I hear there's a certain company that has a hand in creating this new game... and they're rather infamous and hated. And for fairly good reason too.
I don't know what to think of the game myself... guess I'll see when it comes.

That's why it's always important to judge a game based on the game, not the company who made it. Even the best game developers have put out crap, and likewise a lot of the worst have had their gems.

The problem is that the company producing this game has a massive track record of undervaluing gameplay in favour of monetisation models as well as being uncreative and generic with whatever they directly produce.

Judge the game as it is, for sure, but don't get blinded by the big ol' franchise label. It's still very likely to end up being a bland, generic game that's chock full of cash-grab market mechanics. I mean, considering the IP they got their hands on, in their eyes it is the absolute biggest, easiest pile of money to rake in.

Well as for paying any money for it, I'll be approaching it the same as I always do when it comes to free-to-start games. I'll play the game awhile, then if I decide to sink any money into it at all, I'll spend an equivalent to the value I think the game would be worth if it weren't free, then leave it at that.

Tencent is also known for spying: https://fossbytes.com/xiaomi-and-te.....lection-china/

Yeah, there's all that stuff as well. It's just not a company I'd trust in any capacity, to make games, publish games or respect me as a consumer or individual.

As someone who still plays league and has seen the previews.

This new MOBA is a big fat yikes and i will be genuinely impressed if it doesn't go the way of Pokemon Rumble

Its lasting power is definitely something that will have to remain to be seen, since there's a lot of stiff competition when it comes to the genre, and a lot of that competition already has a very strong following. So if this game wants to garner any attention at all, it'll have to do something to stand out, otherwise it'll intrigue people for a week or two for being a Pokemon game, then they'll just return to the MOBAs they've already been playing for years.

That's my current guess of what'll happen.

It'll either be a break out hit or it'll be more of a science class vinegar volcano thing. Cool for a moment, then there's something cooler going on

And if the latter, then let's hope there's at least some form of being able to battle against and alongside computer opponents so those who do enjoy it don't have that robbed from them by a dead community. I've certainly had a few games that I really enjoyed playing, but had a lot of that experience ruined by the heavy emphasis of online play in a game that didn't have anybody playing it. *glances to my shelf at Metroid Prime: Federation Force*

that's my issue with multiplayer driven games in general in the modern age.

Servers go down/no fanbase = unplayable

Indeed. There are even some games on my shelf that, the day I bought them, I knew that I'll be selling them the moment the servers are going down. So long as they're fun enough during that time though, then it's usually worth it, but for me an important aspect of any game is their longevity.

My fear is its playability via Nintendo wifi. Some games can tolerate a bit of lag. Moba games are not those kinda games. If it can't keep a steady reliable connection, the game will basically be dead on arrival.

I've never minded lag much. If anything, it can sometimes make things a little bit more interesting if a sudden hiccup causes an unexpected element of difficulty to interfere with what you're trying to do, and thus needs to be accommodated much as possible.

I'm fine with it normally, but in LoL I can't. Note I do not mind it in anything non competitive. Nothing is worse then shooting a skill shot and watching it go through you opponent unphased followed by a phantom hit to your health from an attack that never registered on screen.

Now that I say it, what I described I do not think is lag, more so than connection issues.

Don't get me wrong though, I am very excited about it. I just hope it's good ^^

Personally, I think I like the sound of the scoring system over other MOBAs I've seen (which honestly is only like two or three), since it makes the gameplay less about aggression to push forward. I think it has the potential to create a more interesting balance between offense and defense, especially if a team is ahead and the timer is starting to run out, they can shift their strategy accordingly to claim the win by emphasizing preventing the opposing team from advancing, rather than needing to continue pushing forward themselves. Which could work to wait out the clock, or could risk the opposing team slipping through and making a final score at the buzzer to steal the win. Whereas whenever I played League of Legends, the general strategy always seemed exactly the same match after match: Push harder than the other guys. Also, with points increasing as the match is nearing its end, another strategy could be to try to hold off on scoring too frequently in a chosen lane early on, thus saving the opponent's nodes, which eventually get destroyed from scoring, for easy access once scoring becomes more lucrative, as opposed to having to work harder to reach the opposing team's deeper scoring points when that time arrives.

I don't know. I'll have to see how it all plays out in practice, but those kinds of possibilities sound way more fascinating to me than the strategies LoL ever offered me.

The way I see it is that if I'm experiencing lag, then chances are so is my opponent. Therefore we're both suffering from the same malady, and so it's neither an advantage nor disadvantage to either side.

I also fall under the wary crowd. It is a mobile MOBA, and at least in my mind, MOBAs need the easy micro control a PC has, which makes a phone/switch version iffy. Plus, Game Freak has used up a lot of goodwill lately. I'll probably give the game a try, but doubt it will last.

