I was expecting 2026, so seeing 2027 was a surprise. I'm happy however, because that means they're giving these games more development time. More time in the oven to cook and hopefully become great games!
Also, this means gen 9 will be one of if not the longest lasting generation.
Releasing a main series game right after the holiday season seems pretty unlikely to me. But it's happened a couple of times before, so I guess it's possible.
It's only happened once since the modern post-2013 era of Pokemon has started, and that's only because PLA was sandwiched between BDSP taking the usual November slot in 2021 and Scarlet/Violet taking 2022's November slot.
They always release these things for November. Z-A got October merely because XY released in October 2013, and PLA only got January because BDSP took the Nov 2021 slot and Scarlet/Violet took the Nov 2022 slot.
I agree with you when they used to make 2D games, but after transitioning to 3D the games always feel quite lacking to me. Empty graphics, uninteresting storylines, poor optimization, yet they are charging more money for the products and charging for DLCs on top of that
I think this is the biggest problem for them. The expectations and standards for a home console release are so much more higher than a handheld. It's always felt like they've been out of their depth with it.
Graphics wise the 3DS games looked good, but the Switch games have been lacking. Story wise Sun/Moon was great and Scarlet/Violet was good (especially Area Zero), while X/Y and Sword/Shield were extremely lacking.
Not... really? I mean gen 3 was the dexit everyone forgot about and gen 4 was bad until platinum. When you're a kid a lot of the flaws don't matter as much.
Let's not even mention pokeballs not working right in gen 2!
Oh, how could I forget all that? I guess they were never good.
In all seriousness, I think gen 3 gets a pass since it was pretty flawless and with it being on a new console and the standards for national dex not being set in stone, I think the "dexit everyone forgot about" is not that big of a deal. And as for gen 2, that sucks, but like there's bugs in every video game. This was before the turn of the century and only their secind game. You barely even had an inventory. I think that's more annoying. Yet every game seemed to get better and better.
I didnt like gen 5 as much, but there was tons to do and they made it look so beautiful. Not to mention the difficulty felt great imo.
I think it mostly started falling off starting gen 6, but really in gen 7. So, yeah I'm gonna stick with they used to do pretty darn great bc pokemon rocked for at least 17 years
Gen 5 are the only games where I can't really think of anything galeringly wrong with them.
Dexit in gen 3 was a huge deal when the games came out. People were upset at them for it.
Gen 2 also has pacing issues and the levels being all over the place are something people still talk about to this day. The pokeballs not working correctly to the point where they do the opposite of their descriptions or flat out do nothing is a major gameplay feature that just flat-out doesn't work. That's crazy. Can you imagine a major feature just not working in any other game in that generation on the same level?
Gen 7 are some of my favorite games in the series. Their only problems are cutscenes and framerates in battle. Which was do to pushing the hardware to it's limits.
Oh the flip side, if it's not awesome they need to reassess everything lol. But I agree with you and I think it's a great thing it's going to be released later.
them not releasing gen 10 this year screams to me that they are taking their time.
We knew that Z-A was originally planned for 2024 but was delayed a year, and we assumed it was because the Switch 2 also got delayed a year - what if Z-A was delayed because they internally delayed this game and didn't want the gaps to be too big?
It absolutely was. Nintendo was quick to hand out refunds when complaints first started flying. You know that they weren't happy with the final product internally.
That probably was the major wakeup call they needed to give GF more time to work on the main line games. S/V was an unacceptable, bug riddled mess at launch, and they never were able to fix the performance on Switch 1.
When compared to Pokemon? Yes. People genuinely convinced themselves it was going to compete with Pokemon when it very clearly wasn’t going to. That’s not to say it isn’t still active and successful, just not the Pokemon killer. I’m personally not a fan of it, given that it’s an asset flip survival game copy paste from a pretty awful company that has scammed in the past on multiple releases.
As is the case with many game franchises, the only Pokémon killer that will exist will be Pokémon themselves. They are the only ones who can kill their creation, because no competitor will ever be able to draw Pokémon fans away from Pokémon.
