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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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