what do you think about the Pokemon Sword and Shield controversy? from the e3 direct, youtube at the point in 25:00 to the end and the interviews usgamer and the famitsu article translations do you think the game developers are lying? Do you think the reasoning they cut the pokemon is because of animation and graphics that a lot of people are complaining about?
Gamers are notoriously bad at gauging how much work it takes to do something in game development. There’s a very good reason every professional game developer I’ve spoken with about the Pokemon thing has basically said variations on the same thing:
“Holy crap, they need to update that many? I’m surprised they didn’t cut [the national pokedex] years ago!”
So today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the actual process of creating a pokemon. This is all taken from a [2017 CGWorld feature] on the process of pokemon creation in Pokemon X and Y.
First, there’s the model with base colors. Then you have to add in the details to the model.
Then you have to build the base textures and a shadow map in order to give a simple-looking model more detail. Artists need to specify what parts of the pokemon are colored, what parts are shadowed, and how those shadows play on the body model. But that’s not the end of it.
They also need to build a [normal map] for the model to show detail in the model. And a shadow mask to figure out how shadow looks when cast onto the model.
Some pokemon like Solgaleo emit light, which means that they need light maps to figure out how that looks and works. Others, like Lunara, require additional technology for the starfield look and tech:
That isn’t the end of it. Shaders are used to make the pokemon look good, so many individual pokemon must have things tweaked to look right with the shaders. For example, compare these two variations on Oranguru:
Notice how the Oranguru on the left just looks better and more defined than the one on the right? The mantle, chest tuft, hands/feet, and pelvis area have all had their normals tweaked from the first pass in order to bring out better contrast and viewability.
Also keep in mind, this is just the static model and texturing. We also have to get into animation. Each pokemon can have up to [110 different bones in its rig], and rigs are difficult to reuse in the pokemon case.
After rigging each pokemon, we need to animate them. Some, like Gumshoos, have both a walking animation:
… and a running animation:
This is all in addition to the rest of the animations in the game - each attack, damage, idle, status effected, pokemon-amie, etc. must be animated.
All 1000+ pokemon must be modeled, skinned, normal-mapped, shadered, rigged, and animated.
“But they already have these!” a fan might say. “They already built them for X and Y!”
This is basically a question of [backwards compatibility] - will the new hardware and software on the Switch be backwards compatible with the old assets from X and Y? Whenever you migrate to a new platform (for example, moving from the 3DS to the Switch), there’s a very good chance that the stuff that worked on the old platform will no longer work without a ton of work on the new. It might be because the new hardware handles shaders or normal maps completely differently than others. It might be because the Switch uses different hardware for lighting calculations than the 3DS. It might be because the old assets had baked-in lighting because the 3DS couldn’t do dynamic lighting, so pokemon now need a light map in order to look right on the new.
Moving to a new platform is hard. It takes a lot of work, because the new hardware never does all (or even most) things the same way as the old hardware, which means that a lot of massaging, refactoring, and fixing has to take place in order to bring the old stuff in to work on the new. When you’re talking about something on a per-pokemon basis, that becomes an exponential growth problem.
The biggest issue here isn’t that these tasks are insurmountable, but the fact that there are potentially over a thousand pokemon models that need to be updated for each task. That’s a multiplicative scale that can rapidly go off the charts in terms of scope. If they are planning to add just one single new type of animation (like… for example, “sad”) to the pokemon’s suite, that’s hundreds of new animations that need to be made. In the move to the Switch, assets for any single one of these steps for pokemon creation may have been compromised and had to be redone, potentially affecting hundreds of different pokemon.
“Just hire more people!” I hear the people shout.
Pokemon has a budget. They have a sales estimate and a revenue estimate, and the budget is based on that. [Hiring people takes time and costs money], which balloons that budget. Going over budget is a really bad idea - in order to keep their shareholders happy, they need to earn money and not lose it. That’s the nature of the beast.
There is no way that they made a decision like this lightly. They looked at the estimates for the amount of work needed to bring the national to the game and it did not fit within the budget or schedule they were allotted. They looked at the number of players who actively engage with the entire national pokedex. Rather than cut other, higher priority features, they made the decision to be selective in what pokemon they do have the schedule and budget for. Maybe they made the wrong choice, but I have yet to see a single professional game dev say “they should have committed to it”. Most of the devs I’ve spoken to say that this situation was going to be inevitable at some point, because Game Freak can’t stop adding new pokemon to the franchise. So, since they can’t stop adding pokemon to the world and they can’t support all of the pokemon forever, they decided to stop supporting all of the pokemon forever and be selective as to which are available.
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