Nintendo Pokemon Sword and Shield - Information Thread (Launching 11/15/19)

[CastlevaniaNut18]

I got my Eevee last night, since I had a Let's Go file.

[GameDadGrant]

4 minutes ago, Nokt said:

Well thats lame. I bought the new Switch and traded in pokemon because I don't play it.

What

 

I guess you could just rent Let’s Go (maybe from your local library?) and get the bonus that way.

 

Or ask your local game shop to test the game in your Switch and just make a save file. Then don’t buy the game, haha.

[johnny]

they don’t even let you evolve your lets go Pokémon. Pissed me off 

 

also my joycons are fucked. Had to order 3rd party ones. 

[GameDadGrant]

10 hours ago, johnny said:

also my joycons are fucked. Had to order 3rd party ones. 

Nintendo will fix ‘em for free. *shrugs*

[AlwaysDyingX]

This is my first Pokemon game. Seems aight. I haven't made it to the first gym yet but I think that is next for me 

[Ghost_MH]

14 hours ago, Biggie said:

Just realized you can use your Pokeball plus controller from Let’s Go! and take one of your Pokémon out for a walk. P’cool 

 

If you still have a Mew with it, you can transfer it to Sword and Shield instead of Let's Go.

[Slug]

I'm weak so I just picked this up (Shield).  I'll start it when I'm finished with DQXI.

[Pikachu]

Pokémon player beats Sword and Shield with nothing but a humble Wooloo

[Keyser_Soze]

15 minutes ago, Pikachu said:

Pokémon player beats Sword and Shield with nothing but a humble Wooloo

 

Not a hard accomplishment, these games are easier than dirt.

[Biggie]

FYI: If you don’t give your Pokémon nicknames (like me) there’s an option to turn it off completely so that the game doesn’t ask you every time if you want to assign a nickname. 

[Pikachu]

Pokémon Sword and Pokémon Shield Sales Exceed 6 Million Units Worldwide After Massive Launch Weekend

[Brick]

And thus, Gamefreak will never learn to innovate... 

[Xbob42]

2 hours ago, Brick said:

And thus, Gamefreak will never learn to innovate... 

Success is really good at teaching companies that they don't have to make a better product. We see it time and time again with long-running franchises. It makes sense from Game Freak's perspective; do less work, still make insane money. But any fan using sales numbers to defend inferior design is always just really sad. If you're gonna defend a lesser product, at least own some shares in the company so your position makes some sort of sense.

[Brick]

46 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

Success is really good at teaching companies that they don't have to make a better product. We see it time and time again with long-running franchises. It makes sense from Game Freak's perspective; do less work, still make insane money. But any fan using sales numbers to defend inferior design is always just really sad. If you're gonna defend a lesser product, at least own some shares in the company so your position makes some sort of sense.

 

I wonder if Nintendo would even give them more development time to make the major improvements. It seems that each new generation comes every three years, but how much more time would they need to make the next generation truly evolved (pun intended)? Six years? Would Nintendo, or even the bosses of Gamefreak allow that when Pokémon is such a money printing franchise, and people still seem complacent for these games to not take that extra time to make the major improvements, hence why they still sell millions upon millions, and still score 9s from sites like IGN and Gamespot? 

[Xbob42]

15 minutes ago, Brick said:

 

I wonder if Nintendo would even give them more development time to make the major improvements. It seems that each new generation comes every three years, but how much more time would they need to make the next generation truly evolved (pun intended)? Six years? Would Nintendo, or even the bosses of Gamefreak allow that when Pokémon is such a money printing franchise, and people still seem complacent for these games to not take that extra time to make the major improvements, hence why they still sell millions upon millions, and still score 9s from sites like IGN and Gamespot? 

I imagine their output could be of significantly higher quality and with mainline games coming more often if they didn't constantly make remakes of older titles or re-releases with middling additions. On the other hand, they could expand their team and spend some of the tens of billions of dollars the franchise makes them, or even make one or more additional teams to handle the mid-cycle games, if they don't already. They not only made Little Town Hero at the same time as Sword and Shield, they apparently were far more interested on working on that since it wasn't Pokemon, which I can easily see them being sick to death of making.

Worryingly, Little Town Hero also sucked ass, so maybe they just don't have the chops?

[Brick]

20 minutes ago, Xbob42 said:

I imagine their output could be of significantly higher quality and with mainline games coming more often if they didn't constantly make remakes of older titles or re-releases with middling additions. On the other hand, they could expand their team and spend some of the tens of billions of dollars the franchise makes them, or even make one or more additional teams to handle the mid-cycle games, if they don't already. They not only made Little Town Hero at the same time as Sword and Shield, they apparently were far more interested on working on that since it wasn't Pokemon, which I can easily see them being sick to death of making.

