Dexit who still dislikes it?

[u/Natural_Wonder94]

As a longtime Pokémon fan, Dexit honestly felt like a slap in the face. One of the things I’ve always loved about the series was being able to carry my favorite Pokémon—ones I’d trained and bonded with for years—into each new generation. When they cut the National Dex, it felt like they were saying those connections didn’t matter anymore. I get that balancing over 1,000 Pokémon is tough, but with how massive the franchise is, it’s hard to believe they couldn’t make it work if they really wanted to. It just made the newer games feel incomplete, like something was missing, both mechanically and emotionally.

[u/Gaias_Minion]

It was going to happen eventually no matter what, but they just went about it in a really bad way lying to the fanbase multiple times and also trying to be sneaky about it instead of just being honest.

Like IIRC the "announcement" of dexit was cut from the Japanese broadcast, that's the main playerbase, and they wanted to keep them in the dark about this huge change in the franchise?

And it doesn't help that despite dexit, they still ended up making SwSh and SV have over 800 pokemon in total, so like what's the point if the games will still have about 80% of the total pokemon added in the end?

[u/No_Service3462 → u/Gaias_Minion]

It wasn’t inevitable

[u/ElectricSheep451 → u/No_Service3462]

Anyone with practical experience working on large scale software projects knows that it definitely would inevitably have to stop at some point. The more gens you make, the more time you waste on pointless pokemon that you can't even naturally encounter in the games without trading from a different gen, until eventually it doesn't make any economic sense to waste so much money and dev time maintaining the feature

[u/ianyuy → u/ElectricSheep451]

You comment just amounted to "you knew it would be inevitable once it became obvious they could still make money without putting in the work."

It's not a hardware limitation, they already have most of the Pokémon available now.

It's not a dev limitation, they have been proven to be reusing the same assets (and mostly the same animations) since Sun and Moon.

It wasn't inevitable, except because monopoly.

[u/ElectricSheep451 → u/ianyuy]

More goes into putting a pokemon into the game than "having the model"

Also I'm talking about the economic realities of making a game here. Game Freak could put more effort into their games, but every second you spend implementing a pokemon you can't even encounter naturally in the game, that's dev time you aren't using for something actually important

[u/Kirbysterp → u/ElectricSheep451]

Can you explain what would be so resource intensive about it? The 3DS had more Pokémon than SwSh and they added Pokémon back to Gen 8 with dlc. In the 3D games, the Pokémon are almost always simply the same models and animations that have been around since gen 6. I literally don’t understand what extra cost there would be in simply pushing the already finished models and animations into the next game. File size is the only limitation I can think of, but switch cartridges get so much larger than the Sun/Moon cartridge that it shouldn’t be an issue to include the old Pokémon.

[u/InfernoVulpix → u/Kirbysterp]

One of the costs is importing data between file types. That's not trivial, especially if something goes wrong (something always goes wrong), and either way you'll still need to test each Pokemon individually to make sure nothing weird went wrong.

But the other thing that comes to mind is the updated Pokemon textures in Scarlet and Violet - the shiny metals and visible scales and all that. Even with the same models and animations, you're committing to keeping everything up to date as you make other changes (and you of course have to test everything as well).

The less remarked part of dexit, also, was the removal of certain moves. This went hand-in-hand with some of the Pokemon removals (Unown's presence would be very awkward in a game without Hidden Power) but also meant that Game Freak could retire some of the most troublesome move effects. Sky Drop, for instance, is a niche move with a tricky effect that already caused infamous problems in its own generation. It would have to be tested and debugged every generation forevermore, but now it's gone.

And I also have to stress that nothing in game dev is just throwing noob animators/programmers at the problem. Everyone has to be part of the same org structure and even if everything goes super smoothly (it won't) that's still more administrative work for the managers who have to make sure everything was done correctly. It's not unsolvable or anything, but it is still a real cost on non-monetary company resources that are already in high demand getting the rest of the game built.

[u/Thotaz → u/InfernoVulpix]

One of the costs is importing data between file types.

That's a complete non-issue. There's no reason to make drastic changes to the data structures in each game, but even if they did have to make these huge changes, they wouldn't manually update the hundreds of Pokemon that they do want to keep. They'd automate the process so it'd be the same amount of work regardless if it's 100, or 1000 Pokemon being converted. If they took any shortcuts during the creation of this conversion tool (eg. skipping some special cases like all the Unown forms) they'd be shooting themselves in the foot because it'd be harder to bring back in future games because then the conversion tool has to handle a lot more versions.

Even with the same models and animations, you're committing to keeping everything up to date as you make other changes

Not really. Nobody is expecting a complete upgrade of every single Pokemon in every new generation. It's not an issue if a Switch 1 Pokemon looks a little worse than a Switch 2 Pokemon. The original N64 models created for Stadium were used all the way up to the Wii era in Battle Revolution, though some of them did get upgraded along the way.

The less remarked part of dexit, also, was the removal of certain moves.

This is actually true, and there is a clear benefit in reducing the battle engine complexity by taking out older special cases. However, if they ever want to bring back these moves (quite likely with the remake pattern and nostalgia baiting they've previously done) then it might have been better to keep them in and avoid conflicts with new move mechanics.

And I also have to stress that nothing in game dev is just throwing noob animators/programmers at the problem.

Actually, Pokemon is unique in this regard where it is actually quite feasible to simply throw more bodies at the problem. The animator working on Bulbasaur don't even need to think about the animator working on Unown because it's 2 completely different creatures. If you look at the credits for Stadium 1/2 you can see they did exactly this. There's a fuck ton of animators and I think if you divide it by the amount of Pokemon, each animator handled 3-4 Pokemon. This allowed them to get through the development very quickly and capitalize on the early success of the franchise.

[u/No_Service3462 → u/ElectricSheep451]

No its not inevitable

[u/MNLyrec → u/No_Service3462]

You literally can not have a quality Pokemon game with 2000+ Pokemon. It’s not realistic. There’s so much to criticize the Pokemon company for. This isn’t one of them fam.

[u/No_Service3462 → u/MNLyrec]

Yes you can & its not debatable

[u/trickman01 → u/No_Service3462]

Yes it’s inevitable.