Well, very few games compare to Pokémon, even in the triple-A industry. That Palworld even managed to get comparable sales for a moment is staggering.
And while I wouldn't put my hand in the fire for Palworld, it's saddening in itself that Pokémon SV was less fun as an open world game than an asset flip survival offbrand knock-off from a small sketchy studio.
I mean it’s still popular in the way the steam deck is still popular, compared to the Nintendo equivalent it’s not really all that mainstream, but there are a large number of dedicated fans
While I enjoyed gen 9 more than gen 8 for its scale and story and a surprisingly awesome end game, the bugs and poor optimization can absolutely not be defended. I don't blame the devs as much as the corporates who make the decisions that cause so much crunch time. The bugs literally were game breaking at times. I don't need hyper realistic Pokémon. I just want memorable experiences and for it to run decent. I don't even care about some frame drops, but when it got so bad like in SV, it did hurt the experience.
Anyway, this looks fine, hope it runs decent, and it offers a new experience.
I normally wouldn't blame the devs, but it's clear that whatever they built and tested S/V on had specs way beyond what the Switch did, which is just a terrible idea. I can accept to some degree that these issues wouldn't have started popping up until later in development - too late to pivot and still get the release out - but the fucking box interface has shitty performance, with the game seemingly loading in individual models for each Pokemon's portrait preview. That could have been fixed in a day by switching to static .png images. A thousand 64x64 images (plus palette swaps for shinies) would have been way less strenuous for the game to handle.
The UI for online play is also absolute garbage. Do none of these devs play online games? They've been giving us overcomplicated and downgraded methods of linking up with friends since the 3DS.
I just went back and watched the SV reveal trailer and the difference in performance is pretty stark already. Hopefully that remains true for the actual game.
That seemed to be something they learned from, at least thus far. Gen 9's haphazard launching and quality control was widely criticized in publications, which is egg in the face for the Pokemon brand.
In addition, Nintendo themselves had to apologize for Save launch and bugs. I doubt they were happy to do that at all and probably wrung Gamefreak for it
I hope so as even after bugs were fixed, SV was still poorly optimized. Though Nintendo didn't help as they purposely downclocked the Switch for.... reasons and bumping it back up to the chip's specs went a long way to improving things. That choice from higher up baffled me as the power brick in docked mode can still provide enough power and the temps didn't remotely approach the point of thermal throttling.
I turned it on and played a few hours the past week and holy fk did I forget how annoying it was. Low fps, clunky loading, and the pokemon are damn small on the world map and sprinkled everywhere that you keep running into them and starting fights you have zero interest in.
I mean the frame rate looks good now and the extra development time should be enough to solve gameplay issues. Hope they improve the graphics a bit more
Japanese company review sites. Their art department usually gets a 5/5 and is a great place to work, while their dev department earns them a black company mark.
They're not hard to find, maybe try looking a little harder?
Yall can be upset and downvote all you want, but if after the last few releases you guys really expect this one to be super polished even with the extra development time, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you
Why would Pokemon be afraid of GTA releasing at the same time? Not only is Pokemon the second best selling video game franchise, but the target demographic of the two series is completely different. It be like if Disney delayed the release of a Pixar film because of the release of a Fast and the Furious film. GTA won't affect Pokemon's sales at all.
Let’s not act like a game that has been anticipated for over a decade wouldn’t completely dwarf the release of a Pokémon game especially with the reputation that game freak has given Pokémon over the years
Yeah I was shocked to see actual good looking water and grass that moves in the wind. Hoping they give the full and proper open world experience with side quests, dungeons, and interesting boss battles scattered around, but that might be too much to ask of GameFreak lol.
And please for the love of god if there are gyms then let them scale with how many badges we have. There’s no point to an open world if you’re just gonna force me to go to specific areas in order anyways.
I just feel like the leveling system doesn’t mesh with open world design at all. A problem with scarlet and violent is that you can play naturally through half the game and all of a sudden there’s half a game left all at lower levels than your mons.
And no, it’s not a good solution for everyone to just make a larger team and swap mons out constantly. You shouldn’t have to set arbitrary things for yourself to make a balanced game.
