thing he wants to work on.

You brought up three more excuses in your response post:

* They don’t know how to make games look like PS5 graphics on the Switch

* They don’t want to dump tons of extra money on the game

* They can still make Arceus look better than a game that had “A THOUSAND” people working on it.

So we’re now up to SIX excuses… So much for there being “no excuses!”



I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.

Jumpin said:
IcaroRibeiro said:

The size of Sparx is a misguided-information. Well, they can now have everyone in this studio working on Kena? Of course. Are they though? I doubt. Once the game is finished and info about the staff working on the game we can possibly compare with Pokemon dev teams. Your stating PS5 specs is also misleading, as the game will be released on PS4

They are outsourcing Diamond and Pearl remakes so outsourcing isn't the problem here, more likely they just don't want to spend more money hiring a more skilled technical studio to make the models. On Sword and Shield (a game with lackluster graphics) the character modeling, motion designing and map development teams had at least 30 to 50 members each, while network, engine, field programming, UI and battle system teams had at best 8 members each. The message is clear, core programming can be done with small teams (it's a turn based JRPG with a simplistic engine after all), while graphics needs big teams and higher expenses and you can't really workaround those costs

Still, Pokemon Sword and Shield have a fairly big graphical team. For instance, the number of people working on graphics teams for Sword and Shield was about 120 people, you can check yourself. For instance, Immortal Fenyx rising is an open-world Zelda-like game that runs on Switch as had about 100 people working on graphics, animations and models, I found that here

So indeed, it's perfectly possible to make beautiful looking an open-world Switch game with a one hundred man staff. So the only one (truthful) excuses for Game Freak are:

1) They don't have the proper know-how to build high quality graphics and character modeling, and after half a decade working on games for Switch they still not learned because they don't care or are just plain incompetent

2) They don't want to increase the budget to make their games looks better hiring more skilled studios to do their jobs

I also wants to add, Sword and Shield had A THOUSAND people working on it. And not only 20% of them worked on the game itself the other were PR guys, localization workers, distribution, animation designers (for anime series/movies), product designs (for merchan), maybe the games looks ugly because the games themselves are just not their priority. 

Moot point, they don’t need to use all 400 of the staff for my point to be true and yours about them having only a small team to be false. And even if you believe they’re showing the PS4 footage instead of the PS5 footage, the PS4 is also considerably more powerful than the Switch.

And just because they’re outsourcing for a remaster of an already existing game, doesn’t mean Sugimori will to want to do the same thing for a new game with a new gameplay approach. Maybe this is the thing he wants to work on.

You brought up three more excuses in your response post:

* They don’t know how to make games look like PS5 graphics on the Switch

* They don’t want to dump tons of extra money on the game

* They can still make Arceus look better than a game that had “A THOUSAND” people working on it.

So we’re now up to SIX excuses… So much for there being “no excuses!”

Correction, there don't know how to make games with Switch* graphics to run on Switch, Arceus looks like worse than a launch PS3 game and is no improvement over Sword and Shield, which itself had a huge staff of coding noobs who just couldn't make a 30-minutes length exploration Wild Area to look acceptable and 2 years after this Wild Area they bring us an equally bad looking spin off title 

By no excuses I of course meant acceptable excuses. You tried to bring reasons to put Game Freak in a more positive light, when in reality they are just incompetent developers (on technical side) who choose to spend their money with marketing and media instead of games. Of course they are entitled to do whatever they want and I'm entitled to disapprove this approach, it is what it is

 



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The textures look like a PS2 games.... they need to spend more time on this stuff.
The shimmering and artifacts (from poor AA or lack there off) is abit off putting too.

People that say, its the Switch holding them back... I dont buy it.
This is lazy devs or bad work, switch is capable of more than this, they just didnt put enough effort into makeing it look as good as it could.



JRPGfan said:

The textures look like a PS2 games.... they need to spend more time on this stuff.
The shimmering and artifacts (from poor AA or lack there off) is abit off putting too.

People that say, its the Switch holding them back... I dont buy it.
This is lazy devs or bad work, switch is capable of more than this, they just didnt put enough effort into makeing it look as good as it could.

I agree about the textures, but the lighting, colors and of course the size of the environment would be impossible for a PS2 to handle, that's why I used launch-PS3. Late PS3 games though looks far better than this 

And it's clear for me Switch isn't what is holding this back, not when we have Dragon Quest XI and Xenoblade 2 running on Switch

Game Freak spent 20 years making only handheld games, they don't have any background developing HD games and for some unknown reason they just refuse to hire more developers who could help bringing in a more modern skillset. It's kinda like they want to stretch every possible bit of profit and don't want to increase spending unless this directly translate to more money. Absolutely awful philosophy for an IT studio but I guess The Pokemon Company see themselves more like a Media company than a Technology company 

Pokemon also have a tight schedule, they need to have a steady influx of software because otherwise this will impact their media pipeline from anime, movies, toys, merchan. They even fully outsourced gen 4 remake because they are unable to handle this schedule with their small number of developers, Pokemon more than any other Nintendo IP looks more like an Ubisoft or EA franchise that have multiple releases each generation, that's why in HD gaming world they will never meet expectations as more than ever games take a while to make.



ah graphic whores



I am a Nintendo fanatic.

IcaroRibeiro said:
Jumpin said:

Moot point, they don’t need to use all 400 of the staff for my point to be true and yours about them having only a small team to be false. And even if you believe they’re showing the PS4 footage instead of the PS5 footage, the PS4 is also considerably more powerful than the Switch.

And just because they’re outsourcing for a remaster of an already existing game, doesn’t mean Sugimori will to want to do the same thing for a new game with a new gameplay approach. Maybe this is the thing he wants to work on.

You brought up three more excuses in your response post:

* They don’t know how to make games look like PS5 graphics on the Switch

* They don’t want to dump tons of extra money on the game

* They can still make Arceus look better than a game that had “A THOUSAND” people working on it.

So we’re now up to SIX excuses… So much for there being “no excuses!”

Correction, there don't know how to make games with Switch* graphics to run on Switch, Arceus looks like worse than a launch PS3 game and is no improvement over Sword and Shield

Eh, looks better than Sword and Shield to me; lighting is nicer, draw distance longer, the tall grass is better rendered, as are other things like water, trees, the particle effects for falling snow, etc, and all this with a big increase in scope.

Last edited by curl-6 - on 23 August 2021

curl-6 said:
IcaroRibeiro said:

Correction, there don't know how to make games with Switch* graphics to run on Switch, Arceus looks like worse than a launch PS3 game and is no improvement over Sword and Shield

Eh, looks better than Sword and Shield to me; lighting is nicer, draw distance longer, the ground has scattered short grass rather than just being a flat texture in S/S's wild area, the actual clumps of tall grass are better rendered, as are other things like water, trees, the particle effects for falling snow, etc, and all this with a big increase in scope.

Definitely more ambitious than the wild areas in S & S, more gemoetry, lighting, more convincing landscapes, far better grass. I think S & S looks a bit cleaner and that maybe Legends can burrow a bit more from it  & BOTW so it gives more of anime aesthetic, but that's just artistic choice. I'm sure due to open world nature including battle, Legends will have a few sacrifices here and there, including resolution of ground textures.