Why do fan-made pokemon games look better than released ones?

[KenzeyEevee]

Its amazing what fans can do with a little money, making awesome games. Why cant the Pokémon Company do that?

 

[FinnishPokéFan92]

I respectfully disagree. I think actual products look way better and are way better.

 

[Bolt Strike]

Because the fans actually have passion and put care and effort into their games.

 

[Lightning Flame Blast]

Fan projects aren’t regulated by timelines like companies, so they can take their time making their work look good. You often see fan games and animations spreading across many years before they’re done, while Pokemon usually has two to four.

Besides, there’s less need to worry about executive meddling.

 

[colours]

Because the fans actually have passion and put care and effort into their games.

i think this is a rather unfair take.

pretend for a moment you're a fangame developer. you as a developer don't have any sort of management to report to, as your only boss is time management and your own capabilities to make your own game. budget is hardly an issue as you can use existing resources out there. in the event that you need something custom made and can't do it yourself, that's when you need your own team (and keep in mind this is all working for free). not to deviate from the point too much but most people would want to see some progress made on your game such as plot, mapping, some idea or description of what the characters in your game are going to be like, things like that (unless you're doing this with a group of friends but that's a different thing).

the bigger point being is that sometimes fan games do appeal more to the "mature" age group of pokemon players because there's no real restriction saying you can't. your audience is whoever the heck you want, and you have that freedom to direct your game how you please. your biggest risk of your game failing is lots of sunken time. in a lot of ways, it can be assumed that fangame developers have a lot of advantages on their side that your typical, paid game developer doesn't. what if there's a strict schedule to adhere to? who, specifically, do you dedicate to working on newer pokemon games: is it the more experienced programmers? what about the newer ones, how do they gain experience and become better?

there's so much more that people don't really think about or give a second thought to. i'd like to be clear and say that Game Freak is far from perfect: there is a lot they can be criticised for. but i dunno, saying that they lack passion and care is an odd take, for me.

 

[RK9]

To be honest.

I think a lot of sprites are off with fangames. Like, not a little bit off but a lot off. I also don't feel they are Pokémon designs most of the time either. A lot also try too hard to be dark, becoming edgy instead.

TL;Dr: Only a handful are actually good. Rest is just people jumping on the "GameFreak has no passion for the games" bandwagon.

 

[Leaf_Ranger]

I haven't payed that much attention to fan-made games to the point where I've followed and played or even can mention the name of one.
That said and from what I see from time to time when I came across one of them is that since most of those projects are based on 2D sprites, they end up looking better than some previous official games in certains details, like filling the background areas with lots of tree types, details, buildings, NPC's. One thing can be said about what I've seen is that they tend to include ideas that we don't see in the GF games, like expanded Pkmn labs and the areas being more filled with Pkmn. I think that the creators behind those projects deserve credit for putting their effort in somehing they love, more so when, in my opinion, GF has been doing sooooo little.

 

[Bolt Strike]

i think this is a rather unfair take.

pretend for a moment you're a fangame developer. you as a developer don't have any sort of management to report to, as your only boss is time management and your own capabilities to make your own game. budget is hardly an issue as you can use existing resources out there. in the event that you need something custom made and can't do it yourself, that's when you need your own team (and keep in mind this is all working for free). not to deviate from the point too much but most people would want to see some progress made on your game such as plot, mapping, some idea or description of what the characters in your game are going to be like, things like that (unless you're doing this with a group of friends but that's a different thing).

the bigger point being is that sometimes fan games do appeal more to the "mature" age group of pokemon players because there's no real restriction saying you can't. your audience is whoever the heck you want, and you have that freedom to direct your game how you please. your biggest risk of your game failing is lots of sunken time. in a lot of ways, it can be assumed that fangame developers have a lot of advantages on their side that your typical, paid game developer doesn't. what if there's a strict schedule to adhere to? who, specifically, do you dedicate to working on newer pokemon games: is it the more experienced programmers? what about the newer ones, how do they gain experience and become better?

there's so much more that people don't really think about or give a second thought to. i'd like to be clear and say that Game Freak is far from perfect: there is a lot they can be criticised for. but i dunno, saying that they lack passion and care is an odd take, for me.

The management is the problem. Your regular old paid programmer isn't going to be making the calls on what games/content to make and not to make, and that's where the fans are outdoing Game Freak and TPC. Maybe some of the lower level programmers have some kind of passion, but they also don't have much of an impact on the series. The corporate executives at the top, on the other hand, most certainly do not and only seem to want to make a quick buck. And as Nintendo's first party IPs on the Switch show, making an ambitious, high budget game that goes all out to make the best experience they possibly can does work, in fact the IPs that do are breaking sales records on the Switch. It's not a "mature" thing nor an attempt to ignore a wider audience. They just... make a good game and the fans gravitate towards that. Shocking conclusion, I know.