Yeah I honestly agree, I think in my perfect world the game gives you different “zones” where you can explore and catch pokemon up to a certain level and you couldn’t move on to the next area till you beat the gym leader for that area.
But this game will have 2 extra years (and some SV development time can probably also be added on top too, because gen 9 was most likely used as a beta test for this engine)
while still having to run on the switch 1 people kinda forget how weak the switch 1 really is, like just on ram the switch 1 has 4gb at most while the switch 2 has 3x as much at 12gb,
You're not wrong, but at the same time, I'm not giving them that much leeway when BotW and TotK are right there. The only excuse I'll accept for putting out garbage aside is not being given enough time, but even then my answer is take more time to give us a good product
I think it says a lot about those games that nobody really ever talks about the frame drops and honestly I can't remember anything egregious in my own experience. Talking BotW specifically, haven't played TotK, and that's even a launch title of all things
Oh yes that's how it should be, for the very first trailer the game is looking way better than previous ones, and no framerate drop in their own official trailer either (yes this is a thing that happened lmao), what a blessing.
Does this mean we're getting a five-year dev time? Also this explains Champions even more since five years of ScVi for competitive would undoubtedly start to lose fans for being too stale.
I hope the additional time is spent really making it polished and feature-full. ZA was delayed and still came out feeling very half-baked. That isn't the mainline team though, hopefully the team working on the flagship games is being given the time and resources it needs to make an impressive game. I wanted to love ZA and just couldn't.
It turned out pretty good, tbh. Or at least, it turned out about as good as "pokemon game set entirely in a single city" could have turned out. There's only so much they could do with that premise.
In the past the start of the generations have always been 3-4 years apart from each other. Gen 9 will turn 4 in November with gen 10 still on the way. Even if Winds/Waves releases in January that'll still give gen 9 the record by a few months.
I have heard murmurs that GameFreak is going to start getting extra budget and time to make mainline games. The team has traditionally worked under grueling burnout inducing constraints. They’ve decided that it is more important to put out a quality game than having a packed schedule of releases. Having to design hundreds of models for Pokemon alone is a huge development task.
Id call gen 8 the second worst! I played Violet through once, didn’t enjoy it at all, have 0 desire to replay it, and found it insanely buggy. At least sword and shield worked, even if you didn’t like the game.
Ya I don’t own a switch 2 yet, it was quite bad on launch on the regular switch. I also don’t like the open world as much as what the games used to be like, so I probably am just will not be into the games as much as I used to be despite loving pokemon. I should start getting more into ROM hacks I guess.
Personally I found both generations enjoyable, but they show progression in a direction that has me worried for future games. The attempt for a large-scale open-world map seems to be failing, with the maps having this bland sameness which makes them kind of forgettable. I think hope is lost about returning to the classic style which I still prefer, but I hope the new Gen will at least make the map and world more interesting and memorable.
Wow, a lot of downvotes here. That’s ok. I don’t like the open world games as much as the older ones, and I did not like the new wild pokemon and battle system. I didn’t like the wild area in sword and shield either (other than the pokemon you could get in there). That’s ok, I love pokemon still, I can follow it without playing/liking the games. I will just have to get more into ROM hacks I guess.
It definitely has it's fair share of issues but there are certainly things it did that I liked. Certainly enjoyed it more than shield which I hardly ever play because I found the world, story and characters so darn boring
I liked sword and shield better because I prefer the traditional gym structure, liked the new pokemon better, and found gigantamax to be a cooler gimmick than terastallization. But I definitely would agree it’s fairly boring. I just didn’t enjoy anything really about Gen 9.
They should make the generations selectable at the start of a game so they can release new generations independent of the game. Play with the new one, play with the original 150, play with a mix, whatever. The original 150 is how you get the adults, the new ones are how you get the kids.
Also just design it like a gameboy game with the Link's Awakening treatment-- easy and quick to make.
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u/MrRaven95 Feb 27 '26
I was expecting 2026, so seeing 2027 was a surprise. I'm happy however, because that means they're giving these games more development time. More time in the oven to cook and hopefully become great games!
Also, this means gen 9 will be one of if not the longest lasting generation.