Worryingly, Little Town Hero also sucked ass, so maybe they just don't have the chops?

 

If anything they should have just had Little Town Hero this year, and have Pokémon next year, or vice versa, and perhaps both games would be better. I won't begrudge them if they're getting tired of making Pokémon constantly (I feel bad for developers that get locked into only making one series with no freedom to experiment with other ideas, like the CoD developers for example), but aren't they split between the independent Gamefreak, and The Pokémon Company, which is co-owned by them and Nintendo, and it's that team that makes each Pokémon game? 

 

As for lacking the chops, I think it's quite obvious at this point that they are severally behind in various areas. I get they're more used to smaller handheld experiences, and using sprites, but if you're making a big tech jump, like to 3D, hire more people with the knowledge, experience, and skill to help out with that. I read that they have separate MODELS for each shiny variation for each Pokémon. Models. Not a different texture, an entirely new model. That is not only unnecessary, but stupid. It creates so much bloat in the files with unnecessary data, making them bigger than they need to be. Add to that the bad sound design (lack of ambient around effects, no voice acting or even voice sounds like we get in Zelda, and the poor quality midi tracks for the cries of the Pokémon instead of them saying their names, or making animal-like noises), and it's clear that Gamefreak is still developing these games as if they're still 2D sprite based handheld games. 

[Xbob42]

Oh, that much is definitely true. They appear to be in over their heads in many ways. I do feel bad for them having to make Pokemon forever, but like I said, get a new team and have them trained by the current Pokemon veterans while they work on projects they've been dreaming up for two decades. I'd be happy to see them trying more games like Little Town Hero even if it wasn't great, taking chances is something I approve of, far more than sticking with the same formula forever.

 

You know, I had no idea they used separate models for shinies, that makes what they said about remaking each Pokemon from scratch despite having identical models to the 3DS versions (like, wireframes overlapping perfectly identical, no changes at all) make a little more sense. Now I'm just picturing some dude printing out a wireframe of the 3DS model and recreating it instead of importing it or something.  

[TwinIon]

The more I think about it, the thing that shocks me most about their lack of ambition isn’t that you have games like Sword/Shield that follow the same old formula to a T without any innovation or modernization, it’s that they don’t also have separate projects that do try those things. They have a whole generation of gamers that grew up with these games that would very likely consume riffs on the franchise.  Obviously the old formula still works and sells millions, so I guess you just keep putting in the same lazy energy and put out the same lazy games. Anyone who doesn’t do that is probably foolish when there is a fortune to be made in doing so. But they’ve literally created their own market, and one of their licensed offshoots went on to be the most played game in the world for a time. Why the hell don’t you throw some money another dev and see what happens?

 

After playing Spider-man PS4 and Fallen Order it think it would be incredible to see what a dev like those could do with Pokemon.

 

Then again, after playing WoW 1.0 it seemed obvious and inevitable that there would be a Pokemon MMO. There probably still should be, but if they don’t have the ambition to do a decent single player title, they’re not going to do that.

[Brick]

Pokémon would actually probably benefit having a game that did the whole live service thing. 

[GameDadGrant]

[Brick]

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/pokemon-total-user-experience-overhaul/

[johnny]

Got through the endgame phase. Really liked changing up the elite 4 part, as in, there’s not more elite 4. The feel of an actual tournament is way cooler. 

[Xbob42]

9 hours ago, GameDadGrant said:

Ah yes, the "people criticizing a game I like are trying to oppress me and steal my fun" angle. It's always funny when people take game criticism personally and assume they're being told to not have fun. Let's all willfully ignore flaws and never complain about them because it would... Shatter the illusion or something? If you're having fun now, imagine if the game actually had some effort and expertise put into it!

 

Nah, better to have everyone nod and vaguely agree how good it is. Very interesting discussions that are totally worth having.

[GameDadGrant]

@Xbob42

 

Ha ha, no worries man. I’m not feeling personally attacked or anything. I stumbled across that comic? Meme? Recently and thought it fit the discussion at the time. Sorry if it felt like *I* was attacking *you* - just wanted to share a joke.

 

And sure, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to this game...or any game, for that matter. Let’s not overlook all the great new things this latest iteration of PKMN does do, though. Maybe I’ll detail them later on when I have more time. 
 

Cheers!

