Topic: Nintendo Switch --OT--

@Ralizah Of course, I understand why they price them at 60, because they can get away with it, but I don't think that means we can't compare them to other €60 titles. It's either option, making handheld-size games, and charging for them accordingly, or making a game on par with the rest of the console's games and asking full price. But alas, I'm glad I found a copy for 50 in the end. It should arrive soon.

So, earlier in the year, I got 4 vouchers, worth the equivalent of $240 for 4 day-one full retail titles, for $160. If you contextualize this as $40 for each of the four games, then Pokemon Shield only cost me $40. If you count gold coins gained from this transaction and then split the value added between the four games, it only ended up costing me $37.50.

Anyway, the only thing I don't like in the game so far is the complete absence of voice acting in the cutscenes. It's weird to see these elaborate, well-animated cutscenes with talking and drama, but no sounds coming out of the mouths of the characters involved.

I just played the first bit. Got my Grookey. The beginning area looks pretty sweet, though I haven't really been able to explore yet.

I'm not too fussed about the lack of voice acting, because I rather have no VA, than cheap VA by the Nintendo Treehouse team

@KratosMD It's weird to see the developers of a game that'll sell tens of millions of copies treat it like some sort of budget-constrained indie project. Maybe they should start a kickstarter and make voice acting in the cutscenes one of their stretch goals.

@Octane Eh. Even voice-acting that isn't great is better than a void of silence during dramatic or dynamic cutscenes. It's like some weird silent movie.

@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?

Galarian Meowth should be it's own thing really to me @KratosMD

If you take the defining feature away of the coin on it's head I would've said it's a brand new pokémon! Quite like the look though. Better then the alola one I've seen

Sobble easily @mookysam!

I hoplessly adore the water starters (... Popplio and Oshawott are my least favourite but I still like them)

They're always useful (Especially in the earlier entries with surf)

@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?

Perhaps @Rudy_Manchego learnt that the girls at crippled Kate's are much more supple then the name implies @Ralizah

Nice to see the video @Ralizah about Sw/Sh! Good to hear some actual information rather then hearsay

@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.