I haven't played the game but I remember having a lot of strong feelings for the trailer. I work as a 3D artist and was kinda triggered for various reasons.Now with this, I have been considering that perhaps full 3D is not a direction for Pokemon should go in. Or at least, the Sword/Shield and beyond version where Pokemon are visible in the overworld. In fact, if someone from GameFreak held a gun to my head I would suggest thus: do with Pokemon and the HD era, what Castlevania: Symphony of the Night did with CDs and the 3D era. Keep the sprites, tart them up to 4K and use all that lovely space to make the biggest, most badass Pokemon game ever. Seriously if you took all the space required to make Paldea but scaled everything back to the Pokemon Black/White era look, you could probably fit three fucking regions on that Switch cart.
I somewhat sympathize with the devs cause they have to somehow shit a game out every year to coincide with all the multimedia and merchandising that goes on. But I think they really do need to take a gap year or more to prepare for a new generation of hardware. Clearly they were just completely winging it all this time. Can't imagine what will happen when there's a hypothetical Switch 2 with the graphical capabilities of the PS4/XBOne generation.
It is Pokemon at the end of the day and I think if they get one game down pat, then asset/shader reuse will go a long way in making the next game less of a poo process considering their crazy short development cycles.
Scarlet/Violet's art direction just confuses me. There's a mix of buildings that look like they were ripped straight out of the handheld games and plopped down, and then there's some attempt at realistic looking stuff with reflections and shaders. One window has that cartoon light reflection painted on it, another has an environment map reflecting on it. One brick wall looks like it was generated from a real life photo texture with normal mapping, another just has plain flat hand drawn bricks. Like, what is going on? It feels like they hired all manners of outsource companies and slapped shit together with no QC/QA/Direction.
The brick thing.
3DS ass looking building.
I feel like they can't decide what their art direction is sometimes. There's these high res fabric thing going on with the character's clothes if you see it up close, but is barely visible for most part. Parts of the terrain look cartoony as fuck but yet you got these realistic-ish-styled terrain mapping. It's like they are trying to go for high fidelity, but they don't know what they are doing nor is the Switch really capable enough for it so it's just weird.
Sword and Shield at least looked coherent and I feel like they should've built on top of that...
I honestly would be fine if a mainline Pokemon game had lower key 3D graphics. Take Pokemon Masters for example. It is a gacha mobile game but the graphics I feel are quite nice. Though the more I look at it now and the more I'm suspecting the game of reusing pre-rendered or illustrated backgrounds so I'm not sure how practical it is to follow its style for a full 3D open world. Though I'm pretty sure the main lobby is at least modeled out even if the outdoor story backgrounds and battle backgrounds aren't. Sometimes stylized art is harder to mass produce even if it looks simpler. "Realistic"-styled stuff is easier to procedurally generate and also outsource to - and maybe that's the cause of the rather eclectic art direction of Scarlet/Violet.
I personally would love to play a GBA specc-ed Pokemon game, but with every region and 64 gyms or however the fuck many there are these days.