Yeah, but from what I saw in the trailer, it seems to be trying to do things to accommodate the lack of PC control, such as having more simplified gameplay in general like not needing to quickly navigate complex equipment menus to gear up. It really just boils down to how well the game is built around the controls presented, rather than trying to force itself to play as if it's on a system it's not just because that's how others play.

As for Game Freak themselves, I haven't seen anything wrong with them as of late.

You're the first person I've seen with any hype for it. In general I agree with your desire to see more non-remake, non-formula Pokemon games, but I feel like a MOBA is an... odd choice to say the least. Nintendo has more fitting options for franchises to stick in a MOBA; Zelda, Metroid, Star Fox, Splatoon, or even go Heroes of the Storm route and do it like Smash. But more than that, didn't the MOBA craze come and go already? It'd be like Pokemon releasing a Battle Royal in 2028. I know LoL, DOTA2, and Smite are still around, but is there room in the market for another MOBA? And that's not even touching on studio working on it.

Personally, I feel as though Zelda and Metroid would be terrible choices for a MOBA. There's not enough iconic characters to play the heroes without forcing them into the role like Hyrule Warriors did in taking characters who aren't fighters and forcing them to be just to fill out the roster; especially since MOBAs have a tendency to maintain their longevity by frequently releasing new characters. A Splatoon one could be interesting though since all the characters area already entirely generic, and some of the mechanics already in place in Splatoon could be applied in neat ways. Star Fox could also be neat if they provided different types of ships to pilot in addition to having character-specific skills.

It's certainly an odd choice, but sometimes you need to take a risk in order to figure out what does and doesn't work, and those kinds of unexpected decisions are far more interesting than companies mindlessly releasing rehash after rehash of the same thing just because they know it works, and are too afraid to try anything groundbreaking.

No, can't say that I've got any.

All right.

I'm not really upset that they're making a Moba. I am a little upset that they made their second pokemon presents, which they built up to be something great, was simply a mobile phone game. Well...Switch and Mobile phone game.

Then again, it's Tencent so it's not very surprising there.

Which I still stand by as being a better announcement than wasting our time and money on a remake like I heard other people suggesting. I didn't even bother watching the presentation because of that expectation, but then gave it a look after somebody else told me about what they actually announced.

Well I for one would not be opposed to a remake. If there is any generation of Pokemon I absolutely adored, it was Gen 4. Pokemon Diamond, Pearl and Platinum were spectacular and if they decide to ever do a remake for it, I'd not be opposed. That was my expectation...

I'm not angry it turned out to be a Moba though. Moba's can still be fun and as they're free to play you can FIGURE out if you want to invest into it. I just think they could have slapped it into the first showcase last week and it would have been fine. The main problem was that everyone saw Pokemon Snap and that was fantastic. Then people go in thinking the next big reveal has to be something that would take away from that excitement.

And it did...just not in the best of ways. but we won't know if it's good or bad until the release.

Remakes can be neat, and are usually better than the original, but my main problem with them is that if one wants to play a game, then they can just play the original. They don't need a remake to revisit something, especially when the original is probably cheaper assuming they don't already own it. So while remakes can be amusing, I've always failed to grasp actually being excited for them.

Not to mention if they continue to force the EXP Share as a mandatory feature, that would just wind up ruining any possible enjoyment I could get out of the remake over the original anyway.

Yeah I can see that point. I guess I'm just excited for Remakes because I love to explore games from the past with more detail than there had been the first time around.

Because Pokemon Fans are complaining about what don't even know what they want, I concluded that Pokemon Unite isn't the game the fans need. Its the game the fans deserve.

The problem is that people who complain are louder than those who don't. When there's something to complain about, one will go out of their way to be heard, but when there isn't they'll just sit back and silently accept things for being satisfactory.

It's not really my game and I don't care for this, just like I don't care for Cafe Mix. But I think the way the fanbase has reacted and some fans in general is beyond absurd: Definitely understandable to be disappointed or bummed it wasn't another spinoff, or to be weirded out by the whole thing being its own video, but some are just getting way too uptight over a boring phone game. Some are pissed it's not Sinnoh Remakes or LG Johto, when I'm like "Dude... you guys literally bitched all of last year that Game Freak needs more time on pokemon games and that swsh were abysmal, apparently, but you then go SINNOH REMAKES 2020!", and I think that's just stupid that people even considered that a possibility that they'd kill off DLC sales with a game that would absolutely be rushed if they came out now, especially with the pandemic in account.

Oh, and it should go without saying, but besides the obvious concerns about tencent and the like due to them being disney-sized and being all sorts of sketchy, I've seen my fair share of blatant xenophobia and racism towards those of chinese origin (either the people in the region that express excitement for the game, or developers involved: same with how people are treating anyone in general who's excited over the game) over this: solely because some people can't fathom the idea of a game being made for a market that isn't them, or that spreading racist conspiracy theories about how this game will fund the coronavirus existing is somehow a way to "get back" at this game. It also doesn't help that I saw similar racist go down when Epic Games Store exclusives happened, and that was an even more unfounded situation.