[Biggie]

4 hours ago, Xbob42 said:

Ah yes, the "people criticizing a game I like are trying to oppress me and steal my fun" angle. It's always funny when people take game criticism personally and assume they're being told to not have fun. Let's all willfully ignore flaws and never complain about them because it would... Shatter the illusion or something? If you're having fun now, imagine if the game actually had some effort and expertise put into it!

 

Nah, better to have everyone nod and vaguely agree how good it is. Very interesting discussions that are totally worth having.

[Xbob42]

4 hours ago, GameDadGrant said:

@Xbob42

 

Ha ha, no worries man. I’m not feeling personally attacked or anything. I stumbled across that comic? Meme? Recently and thought it fit the discussion at the time. Sorry if it felt like *I* was attacking *you* - just wanted to share a joke.

 

And sure, there are a lot of improvements that could be made to this game...or any game, for that matter. Let’s not overlook all the great new things this latest iteration of PKMN does do, though. Maybe I’ll detail them later on when I have more time. 
 

Cheers!

Oh I don't take it as an attack, I just find the "don't steal my fun away because apparently saying negative things means you're having a bad time" argument to be played out to death. Apparently people think you can have a bad time or a good time but no in-between, reminds me of every single negative aspect of American culture. Nuance and important discussion is lost in favor of one-liners, memes and people being unwilling to engage any subject from a vantage point that isn't either totally for or totally against something, with the closest thing to a middle ground being finding something mediocre. I think people who don't want to hear the negatives of the things they enjoy and only want positive reinforcement for their purchases are better off just saying what they like to a parrot, then they'll always hear exactly what they want.

3 hours ago, Biggie said:

Like this.

 

In any case I don't let the negatives get in the way of the positives unless they overlap. Raids are a cool idea and can be super fun at high difficulty, the music is easily some of the best in the series, the QoL improvements are numerous and very welcome, the wild area, while not perfect, is fun to explore in, though I thought there'd be like 5 of them. The bike being amphibious is amazing and makes getting into water super fast, the cities all feel unique and distinct, your rival actually has something resembling character development, the gyms are all totally different, the new Pokemon designs are some of my favorite ever (Falinks rules) and the frame rate usually stays in the double digits!

[Brian]

There are series that grow with you and those that don’t. This is a don’t. 

[Keyser_Soze]

A co-worker of mine kinda made a point on the new pokemon designs, now they are just incorporating regular animals instead of an imaginative creature.

 

Like Pidove is just a pigeon

 

 

 

[Xbob42]

6 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

A co-worker of mine kinda made a point on the new pokemon designs, now they are just incorporating regular animals instead of an imaginative creature.

 

Like Pidove is just a pigeon

 

 

 

I mean it's not like the original was terribly creative. Rattata was just a palette swapped rat, and Ratticate was... like a hamster rat or something? Pidove's got his little heart theme going on. Geodude was a fucking rock with arms. Graveller was also a rock with arms. Voltorb and Electrode were just recycled Poke Balls, Seel and Dewgong don't even need explaining, Diglett was a turd coming out of an anus, Metapod was literally just a cocoon, Krabby and Kingler were just crabs, Butterfree just a butterfly, etc. The list goes on and on.

 

And on the other hand, we have Falinks, who is better than every other Pokemon:

 

[Ghost_MH]

1 hour ago, Xbob42 said:

I mean it's not like the original was terribly creative. Rattata was just a palette swapped rat, and Ratticate was... like a hamster rat or something? Pidove's got his little heart theme going on. Geodude was a fucking rock with arms. Graveller was also a rock with arms. Voltorb and Electrode were just recycled Poke Balls, Seel and Dewgong don't even need explaining, Diglett was a turd coming out of an anus, Metapod was literally just a cocoon, Krabby and Kingler were just crabs, Butterfree just a butterfly, etc. The list goes on and on.

 

And on the other hand, we have Falinks, who is better than every other Pokemon:

 

 

Every generation people complain about Pokemon designs not being original enough and that's just something can't be said from a franchise that started with Voltorb. Also, Falinks is an amazing Pokemon. Also also, can we talk about how horrifically hilarious the fossil Pokemon abominations are in this game?

[Brick]

Every generation has some Pokémon that aren't that super creative looking, but people hold Red and Blue up because of nostalgia. "Omg lol look at Pidove, and Fletchling, they're just birds!". What, and Pidgey wasn't also just a cartoon bird? 

