Nintendo apologizes for Pokémon performance problems, promises “improvements” | Hacker News Reader

Nintendo apologizes for Pokémon performance problems, promises “improvements”

arstechnica.com

48 pointsPaulHoule50 comments

I realize that Nintendo likely did not want to miss the holidays for Pokemon.

But I am still very surprised they allows this to ship, unless they have less control over Gamefreak than I thought? I know its a different company and another company controls Pokemon.

But I compare this to far more ambitious games, Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Bayonetta 3. That all run nearly perfect. I mean even at launch I can't remember there being any notable bugs in BoTW.

The only explanation I can think of is the sheer number of models in a pokemon game may be much higher than those games, but I am not sure.

For Nintendo, pokemon is more and more a bad look for them when compared to the rest of their games. Don't get me wrong I am enjoying the new game, but from a technical prospective it is just disappointing.

Nintendo is generally a lot more likely to delay games - they've done pretty major delays for BoTW 2, they restarted development on a metroid title, and so on.

Gamefreak and the Pokemon Company, on the other hand, need to have the games release on schedule to put out new animes, new merchandise, and so on. Nintendo doesn't see that profit, as far as I know, but it's really important to TPC, so I assume the release pressure comes from there.

> Nintendo is generally a lot more likely to delay games - they've done pretty major delays for BoTW 2, they restarted development on a metroid title, and so on.

That is something that keeps Nintendo games as largely day one purchases for me. I don't hesitate to preorder their next game because I (generally) know it will be quality. Even as bad as the Wii U fumbled, the games themselves were some of the best Nintendo games.

Yeah I can see on the Pokemon side that being complicated. But it does leave a mark on Nintendo's reputation. Especially for anyone not familiar with how it actually is setup and just thinks Pokemon == Nintendo (more or less).

I just feel like Nintendo needs to find a way to do something. Somehow, they have a majority stake in the pokemon company and I thought gamefreak.

BotW also had framerate problems that were fixed in an update after release. They just were limited to a few areas where it didn't hurt overall game enjoyment very much.

Was that on both consoles or just the Wii U or Switch?

I played on Switch and I feel like I don't remember that. But honestly I may have just not cared... I burned through that game. I could not put it down.

Regardless, if it was limited to a few areas and not basically as soon as you start the game I feel like it's much more forgivable. Especially for just how damn beautiful that game was.

I remember the Korok Forest in BOTW running at sub 20 fps back when I played it on Switch in handheld mode (I'm guessing at the fps). It was the only area I remember having performance issues, but there might have been other places.

Even emulated where my pc can run the game at upwards of 100fps at some points still drops to like 30 at Hyrule Castle

It's still bad in a few areas. I have one of the original Switches--the one that can be jailbroken.

I believe it was affecting both but it was much more noticeable on the wii u. it was mostly anywhere that had the fog effects going on that i saw it but even then it wasn't taking the framerate to an unplayable level, just to a level that made it obvious that there was an issue.

I get the feeling GF operates largely independently from Nintendo. They might be in the same building, but I suspect the strictly hierarchical culture in Japanese companies has lead to a situation where even if somebody at Nintendo (or even The Pokemon Company) did want to do something about GF, they'd first have to figure out how to get rid of the president (who is literally the creator of the franchise) and the current director (who's been with the company for decades). The politics of that situation seem insurmountable to me.

When it comes to Pokemon games, the chain of command is The Pokemon Company -> Gamefreak -> Nintendo.

Yes, though in turn The Pokemon Company is owned by Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures. So it's a big loop in some way.

I always got the feeling it was the other way around. I know there are some incredibly talented people at Game Freak who are ashamed of these games and didn't want them to ship, but Nintendo needs to sell switches at Christmas and a new Pokemon game is essential for that

Nintendo is a lot of things but they have never been afraid to push back release dates

As someone else said, Nintendo is the company that publicly restarted the new Metroid game development because it was not up to their standards.

They seem like the company that will hesitate the least to push back a game. Partially I assume because they know that no matter when it releases it will likely sell well, but also because of their reputation.

I can't think of a rushed Nintendo game in recent memory (outside Pokemon). Nintendo sets a pretty high standard for game quality across the industry.

IIRC Nintendo and GF own parts of Pokemon company, Nintendo doesn't control GF directly.

> The only explanation I can think of is the sheer number of models in a pokemon game may be much higher than those games, but I am not sure.

They remade models in 3D for 3DS games, at the SwSh release people compared them to the 3DS ones and they turned out to be essentially same. So they already put the effort to migrate models to 3D

The explanation is "people will buy anyway". The game would realistically need another 6 months to get to the "good" state and they couldn't miss the holiday season.

