Game looks terrible. A game ported from Nintendo's last generation, inferior platform from 5 years ago... Aka. Breath of the Wild is technically more impressive.

I think we should all expect and demand better considering the insane revenue Pokemon brings in... End of the day we are human beings and we are very driven by our senses such as sight and sound.

MC kinda sucks but I'm all for Donald Duck!

Yup this pretty much sums it all up.

Bizarre to announce a fully open world game coming this year just after the semi-open world Arceus released. Stupid business decision as that will likely take millions of sales away from Arceus. It's also a sorta stifling decision for fans cuz we literally just got two pokemon games which is already crazy and now another one isn't far away.

But that said, super exciting to see that in a single year Pokemon is going from not having evolved the formula in 20+ years to semi-open world all the way to fully open world. I thought Arceus was a testing ground for open world Pokemon and so figured we might be waiting for a fully open world game until like 2024 or 2025. But I'd be more happy if say this summer they were like actually we really want open world pokemon to be amazing with no effort spared so we're delaying the game to like mid-'23. That'd give Pokemon gamers room to breathe, make sure gen 9 is shiny, and give Switch gamers a break cuz there's already too damn many great games coming out this year!

Why are people saying "fully open world"? Did I miss some information confirming this or are we just guessing from the trailer?

Gen 8, 2019

Gen 9, 2022

The game is described pretty explicitly as a fully open world on the official website

Oh now come on, everyone knows using visual aids in online arguments is CHEATING!

In all seriousness, the game does look like a substantial technical step up, but it could definitely stand a bit more polish.  I'm confident the performance will be cleaned up, but I do also hope beyond hope that there's voice acting.  Probably setting myself up for disappointment, but given Pokemon has decided to be dialogue heavy and how much more they animate their cutscenes when they do them, the silence is just really awkward.

I never said there wasn't an improvement over the prior entry, just that visually it's still poor regardless.

And also to be fair... There are instances of Sword and Shield that do look better than that cherry-picked shot too.

At the end of the day, the benchmark tends to be Breath of the Wild, it was a launch title, it was designed around Nintendo's previous generation platform... It was also 5 years ago.

A large issue with Game Freak is that they are not willing to knuckle down on their art style... If they go for a heavily stylized approach, the games would present far far far better.

So yes... A WiiU game from 2017 looks better than an unreleased Pokemon game in 2022 on Switch... And we shouldn't be happy about that, we should see clear improvements over launch games by now.

I get what you're saying but in fairness Monolith Soft is probably Nintendo's best or second best studio in terms of technical prowess and are given pretty much however much time they feel they need to make Xenoblade while Pokemon games are on a pretty strict timetable (unfortunately).

That's an odd image comparison though cause in the context of what that Pokemon image is showing, it's not bad.  And we can see the texture quality on the characters is much better than Arceus.  The grass approach reminds me a lot of Breath of the Wild or Dragon Quest XI.

In fact, looking at the screenshots, I feel Dragon Quest XI might be the most apt comparison?  Not quite as nice, but feels similar in a lot of ways.  This isn't a technical showpiece but there's a lot of upgrades I'm seeing over Arceus.  

Also, Sword and Shield could look better but typically when on the Routes, not the wild area.  So not really a good comparison.  The Wild Area typically did look like the image provided.

If you are expecting good visuals from game freak, sorry but keep waiting. The gameplay loop is more important and they are saying it's open world which they didn't even say for Arceus. This might not have any borders unlike arceus

-Pokemon is a handheld series before Switch, and Game Freak is slow to adapt the new techonogy.

-Wait till Pokemon gen 10 to see more improments then.