[johnny]

57 minutes ago, Brick said:

Every generation has some Pokémon that aren't that super creative looking, but people hold Red and Blue up because of nostalgia. "Omg lol look at Pidove, and Fletchling, they're just birds!". What, and Pidgey wasn't also just a cartoon bird? 

scyther is still the coolest 

[GameDadGrant]

I just got my sixth badge tonight. This game is consuming my time, like...ridiculous. I’m loving the soundtrack, too.

[Biggie]

1 hour ago, GameDadGrant said:

I just got my sixth badge tonight. This game is consuming my time, like...ridiculous. I’m loving the soundtrack, too.

I love playing it on my new Lite.  So comfortable.  

[Xbob42]

1 hour ago, GameDadGrant said:

I just got my sixth badge tonight. This game is consuming my time, like...ridiculous. I’m loving the soundtrack, too.

Despite my bitching, I actually wrapped up the story last night. The last several gyms are like... 10 feet apart, it feels like. I kept up the pace of playing for probably one of the dumbest reasons: To keep ahead of this Nuzlocke I was watching, I didn't want to be spoiled since I liked the gym stuff more in this game.  Sadly, while the gyms are far more hype than ever before, owing largely to the excellent music, some elements kind of fall apart in the endgame. Namely content and production values, specifically in regards to the lack of voice acting.

 

To keep this from becoming my normal 72 paragraphs, I'll try to split it up so you get TWO walls of text!

 

The Good:

• The storyline is actually fairly interesting. Characters have actual personalities, and go through small arcs. Things happen to these people and they're legit different at the end than they are at the beginning, at least a few of them.
• The gyms, as mentioned, are way more hype than before. Great music, solid presentation, good seamless transition between gym leader talking and actually battling. The music changing depending on how many Pokemon you've taken down (resulting in the crowd chanting along for the final Pokemon along with a timed music cue to crescendo when the gym leader's final Pokemon pops out of the Pokeball, beautiful attention to detail for maximum result) and even if you've lost a Pokemon and are choosing another.
• The music in general is some of the best in the series, and I might even say the absolute best. I heard Toby Fox worked on the music in the game, and based on my first several hours, I figured he did the entire soundtrack. Turns out he only did the ending credits. That I could mistake Game Freak's music with Toby Fox's is a huge compliment to them, because I love his work.
• The Wild Area, while at first a little overwhelming, confusing and kind of weird, has so far kept the postgame interesting if for no other reason than the raid battles. It still feels like the world is living and going on instead of being frozen in time, which is why I usually stop playing Pokemon once the credits roll and I do the generally piddly postgame. How long this effect lasts I don't know, but I wish there were multiple wild areas. There appears to be only one. It's varied, but kind of in a cramped, bizarre way where it feels like 8 different biomes are a hundred feet apart. Overall I consider it a positive, though.
• Raid battles. This will be in the good and bad, however. The good is that they're fun and seeing that giant beam of purple and knowing it's something rare should get you excited almost every time. And that shiny Pokemon can show up, too? AND that they use online functionality to do raid event Pokemon? Great idea and great way to keep the area feeling fresh and alive, along with the weather system.
• The game is overall dramatically faster than previous titles and wastes a lot less of your time. Battle text seems snappier, evolutions happen in half the time, you don't have to worry about using special abilities to cut down tiny trees or any of that, your bike seamlessly goes into water once you upgrade it, there's no animation for fast travel so it's even faster, there's a dedicated Poke Ball button (I can't remember if this was in Sun & Moon) and numerous other minor upgrades such as being able to change your Pokemon's nicknames whenever you enter a Pokemon Center.
• The new Pokemon designs are largely fantastic. No complaints with the new generation from me, except maybe the starters are kind of boring.

 

The Bad:

