Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Ralizah Eh maybe, but I thought BOTW's VA was 50/50 as well.

Anyway, catching new Pokemon is always fun. It's kinda exciting going in completely blind. Wooloo seems like a tank, found a level 5 one, but it was not worth taking down.

I'm liking the streamlining and elimination of tutorials in this game. It's about time they figured out that a sizeable portion of their audience doesn't need to learn how to catch wild Pokemon for the 50th time.

Also, pretty excellent music so far! It's above-average for a Pokemon game, imo.

The Wild Area feels... too big? Maybe it's because there's hardly anything in it. Didn't encounter any new Pokemon either, which was kinda disappointing. Oh well, onto the next part.

Regarding the difficulty; I've not yet reached the first gym; however, I have two full teams of level 18-20 (that's 12 Pokemon), whereas the trainers are only level 12-14. I avoid any grinding by the way.

It's definitely easier than I expected.

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Cheers. I'm now in until at least Monday so fingers crossed for next week!

No idea what the pokedex is this time, but will try and use Pokémon I haven't before again. I used to fall into the trap of using the same each time, but since Black and White where it forced you to use brand new ones it made it feel really fresh. X and Y had so many original Red/Blue ones I found myself using a few of those again.

What starter Pokémon do you think you would go for if you play Sword/Shield?
I like the grass monkey.

Thanks for the first impressions!! I have a question.

So can I trade Pokemon like Sun/Moon where you upload one and ask for whatever you use or they reuse the bad system from Let's Go where you have to know beforehand who to trade with?

@mookysam The way this game works, you can probably use more than a team of six. I'm currently using 12, rotating them around. Which is easy to do, since you can access the storage anytime. I'm still over-leveled, so I'm probably looking to expand my team to 15 or 20.

@Octane You gain experience for battling AND for catching wild Pokemon, which is overkill. In the past, there was a tension between the two, so that there were upsides to both approaches. Is there ever a reason not to catch everything in this game for wonder trade fodder? This "getting experience for catching wild Pokemon" thing made a lot more sense in LGPE, where that filled the void left behind by wild Pokemon battles.

@Ralizah Very true. I don't catch Pokemon more than once though, but still, you get so much experience.

It was a Pokemon Go chimchar community day earlier (11am-2pm local time), so I figured I'd not pay much attention to it and instead just catch a few chimchar on route to the shops. But once I started, I ended up rushing around catching as many of those flaming monkeys as possible.

Anyway, that kinda reminded me of how much I like Pokemon. Maybe I've been ever so slightly too harsh on the new games Sword and Shield.

Nintendo Everything's summary of the video, for those who don't want to watch:
– Better models
– More detailed towns
– Superior lighting
– Environments are often copied + pasted
– Texturing can be on the basic side
– Some low resolution texture mapping
– Dynamic shadow system factors in characters and even tree branches far above, casting shade right to the floor
– A lot of flickering on camera movement
– Shadow filtering cascade
– Reflections vary in quality
– Characters and Pokemon have a limited rendering range, resulting in pop-in
– Model geometry for Pokemon close to those of Sun/Moon
– Switch’s lighting and material work a step up from the Pokemon in Sun/Moon
– In-engine cutscenes
– 1080p docked with dynamic resolution
– 864p docked in the worst cases
– No anti-aliasing
– 720p in portable mode with dynamic resolution
– 576p in portable mode in worst cases
– Similar visuals in docked/portable modes
– Usually holds 30 frames per second
– Performance closer to Pokemon: Let’s Go rather than games like X/Y

Source: https://nintendoeverything.com/pokemon-sword-shield-tech-anal...

I'm guessing the lower resolutions are usually in The Wild Area or raid battles. Relatively undemanding routes and towns are pretty and pinsharp, which is probably due to the higher resolution.

Disappointing if you wanted a full-blown home console scale transition, I guess, but for the next portable entry in the series, it's very solid.

Lesson learnt today... lots of mum’s don’t seem to approve of me playing Witcher 3 while sat waiting for my daughters dance class to finish. I mean I did shield the screen and had headphones. How else do they expect me to get through a hundred hour game?

@Rudy_Manchego I'm curious. What happened?

Was there a stuffed unicorn involved?

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, I'm glad the game is out now so that we actually know how it performs. Which, all things being equal, is pretty well. The way people kept freaking out over footage from pre-release streams of hacked digital copies got old pretty quickly.

And lol, I went to Crippled Kate's and everyone there was so rude and abrupt. One girl was more polite, so she ended up getting my business. :/ Of course, then I discovered that there's zero point to the brothels. They're pure window dressing from a gameplay perspective. I was hoping to get experience points or a new quest or something.

Haven't gone to the more upscale one yet, except for a story quest.

@Ralizah Might eat into your stamina, if was such a thing in TW3, i forget now.

@Ralizah @Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Well I mean you guys are obviously disgusting with all that talk of brothels... I was just playing early on and doing the Kiera Metz missions and I mean, she was a useful ally for a bit so things had to play out. I tried to explain that to the waiting mums but they seemed uninterested by my explanation of my search for Ciri.

Maybe its functionality expands or improves or something over time, but Y-Comm seriously sucks. The PSS from X/Y was so robust and fully-featured: I genuinely don't understand why GF keeps replacing competent MP-focused systems with inferior ones. I guess it's nice that the wonder trading match-ups can happen in the background now, but it's so much less convenient trying to trade for specific Pokemon, and even trying to find someone you want to trade with is a chore given that there doesn't appear to be a friends list (!). No personal messages. No requests. No easy access to a list of friends to quickly trade with. Now I have to arrange a trade on a forum or something and pray that us entering the same Link Code somehow connects us. Am I misunderstanding something? How do you open up Gen 8 with MP features that are vastly inferior to what we got in Gen 6? I don't understand it.

@Ralizah But you can control the camera.

Lol I was afraid they would remove GTS. I really liked this feature. I read somewhere that GTS will be sold of offered as a subscription via the Pokemon Home app. I don't know if it is true though but lurking in forums for Pokemon trading surely is way inconvenient.

I beat the game in about 18 hours.

But I only used one team of 6 and was never overlevelled. Not even once.

Weird.