>>58982099>Its very easy to see the difference between the level design of a route in the old games versus a completely open ended world and tackle those details in your argument by example but you can’t even do that.I'm not here to write a dissertation right out of the gate. The first line of counterargument is to emphasize that the core game has remained intact, but the production values of the games have not, and that exemplifies the central critique of the past 8 or so years. If others need me to spell out what production values mean, I refer to model and texture fidelity, world fidelity meaning environmental detail and density, liveliness within towns in terms of NPC behavior and ornamental structures, performance and stability, quality of graphical effects like shadows, lighting, illumination and reflections, etcetera etcetera. Do you want me to continue? Does this require further elaboration? Are you just going to gaslight me with your "define X" semantics games?
More specifically, Scarlet and Violet was the first game since Diamond and Pearl to have routes with complex nonlinear layouts, which had long since been whittled and reduced in the name of accessibility and simplification even starting in Gen 5. But it completely dropped the ball in terms of world, environmental, and geometric detail. Practically empty towns, sparse fields and vacant plots of questionable-looking prop trees scattered haphazardly at a distance from one another. Not to mention the framerate and animation work being as scattershot as they were. The world was the problem, not the core game.
Again: we know what kind of game this will be. Pokemon does not require dramatic gameplay innovations; Legends ZA is probably the most mechanically """""innovative""""" game in ages and it was mediocre, because its direction was orthogonal to the base concept: exploring ecosystems and catching creatures. This is the fundamental conceit of the games as manifested by Tajiri's original vision.