 

[Rocket Zigzagoon]

As fan-made games were made as non-profit games in mind, the makers, especially those in group circles, don't need to rush their games to completion and putting their effort of detail in their game mechanics. And they can expand their mechanics whatever they can.

And organization played a bigger factor too. It's sad to see the GF staff were not unionized in that matter.

 

[colours]

The management is the problem. Your regular old paid programmer isn't going to be making the calls on what games/content to make and not to make, and that's where the fans are outdoing Game Freak and TPC. Maybe some of the lower level programmers have some kind of passion, but they also don't have much of an impact on the series. The corporate executives at the top, on the other hand, most certainly do not and only seem to want to make a quick buck. And as Nintendo's first party IPs on the Switch show, making an ambitious, high budget game that goes all out to make the best experience they possibly can does work, in fact the IPs that do are breaking sales records on the Switch. It's not a "mature" thing nor an attempt to ignore a wider audience. They just... make a good game and the fans gravitate towards that. Shocking conclusion, I know.

if we're using sales as a metric of how much a company cares, then SwSh is like the third best selling titles after GSC, so I guess Game Freak must be doing something right? you can argue whether or not that, and SwSh being one of the best selling Switch titles, are deserved, and that's not even taking into consideration how much they might sell come this winter because of the Crown Tundra DLC. keep in mind Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild have been out since 2017 and SwSh sales are keeping up with them. interesting, huh?

like, i don't disagree with your overall point that maybe management is a problem, but i feel like it's odd that you point to sales as overall proof of hard work and passion paying off while somehow either ignoring or forgetting SwSh's sales so far.

 

[Esserise]

You got some examples?

 

[SinnohEevee]

Because Game Freak knows the games will print money anyways.

 

[Bolt Strike]

if we're using sales as a metric of how much a company cares, then SwSh is like the third best selling titles after GSC, so I guess Game Freak must be doing something right? you can argue whether or not that, and SwSh being one of the best selling Switch titles, are deserved, and that's not even taking into consideration how much they might sell come this winter because of the Crown Tundra DLC. keep in mind Super Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild have been out since 2017 and SwSh sales are keeping up with them. interesting, huh?

like, i don't disagree with your overall point that maybe management is a problem, but i feel like it's odd that you point to sales as overall proof of hard work and passion paying off while somehow either ignoring or forgetting SwSh's sales so far.

It's not beating the other games by much though, Pokemon games all tend to sell in the same 10-20 million range. A full fledged console game where they go all out could sell even higher.

 

[colours]

It's not beating the other games by much though, Pokemon games all tend to sell in the same 10-20 million range. A full fledged console game where they go all out could sell even higher.

so there's two ways to take this. feel free to correct me if im wrong here, it seems like you fall in one of these camps (mainly the second one):

a) pokemon games have always sold well and have been considered best sellers of their respective consoles for years. it can be said that they're pretty consistent in this regard.
b) because pokemon games haven't broke the 20 mil mark since GSC, it shows that Game Freak hasn't really striven to re-create that same feeling that captured players in the series in the same sense that they captured their older players in RBY and GSC.

i can see that second perspective and honestly, i can almost agree with it. as i mentioned before, there are a lot of things one can criticise Game Freak for. SwSh's main wild area definitely doesn't look the prettiest (far from it) compared to what they could do which is what we've seen in IoA. they've gotten worse over the years as far as online connectivity goes (why is Y-comm so bad....), among many, many other things. for better or worse (getting back to the topic at hand), this all goes back to what i mentioned before — that fangame developers have a lot more time and freedom on their hands — at least moreso than Game Freak does, which is why some may have gotten the impression that SOME (definitely not all) fangames look more polished than main series games.

the bigger point of what i want to say: i don't know if it's completely fair to make a 1:1 comparison between what fans can do and what Game Freak does.

 

[Hidden Mew]

I'm not that familiar with fanmade games, but based on the ones I have seen, the notion that they all look better than the main series games is pretty ridiculous. Most of the ones I've seen or heard about basically just reuse sprites from older games, such as the third generation sprites, and try a bit too hard to make them more "mature" with some of the dialogue, mainly throwing in some swear words just because they can.

It's also pretty strange and downright unfair to put fan game and actual video game developers on equal footing for something like this. People who make fangames are usually doing it just for fun. They don't have to worry about deadlines, they can work on it whenever they want to and I imagine that they don't have to create a lot from scratch compared to actual video game developers. This just feels like another way to issue out the same old complaints about Game Freak. I'm certainly not saying that they shouldn't get any criticism. I love Sword/Shield. They're easily in the top five, possibly even top three, of my favorite generations in the series, but the graphics, mainly in the Wild Area and larger cities, are some of the weaker elements of the games. There are plenty of valid points against them too. Using the supposed good qualities of fanmade games,where the fans making them have a lot of advantages that people at Game Freak don't really have unfortunately, to make the same old complaints feel so disingenuous to me.

