I would say roughly look at Gamecube’s Pokémon games and then you might notice that there has been some improvement in terms of graphics, but not in design.
These two games were ambitious for their time, and were the first (sort of) open world Pokémon games in 3D.
But this is really trueashroom Say:
Let’s just hope the locations and wilderness don’t look flat and boring, but with enough atmosphere and NPCs to spend hours walking unlike Legends Arceus. Quests with other NPCs next to the main story can also be a good addition.
The reason new games seem so bad is the amount of attention that is given to the details of the world. In Arceus, the landscape is just an elevation map, with a repeating texture that is very recognizable and some trees stick out of it, and if you’re lucky, you’ll come across a wild boulder somewhere. What do I mean? It can be seen especially in this picture. It seems as if the game consists only of a handful of assets.
The mistake that happens here is that they chose the wrong balance between size and detail, a mistake many early access developers make with their open-world survival games. If you want to make the world look big, you can do that by making the environments extra large. But then you have to make sure you are wearing it in the right proportions to prevent the world from looking too empty. Building on larger bodies is also very important, so put grass and shrubs under the trees. As a result, the trunks are partially covered and the landscape is better flowing in vegetation.
The only thing really missing is more variety in vegetation, rocks, and other things that make the world more alive.
In the screenshots of Scarlet/Violet there seems to be some improvement, but many of the same bugs are still there. Bugs that don’t really fit a developer with Game Freak’s budget.