• The production values seem to have a lot of cut corners that really hurt the game near the end, despite it also simultaneously being the most hype the series has been in terms of story and the road to becoming a champion. It's a case of, relative to older Pokemon games, it's fantastic, but relative to... well, anything else, it's woefully behind. No voice acting is hurt even further when one of the gym leaders is an emo/punk singer who has a cutscene where he's throwing a concert and is clearly singing (moving his mouth quite enthusiastically) and yet it's dead fucking silent except for some mild background music and the absurdly loud tapping of his foot. The scene was so bad I thought it was actually glitched. If you're not gonna have voice acting, maybe don't have a fucking singer as a gym leader. Maybe they had it planned at some point? There's weirdly a lout of what appears to be lip "syncing" in a basic sense, or at least mouth articulation, with closeups of faces, it feels like they wanted voice acting at some point but didn't get it, and the endgame in particular is far weaker than it could've been because of that. There's also part of an endgame cutscene that's literally a couple low resolution jpegs that I think only exist because they didn't want to render a city visible in the background in actual 3D. I can't think of any other reason when something like that doesn't happen anywhere else in the game. And no, it's not a flashback.
• The online features, while more robust than normal Pokemon, are fucking terribly implemented and unbelievably unreliable. The entire experience of doing a raid battle is a fucking slog. Hitting the button on the den, waiting for it to respond, then picking a Pokemon after you see what typing you're up against, then inviting others which sometimes brings people instantly and sometimes will go all 3 minutes without a single hit. Then you get into the fight and every single move takes a fucking eternity (it's 4 trainers vs 1 dynamax Pokemon) and this is especially annoying when at higher difficulties the enemy Pokemon can take like 3 turns in a row, so it's effectively 7 abilities every turn interspersed with "communicating" in a dedicated text box because apparently Nintendo games can't just seamlessly use online functionality like every other game in the last 30 years.
• The wild area in terms of performance. It runs bad when you're offline, and is also less fun. Turning online on makes it more fun and useful, but also makes it drop to the single digits constantly. You'll find that oftentimes the game will pause you after you activate a den or try to pick up an item until other trainers' avatars have loaded in, so it also feels like you're in a shitty 1990s MMO. The weather transitions are horrifically ugly.
• The overall UX. The series continues to improve each title, but it feels like a couple baby steps here and there when we need a good bike ride across town to get to where things need to be. The amount of buttons presses to accomplish basic actions is often ludicrous. The confirmation boxes for doing something like picking up an item are sometimes a single text box, and sometimes like 3, with the last one really holding on an item description or something. Or letting you know which bag pouch you put it in. Stupid stuff like that.
• The battle system is tried and true and mostly still boring as shit. They power through a lot of it with the hype of music and pomp, but I'd rather see it either get more complex in terms of more abilities/Pokemon out at once, or maybe incorporate some sort of ATB system, something to make it a little less rigid. It's always been rock-paper-scissors in turn-based form, which can just make battles feel resolved in your head instantly before the fighting even starts, which then makes the actual fight an unfun slog. Especially since they don't even go all the way with the rock-paper-scissors design, you can power through almost the entire campaign using nothing but your starter, regardless of which one it is. The game needs to really encourage switching things up and not just hitting your most powerful move every turn. This is a lot different in competitive play, but competitive play is irrelevant while you're going through the story and remains so for most people even after.
• Content production seems to have been an issue, and it's making me worry about the postgame. The gyms all feel really close to each other, the overall map feels really small and super linear, and one gym is literally a hallway, that is also the city, just with no stores or anything. Coincidentally it's also the gym with the singer, so they take a few potentially cool concepts and make the worst gym/town in the game.
• The shrunken roster isn't justified by any of the good in the game. It's just a net negative with no upside.
• I forgot something about online, it's handled via these weird fucking stamps which are basically automated Tweets, except there's no way to manually refresh them, unless "fetch new stamps" shows up, which it seemingly does randomly. So if you want to do max raids, and you check your stamps, you can get it to where the batch you got has no raids, or worse, it has like 6 of them and you try to enter each one and find out it already started so you can't enter because the online design is absolute trash, and then you just... wait? You can even restart the game and try to force new stamps and it'll just fucking stay blank for like 20 minutes. Who designed this?!?!?
• I think only a single character in the entire game so far has used 6 Pokemon, and that was the champion. This is always really disappointing for me. If you don't want the trainers between towns using 6 because it would take a long time to get through areas, sure. But after maybe the 2nd or 3rd gym, EVERY gym leader/high-end battle should be consist of 6v6, which leads me to my next issue...
• The game is just too damned easy. Pokemon isn't exactly notorious for being difficult, but not even having the penultimate battles consist of a proper 6v6 was just weak. You're always at a massive advantage of simply having more Pokemon. Wild Pokemon aren't a threat and I've casually caught over 200 (nearly half the dex) by just walking into them and chucking a single quick ball, which nets in full XP gains. The champion battle was like a massive difficulty spike simply because it seemed like it was the only one where my opponent was even trying, no wonder he's undefeated in this region. I don't need to be punished, but I also wouldn't mind an official Nuzlocke mode with customizable rulesets. Keep the 100% basic and normal mode for the 90%+ who'd want it, but let the remaining people get some thrills.
• Pokemon animations where it looks like someone is clicking on a model and moving their mouse up and down is not "improved animations." Trainer animations have been wildly improved in cases where they used unique animations instead of reusing ones from Sun and Moon, but it's called Pokemon, not Trainermon.