 

[Fan of Jarrus]

and larger cities

Some cities have lower graphics?

A problem that I have with SWSH is that some dialogue lacks emotion. Like when Hop talked about his injured brother that sounded detached. If Game Freak tackles death. Have characters react realistically.

 

[colours]

A problem that I have with SWSH is that some dialogue lacks emotion. Like when Hop talked about his injured brother that sounded detached. If Game Freak tackles death. Have characters react realistically.

that's something that can easily be remedied with good (emphasis on this) voice acting. the absence of which i think largely hurts the games as moving mouths with dialogue comes across rather poorly.

 

[Leaf_Ranger]

As fan-made games were made as non-profit games in mind, the makers, especially those in group circles, don't need to rush their games to completion and putting their effort of detail in their game mechanics. And they can expand their mechanics whatever they can.

And organization played a bigger factor too. It's sad to see the GF staff were not unionized in that matter.

It's not only unionization...the Japanese business structure has a tendency to keep things secretive and without having employees speaking out, just look at Konami and it's history with Kogi Igarashi and Hideo Kojima, mainly this last one. They may have good practises in their companies' policy and code but we still don't even have a clue about what's happening, what were the causes and outcomes of GF's moving or being moved closer or ot Nintendo. Also, the amounts of leaks and whistlebowers for these topics are scarce to none when compared to how in the West we have a clearer idea on how companies make thier business.
I don't think that any GF staff member will come out and make a reputation for himself in being the one doing that. I believe is up to the fans to make an outcry, just like what's happening in other franchises, but even that may not be enough because like said above the sales are strong and in the end it seems that not enough people are voting with their wallets or are even interested in such questions because to them the franchise is still somewhat new.

Going back to this thread's topic, I believe the best example of an "outsider's" effort to make something "better" is that game (goes looking for the name)...TemTem. As far as I know from what I read back in the release, some structures are still the same (a Professor, three starters, etc.) but they went further than just some fan-made games. Of course that the judgement on how both compare to each other is very subjective but it shows that there's an alternative and that people are willing to build upon something even if by having another one's base skeleton when they feel there's stagnation and an opportunity.

 

[Hidden Mew]

Some cities have lower graphics?

I was thinking more of how some characters, such as in Monostoke, just appear or disappear depending on how close you are to them. I'm not sure if that's a graphics issue so much as a loading now that I think of it though.

 

[Bolt Strike]

so there's two ways to take this. feel free to correct me if im wrong here, it seems like you fall in one of these camps (mainly the second one):

a) pokemon games have always sold well and have been considered best sellers of their respective consoles for years. it can be said that they're pretty consistent in this regard.
b) because pokemon games haven't broke the 20 mil mark since GSC, it shows that Game Freak hasn't really striven to re-create that same feeling that captured players in the series in the same sense that they captured their older players in RBY and GSC.

i can see that second perspective and honestly, i can almost agree with it. as i mentioned before, there are a lot of things one can criticise Game Freak for. SwSh's main wild area definitely doesn't look the prettiest (far from it) compared to what they could do which is what we've seen in IoA. they've gotten worse over the years as far as online connectivity goes (why is Y-comm so bad....), among many, many other things. for better or worse (getting back to the topic at hand), this all goes back to what i mentioned before — that fangame developers have a lot more time and freedom on their hands — at least moreso than Game Freak does, which is why some may have gotten the impression that SOME (definitely not all) fangames look more polished than main series games.

the bigger point of what i want to say: i don't know if it's completely fair to make a 1:1 comparison between what fans can do and what Game Freak does.

Pokemon was a fad during RBY and GSC, so that had a major effect on the sales. To some degree they're not going to recreate the same feeling as those games because fads tend to be fickle. Their best chance of that was probably with Go and Let's Go, but those games clearly haven't had much of an effect on the main games (really, that's the best evidence that this direction probably isn't the best way forward for Pokemon, if those games accomplished what Game Freak would've wanted, we'd be seeing 20-30 million sellers out of the 7th and 8th gen games). What it comes down to is that Game Freak and TPC don't understand the Switch's audience that well, and especially console gamers, and that's why they're not breaking sales records while other Nintendo IPs are. Trying to replicate a mobile experience that's intentionally low budget and simplistic just isn't going to appeal to a large portion of the Switch's userbase, and console gamers pretty much want the opposite hence why you're seeing the divisiveness among the fanbase. The kind of game that is is going to have OPTION to play through it quickly and simply, but have enough depth and longevity to satisfy those that want something ambitious that they can immerse themselves in for long periods of times. And that's what the other IPs are doing that Pokemon is not.

More on topic, no, a fan game isn't going to be able to completely do that because they don't have the resources necessary to make a game that's nearly as filling as a full sized AAA game, a fan is never going to be able to make something like BotW. That's why we pay these companies $60. But in Pokemon's case, fan games are outdoing official games in this area, and that's what's especially worrying.