>>58287265No, it was always planned to be open world. It's also why the project name was "Titan", it's supposed to be big.
There's two obvious main reasons why SV is so messy
>1: short dev cycleSelf explanatory. Making an open world 3d game takes a really long time, especially these days. They had like 4 years tops. Clearly not enough time to develop such a huge game, especially considering how relatively small GFs team is still, and how many are still inexperienced with 3D.
>2: in-house engineThey still use their own engine. However, 3D engines are absurdly complex. There's a reason why so many devs use third party engines now. Stuff like making shaders from scratch is an extremely difficult and time consuming task when you make your own engine, and optimization comes on top of that too. This is why SVs engine is so dogshit. It's a poorly optimized mess that looks and runs terribly, and I can only imagine of horrible its spaghetti code is.
Making a fully fledged 3D engine should be the task of top tier programmers who know what they are doing and know all the modern technology related to it, and not by 50 year old Japanese men who used to make simple Gameboy games.
I think they use their own engine because the Pokémon IP is very precious to them, and they want full control over its presentation, data structure, etc. They probably don't want their mainline game "in the hands" of a third party engine for a couple of reasons. But the game quality clearly suffers under it.
They're using Unreal Engine for Beast of Reincarnation, wonder if they'll learn anything from that.
