What do you think of Game Freak's decision for Pokemon?

Started by the-pi-guy, Jun 17, 2019, 12:26 AM

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the-pi-guy

I know some people don't care so much, but lets talk about in the general case.

What do people think of Game Freak's decision to artifically limit which Pokemon are even playable?


Personally, while I have never gotten very far with collecting all the Pokemon in my life.  This despite having some titles where I put a good 100+ hours into, it's still something that I really enjoy trying to do.  

Despite not liking to cheat, I have even bought an action replay at one point so that I could get the really rare Pokemon that literally required going to an event for.  
And I even got the Game Cube disks (the free Jirachi gift, Colosseum, and XD) and played through all of them, mostly to get the cool pokemon.

I think the practical reason most people are upset about the decision is that their favorite pokemon might not make it into the game.  And a few of us awesome people are upset that "catch them all" isn't even possible.

Making Legendaries completely unattainable has already been a pet peeve of mine for the Pokemon series.  This is obviously worse.

Dr. Pezus

How do they limit the number? Haven't been following it much

the-pi-guy

How do they limit the number? Haven't been following it much
If you've played any other game after the second gen, when you basically finish the game you would get a "national pokedex" and you'd be able to get Pokemon beyond the original (between 150 and 400) pokemon.  

That isn't what will happen here.  So you'll be stuck with the original set of pokemon.  

If Game Freak comes out with another Pokemon game, and you want to trade your favorite over to your Pokemon Sword/Shield game, you won't be able to do it if that Pokemon isn't in the original Pokemon Sword/Shield Pokedex range.  

Legend

I personally don't care. It's just not how I play pokemon. Every game is a fresh start for me.

Beyond that, it just seems like such a needlessly complex feature to support. I fully agree with removing it.

With that said, the huge mistake on Game Freak's part is that while the vast majority of players wouldn't be affected by this, the feature was geared towards uber fans that really loved Pokemon. Devs shouldn't necessarily prioritise core players over casual players, but they should try to at least keep them happy. They should have been expecting some backlash.

kitler53

I personally don't care. It's just not how I play pokemon. Every game is a fresh start for me.

Beyond that, it just seems like such a needlessly complex feature to support. I fully agree with removing it.

With that said, the huge mistake on Game Freak's part is that while the vast majority of players wouldn't be affected by this, the feature was geared towards uber fans that really loved Pokemon. Devs shouldn't necessarily prioritise core players over casual players, but they should try to at least keep them happy. They should have been expecting some backlash.
not a pokemon player here.  don't really care about the hurt feeling pokemon fans have.  my perspective is one of a guy who's professional career is to develop software so all i see is a fudgy ridiculous acceptance criteria that seems un-maintainable.   so yeah, i agree with joebro here.

it just seems like a waste of development time to build, test, maintain code that will not be playable by a majority of the player base. 


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Cute Pikachu

Give it to nintendo EAD, or expand the team, or outsource more of the games. Cause they are limited.
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the-pi-guy

not a pokemon player here.  don't really care about the hurt feeling pokemon fans have.  my perspective is one of a guy who's professional career is to develop software so all i see is a fudgy ridiculous acceptance criteria that seems un-maintainable.   so yeah, i agree with joebro here.

it just seems like a waste of development time to build, test, maintain code that will not be playable by a majority of the player base.  
What would make the code un-maintainable?  

It's basically just a list of Pokemon.  I know the art and animation would be time consuming.

They could just have a generic "Pokemon" class that simply takes the important values from a file.  

There'd be no monster code base.  There'd be a fair sized database though, that would contain probably 1200 entries.  

kitler53

What would make the code un-maintainable?  

It's basically just a list of Pokemon.  I know the art and animation would be time consuming.

They could just have a generic "Pokemon" class that simply takes the important values from a file.  

There'd be no monster code base.  There'd be a fair sized database though, that would contain probably 1200 entries.  
okay, again i'll remind you i don't actually play pokemon so maybe my view has flaws but...

...the issue is the effort is inherently exponential.  you're not just supporting the list of pokemon,.. you're importing your character from the previous game so that means you are supporting their combat abilities too.  each of those combat abilities has an animation,.. most of those animations require the opponent pokemon to have the appropriate response animation as well.  the formula for N characters supporting M combat moves is:  (Nx(N-1) * M).  I think i'll use 6 for combat moves so only to show character growth:

N=10     ==> 10x(10-1)x6    =         540
N=50     ==> 50x(50-1)x6    =    14,700
N=100   ==> 100x(100-1)x6 =   59,400
N=200   ==> 200x(200-1)x6 = 238,800
N=400   ==> 400x(400-1)x6 = 957,600

these are the test case senarios you need to play test before you ship.  not i'm not sure my math is perfect,.. i think some combat spells can be shared across pokemon.  but i think you can see generally speaking how increase the character and combat ability count leads to an exponential amount of animations to create and play test.  if you have to support everything you ever created across multiple generations of games this quickly becomes un-maintainable.  

and i don't think there is any accident as to why this is the game in which they dropped this feature.   game after game after game released with people saying pokemon has had terrible effort put into graphics.  this particular game seems to finally have an updated graphics engine.  supporting character import probably means creating new animations for every pokemon that ever existed rather than being able to port the old animations.  they probably deemed the amount to work to be insurmountable.


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the-pi-guy

okay, again i'll remind you i don't actually play pokemon so maybe my view has flaws but...

...the issue is the effort is inherently exponential.  you're not just supporting the list of pokemon,.. you're importing your character from the previous game so that means you are supporting their combat abilities too.  each of those combat abilities has an animation,.. most of those animations require the opponent pokemon to have the appropriate response animation as well. the formula for N characters supporting M combat moves is:  (Nx(N-1) * M).  I think i'll use 6 for combat moves so only to show character growth:

N=10     ==> 10x(10-1)x6    =         540
N=50     ==> 50x(50-1)x6    =    14,700
N=100   ==> 100x(100-1)x6 =   59,400
N=200   ==> 200x(200-1)x6 = 238,800
N=400   ==> 400x(400-1)x6 = 957,600

these are the test case senarios you need to play test before you ship.  not i'm not sure my math is perfect,.. i think some combat spells can be shared across pokemon.  but i think you can see generally speaking how increase the character and combat ability count leads to an exponential amount of animations to create and play test.  if you have to support everything you ever created across multiple generations of games this quickly becomes un-maintainable.  

and i don't think there is any accident as to why this is the game in which they dropped this feature.   game after game after game released with people saying pokemon has had terrible effort put into graphics.  this particular game seems to finally have an updated graphics engine.  supporting character import probably means creating new animations for every pokemon that ever existed rather than being able to port the old animations.  they probably deemed the amount to work to be insurmountable.

I think you're actually giving Game Freak way too much credit here.  

This is the kind of stuff they've done in the past:


I doubt it'll be different in future games.  
As far as I know there's only 1 being attacked animation for each pokemon.  Even the attacking animations are often generic enough, that the same effects can be utilized for every pokemon that uses the same attack.  

Instead of exponential, it's more likely to be linear based off the number of pokemon and number of attacks.  (2 * # of pokemon) + # of attacks

Unless they really step stuff up here.