As I write this I am outraged. Over the past weekend a hashtag on Twitter came up called #ThankYouGameFreak which was to show the company that the public appreciated their work and enjoyed their previous games before the release of the latest entries in the Pokemon series.
This unfortunately seems to confirm that despite the lack of several important features, endgame content and over 60% of the Pokedex being cut that people are still excited for Sword and Shield which baffles me completely. It seems to be a trend over these past few years that developers have started getting lazier and realising that they can release content that is unfinished, unpolished or simply lesser than previous entries and it will still sell well due to the games being franchises. The many EA Sports games and the Call of Duty series are good examples of this and they end up dragging down the gaming industry by making us simply accept and in some bizzare cases get excited for subjectively inferior content.
This has been a long time coming and in the Game Freak example it’s a particular shame as there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for all the cuts and missing features aside from sheer lack of effort. This will be the first mainline Pokemon games that I won’t end up buying and that makes me sad as it is one of my favourite franchises in gaming. Our culture is becoming more about companies giving us less content and expecting more out of us. I for one hope that things will change and that the gaming industry will eventually become a more focused and hard working sector with communication between fans and developers being a key focus in order to ensure that game series end up being successful additions rather than hated extensions to dying series.
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.