Case in point, the game looks as meh as I expected and I knew a while ahead of time this was the game they'd show, but I'm still pretty disappointed by those who're just obsessively mad over the thing or being blatantly racist instead of just ignoring it to focus on playing other games instead.

I've never heard something so absurd as to propose something like racism for or against the development of a video game when race has nothing to do with the game, so kudos to that.

As for the whole remake thing, you raise a good point that to release a mainstream game while they're pumping out DLC for another would likely not be a very lucrative marketing strategy. Whether they have the time and resources to give us a quality remake alongside still producing content for Sword/Shield, it would be unwise to create that rift among their own fan base over which title to support, rather than waiting until they're finished with the current games before moving on to the next.

I mean, I wish I could say it's so absurd that it didn't happen but I saw quite a bit of very extreme responses about the game on social media: Just goes to show that some fans take things like this way, way too seriously, to be blunt, and you're definitely right that race has zero to do with the game: doesn't stop some assholes from thinking it does and making a big deal out of it due to the country the game was developed in.

I think it's perfectly fine to not give a shit about the game as that's exactly what i'm doing, I just am baffled that some people got *so* worked up thinking it would be sinnoh remakes in a year with DLC, that they think it would be a remotely good idea to continue yearly mainline entries, only to blow their lids off when it's another spinoff to the point some few start using very bad words or nasty remarks... When it's about a series with too many other dull F2P spinoffs to count (except Picross, that let you flat out buy a full game for $30 and is easily the most fun of the bunch, along with Go which is the only one I feel actually has a ton of effort put in) so why are fans acting as if this singular one somehow kept Sinnoh remakes off the table forever.

Really just a weird set of observations, really. But yeah, I don't think you're gonna see much hype for this game at all unless they show new footage and somehow it's the most addicting or epic spinoff ever... But it just doesn't seem like that at all from what they showed, so I'm just feeling this ain't for me and if I do try it, it would probably be for a hour on switch before I put it away forever, just like I did with Masters, Cafe Mix, Shuffle, Rumble World, etc. There's other retail spinoffs coming soon, more to come, so I'm pretty content with just moving on and treating this like a weird oddity I can ignore like TPCGO. There's others I'll probably like way more further down the road.

I've never played Masters, and got bored with Shuffle really quickly because everything about it felt pointless, and a downgrade from the vastly superior Trozei games. Rumble World I also haven't played because I had already gotten bored with the Rumble series partway through the second entry. Cafe Mix though has honestly been entertaining me decently enough, at least far more so than I had expected from the trailer. Still, even that is in small bursts, so it's far from an incredible game. More like a convenient distraction when I have 10-20 minutes to kill since it's so fast.

On an unrelated topic, it's because of Pokemon being so saturated with such half-assed games that makes Metroid my second favorite video game franchise instead of Pokemon. Because while I do certainly like my favorite Pokemon games more than my favorite Metroid titles, Metroid isn't so overflowing with games that are either crap, or wind up feeling obsolete as newer ones release, making it proportionately superior as a whole.

I mean yeah, Metroid's more spaced out with its releases and thus feels less cluttered. I honestly think the only awfully-made games in that series are Prime Hunters and Federation force (the latter when playing solo, at least). Even Prime pinball is fun! (and for me, more enjoyable than the trilogy since i'm not a fan of the first person view in those: more of a 2D metroid guy who adores Super, Samus Returns and Zero Mission and hopes we finally get Metroid V soon)

Really though, I do agree with Cafe Mix being way more fun than shuffle, and it also doesn't feel nearly as predatory with the MTX, but I still can't help but feel Puzzle Challenge and DS Trozei were the best puzzle games in the series.

Indeed. Cafe Mix feels less like a puzzle game, and more like a "flail randomly until something works" game. My favorite Pokemon puzzle game though is probably Puzzle League on the N64, even if it is just a Pokemon skin slapped onto an entirely unrelated franchise.

Prime Hunters is definitely my least favorite Metroid game, and the only one I'd say I didn't like. Although I would argue that Metroid 2 falls under a similar category, but that's only because Samus Returns does everything so much better that I don't know if I'd ever want to revisit the original instead (as opposed to Metroid vs. Zero Mission, where I feel both games have merits over the other). I do have to agree though that Federation Force isn't particularly interesting when playing alone, but I very much enjoyed playing it online for the week when it was possible to find matches. A friend and I did play through the entire game from beginning to end while voice chatting, and that was a blast.

I'm not a fan of first-person shooters (or first-person perspectives period), but I didn't mind it so much in the Metroid Prime games because the gameplay overall still felt much more like 3D adventure games rather than typical shooters. My top three favorite Metroid games though are probably Samus Returns, Fusion, and Other M.