Model like CoD with multiple teams working in parallel on subsequent games would probably work better but... Pokemon fans will buy it anyway so why bother ? From company's management view it's a golden goose.

They also tried to make non-pokemon game and it was pretty much a flop so really it is a mediocre developer that have license to print poke-money

> The only explanation I can think of is the sheer number of models in a pokemon game may be much higher than those games, but I am not sure.

I don't really think that would play into the technical issues. The models themselves look fine; nearly all the problems I've seen come down to (in order)

1. Really bad LOD logic/implementation. Just shockingly bad, entire characters popping in 20ft away from you

2. Animation/rigging issues, mainly with the player character, and seemingly correlated with network play

3. World navigation/physics glitches for the main character

I guess #1 could be affected by the number of models if it came down to "we don't have time to create proper LOD increments for every model", though surely that could be automated these days? At least a rough version, which is all you really need

Overall it just feels like an open-world game made by people who have no idea how to make an open-world game (but like others have pointed out, BotW was the first real open-world game Nintendo had made and it was a slam dunk)

> though surely that could be automated these days?

The big game engines all have assets or built-in features to do this. Of course, there's still the last 10% of QA and fixing up the ones that aren't properly converted.

It's the first time I've seen such an unpolished experience in a major Nintendo title.

Yet, I've enjoyed the latest Pokemon vastly more than the previous one (Sword/Shield, didn't play legends of arceus). Personal opinion, of course, but shaking up the usual Pokemon formula did a lot more for me than performance and polish.

Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl were also a bit buggy.

I recommend Legends of Arceus though; much of the shake up seen in Scarlet/Violet was tested first in Arceus, plus a fair bit more divergence still.

To be fair, BDSP was made by a different studio

Absolutely, but I'd still consider it a "major Nintendo title" and it's one of the best selling games on Switch.

I agree. The actual gameplay is very good (for the most part) but it's just so hard to look past the performance issue and poor visuals.

Content-wise it's among the best gens IMO. My heart breaks for the creative team that's held back by their tech.

They should really go back to 2D. They have been trying for way too long at 3D to have not figured it out by now with the amount of resources they have. Maybe something 2D-HD like Octopath and the like.

Agreed. The types of 3D they are putting out is not something I enjoy. Rather have a good 2D experience and broaden the scope of the games.

If they have not figured out 3D how are they making games like splatoon and zelda botw look so amazing. The point is they don't have to make good quality Pokemon games to sell their merch, they just have to make mediocre Pokemon games so that they stay in the public eyes.

Different studio entirely (even company to an extent).

Splat and BotW were developed by Nintendo itself (EPD, formerly EAD, formerly R&D4).

Pokémon is developed by GameFreak and managed by The Pokémon Company. For which video games are just one aspect of the franchise, even more so mainline ones (there’s also a bunch of spinoff games sometimes developed by Creature Inc and often not).

Nintendo doesn't produce any Pokemon games unfortunately. I'm sure they would be better if they did or at least had some way to oversee the quality of them.

It's not just the performance, i hope they also fix the blurry and poorly tiled textures and "low-geometry" environments.

It is somewhat related to performance as well since those poor art are most likely the result of them “optimizing” the original assets to squeeze as much performance as possible at the last minute

> hope they also fix the blurry and poorly tiled textures and "low-geometry" environments

That sounds more like the limitations of their 2015 Android phone hardware these games have to run on.

That's definitely not the case. While I don't play these games, or much else on the Switch, I have a friend who is passionate about this and they have shown me immediate comparisons with the likes of Monster Hunter, BoTW, and several other games on the same hardware that make the most recent Pokemon game look 3 generations older in side-by-sides.

Even the previous pokemon release on the Switch (Arceus?), which is not amazing visually, looks positively fantastic when it's sitting next to the latest, hot-garbage release.

Aren't Pokemon video games made just so that they can sell their merch and trading cards ? That explains all the rushed/unpolished aspects of the game. You wouldn't see them pull the same stunts with Mario or Zelda, because Video games are the main selling point of these two franchise.

They used to be good. The games had a good enough battle mechanic to have a competitive scene, and they had enough content after the main game to keep playing it for a long time. The battles are simple, but can actually get quite strategically high level with lots of nuances if both sides know what they're doing. That kind of battling didn't come into play in the main game except maybe in the Elite Four, but it mattered afterward in the Battle Tower (or whatever it was called), and online battles.

Also, you could transfer ANY pokemon from ANY game to the new game, complete with special moves and items, such as mega-evolutions. Building good teams and all the work going into it, from breeding to training, was fun. There were complex breeding mechanics to get pokemon with unusual moves or better than average stats, and there were side games like Pokemon beauty pageants that you could breed and train them for. Also there were extremely rare "shiny" Pokemon with unusual colors or markings. Those are still there, but it's a lot less meaningful to have one when you can't transfer it to other games anymore.

Admittedly you can still transfer pokemon around, just not as freely (and not yet, for scarlet&violet). Pokemon home lets you send pokemon from far back, and I know people who keep pokemon on there that they transferred forwards from the GBA days. It's not 100% of them (although, at least for competitive, that's somewhat of a good thing). Sadly, pokemon home support is expected to come spring next year for scarlet and violet. And competitively speaking, this generation is looking really interesting, especially compared to the disaster of the last one, so I don't think all's lost yet.

once (if?) the technical issues are fixed, this chapter is probably gonna be the best pokemon game that we've had for quite a few generations, imho.

It might be time for them to try out Unity or Unreal engine for switch games. Pokemon's inhouse engine doesn't seem to be doing that great.

I think even Pokemon Arceus had a difficult development as well. The original in house engine was replaced with a modified version of Zelda's Breath of the Wild engine.

I know Mario kart tour was written in unity I think, and it works well across my families wide range of devices.

Edit: It seems some pokemon remakes were done with unity too: https://exputer.com/news/nintendo/pokemon-brilliant-diamond-...

It doesn't really matter engine you choose between, no matter if it's inhouse/unity/unreal/godot or whatever. What matters is what expertise you already have, skills of current/future developers and how your development process works.

If all those things are shit, the output will be shit. If all those things are OK, the output will be OK, no matter what engine you choose/develop.

> If all those things are OK, the output will be OK, no matter what engine you choose/develop.

This is just not true in any domain.

If your tools are bad, buggy, or inefficient, it's very possible for your talented people to be unable to overcome them.

For example, if a game engine takes even 2x developer time vs. another engine, it's probably not possible to achieve a similar level of polish because the developer time isn't going to double accordingly.

Well, I guess our experience differs then, which is not that weird.

I'm my own experience, good developers are able to work around bad tooling much easier than bad developers. Or even being able to recognize bad tooling requires the developer to not be bad themselves. The matter of "it's working fine, let's move on" VS "I can't take this bad experience, lets fix it before moving on" is often choices bad developers won't even engage in.

We see the effects of bad tooling and game engines all the time. Just look at the disastrous development histories of games like Destiny, FF13, FF15, any number of Battlefield games, or Mass Effect Andromeda.

edit: At this point, I think it's clear that it's not just their tooling and engine though. I mean, clearly these are big issues, but I'd say it largely stems from a lack of technical expertise and/or investment in R&D and engine/tool development.

Frost Engine is notorious, as is whatever was used in Cyberpunk 2077. They're apparently going to abandon it after that disaster.

For videogames development. Engines is kinda synonymous with ecosystem.

Videogames use tons of third party libraries with various engine support either from library developers or third parties. Alot of studios do not have the inhouse talent/money to support all the skills required for inhouse development, so they use a ton of libraries. If you have to reimplement all the third party library support in your custom engine, well you are going to have a bad time.

I think this why unreal/unity consolidation is occurring and honestly not the worst approach for practical game development.

- I'm not in the videogame industry, but I'm interested in becoming a project manager in it after pseudo-retirement

Unless they’re total amateurs - they’ve released tens of games and sold hundreds of millions - so they’re not, a commercial game engine will give you great optimizations and it’s pretty difficult to shoot itself in the foot in a way that totally kills your performance. It seems to me like they wanted their own engine but it’s just not ready so it’s struggling with a very basic looking game immensely

> It might be time for them to try out Unity or Unreal engine for switch games.

EDITED: They used Unity for Pokémon Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl. I'm not sure why they switched back to in-house for Arceus and these newer ones.

The main issue seems to be their release schedule as well as their inexperience with games of this scope, and likely not the engine itself (although it's likely a contributing factor).

Digital Foundry put out a good video showcasing how the game performs and comparison to Arceus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBZqt7D24Zc Honestly, Arceus which was already rather ugly compared to Breath of the Wild and certain other 3rd party titles on the Switch, is a much better looking and detailed game then this new generation.

Sword and Shield didn't use unity.

People have peaked into the nsp file structure, and have confirmed Brilliant Diamond/Pearl did but Sword/Shield was a modified version of the 3d pokemon engine.

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were created by a third party studio:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Brilliant_Diamond...

I've really liked Scarlet! But I don't play for longer than 1-2 hours at a time and at some blog's suggestion I close the game app every time. I'm not a hard-core gamer or graphics person though.

I assume all Nintendo cares about on release is "does it pass lotcheck". It technically does, so...

Really? No one else is going to mention the P-filled aliterative title?

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