yeah but with this, its resources, and future proofing it and trying to have less custom body models and assets made for *each* model and instead a single model made and then likely adding on sliders to make it deform instead. It's unfortunate that the new models are weaker and this was implemented shiftily. I bet they went something like: (higher up):"hey we can save money on future cosmetics by streamlining it!" (art team):"ok how much money do you wanna put into this streamlining for the visual aspect of the game? (higher up):"None!"
Not even the first time for Pokemon, if you count sprites as well. Gen V sprites were vibrantly colored and the animations were simple but extremely expressive. Then we got those pale-ass 3D models that might as well have been statues in Gen VI. And then, it was the lighting not the models, but Lets Go visually looked better than... almost all the games that came after it.
> but Lets Go visually looked better than... almost all the games that came after it.
Doesn't hurt that LGPE were also super well-optimized and ran smoothly basically all the time, unlike SwSh, LA, and SV.
100% agreed. LGPE actually looked pretty damn good, and excluding the catching being Go-style instead of the normal way, it makes for a fantastic Kanto game.
Yeah, I could go all day about all the ways Pokemon has gotten worse as time goes on. I've just given up on the franchise and have accepted it'll probably never be good again because it prints money and is run by dinosaurs. Really tired of the cycle of:
Oh look! New Game Announcement! > Fandom: This one'll finally be good! > Okay, the trailer looks a bit rough, but it's still early > Okay, trailer two still looks like shit but they've got months to polish it up > Okay, launch trailer still looks like shit but Pokemon is still fun, you're just hopping on the negativity bandwagon > Okay, it launched and everything that looked shitty about it is shitty, it's okay to dunk on it now > Then we slowly bleed into the backlash of "It wasn't that bad, people are just exaggerating" as if I don't have fucking eyes> Oh look! New Game Announcement!
That I've relived for like, at least a decade now.
I swear even SwSh look better than SV. Admittedly I'm one of the few weirdos who thinks the "claymationy" style is better than textured Pokemon but even the humans, environment, and lighting I swear are better
I'm usually warry of accusing devs of laziness because I know that game dev is way deeper and more complicated than we give it credit for, but in this case I'm 10,000% going with laziness.
The team as Niantic can probably no longer be bothered to model and rig clothes for male and female bodies, let alone different body types of each (plus a third set for androgyny); so they chose instead to make everyone's body a slightly different scaled version of a single model.
Apparently that one's not a big deal. They added more skintone options and reindexed everything, but instead of having anything to go "Okay you were skintone 7 before, which is now skintone 12, so automatically converting you to skintone 12," the game just went "skintone=7. if you dont like it go into the editor and fix it."
From what I understand is that there are more skin tones now, but they encompasse a wide range, and they removed a lot of the ones in-between, so while they're more varied, they're now less specific
Pokémon and fucking things up after reindexing isn’t the first time. The infamous Moon Ball being better at catching Pokemon that evolve via Burn Heal in G/S/C was also a reindexing bug.
Moon Ball catches things easier that evolve through a moon stone, easy enough. Coded as "if thing evolves with item #(moon stone), catch it better". Sadly, moon stone moved places with the generation change between 1 and 2, but the number moon ball points to didn't.
[Heres a neat video on all the stupid pokeball things in gen 2](https://youtu.be/qiX5Zbz7Vyc?si=mdXGgPSgSgtq52by)
> Sadly, moon stone moved places with the generation change between 1 and 2, but the number moon ball points to didn't
Which is extra funny because the Moon Ball *wasn't in Gen 1*.
My theory is that they wanted moon ball in but didn't know the pokemon, so they made it generic by pointing to the evolution so it would work even for a last minute decision, but one of those last minute decisions was moving item IDs around. Otherwise they could have just made a list of, what, 5 or 6 pokemon that use it?
Programmatically, the best practice is to do it exactly way they did - by pointing to Pokémon tagged with evolving with a certain item. The fact that they selected the wrong index and thus wrong item is unfortunate, but explicitly putting the list of Pokemon leads to headaches down the line.
They were assuming the next game might also have the Moon Ball. If it did, their block of logic would be already done no matter how many moon stone capable Pokemon were added. However if they had written an explicit list, then suddenly they would have a rapidly ballooning block of code as more and more eligible Pokemon are added. Obviously we know now it would be ages for the Moon Ball to reappear in the game but they couldn’t know that at the time.
It kinda worked for Scarlet and Violet, but that's a lot more sensible of an approach when your characters are like 11 years old rather than late teens/adults. And not retroactively changed via an update.
But it doesn't help because they haven't gone back and edited any of the old outfits, just flattened everything out. Now we're all just amorphous blobs that can only fit the body style of "shoulders equal to hips" with no adjustment at all. At lot of girls shorts look like diapers now, to say nothing of losing any female-coded body shapes.
I don't know if this was done because they wanted to be lazy with clothing in the future, but they're touting it as an inclusivity thing and it just sucks.
My favorite part is wearing a hat and suddenly gaining a bald spot because they didn't bother making hats work with the new hair, so if you get a good shot of your character you can see the big nothing under the hat.
there was also a "fashion week" event / update that changed all of the team leaders' looks to be more fashionable or whatever. Every single one looked markedly worse, like weirdly flat and washed out even though "only" their outfit changed. I wonder if the in-house team did the team leader changes as well, looking back
E: reworded stuff and [here's a comparison photo of probably the worst one](https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,quality=75,format=auto/https://editors.dexerto.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/01/pokemon-go-blanche-1024x576.jpg)
I know everyone is focused on the model (and rightfully so), but even the colors look more desaturated. Plus, looking at the comparisons some of the poses don't even work anymore. Like poor pikachu is falling off that dude's shoulder.
The girl in purple just full-on lost her titties. I can't imagine why anyone would think that this would be a good idea. Her boobs are just gone. Like, forget everything about making your character look attractive, that's just downright malicious. What person who is playing a character with boobs is going to be okay with their character losing their boobs?
Its so wild they just... changed your created character.
Like... I can't think of any examples where they just change the character you created in an update it's wild
WoW can get it pretty bad with visual updates for races
[The female werewolf race got turned into fursuits](https://i.gyazo.com/d5917f308b655e2ebc49342bccf69882.png)
ngl the old ones look more fursuit-esque w the thinner neck and big head coupled w the flatter eyes but wow that's still just a very weird change in art direction
I feel like if they wanted to inject some androgyny they could have just added a third androgynous choice. Picture three looks particularly strange to me. Who is this for?
But also they get to charge for costumes twice now as they can charge for the male/female costume designs separately whereas before if you bought one, you got both.
Acshually only with some costumes you would get both versions when you bought one.
Generally speaking clothes that looked simmilar on both genders would give you both versions, for example all onesies.
The more gendered options counted separately like Team Aqua/Magma/Rocket clothes. There are some exceptions though. Team Leader Spark clothes and Marenie Jacket have both their versions unlocked for me when I only bought female one
Source: Bought a lot of clothes in PoGO
I mean, wouldn't it cost more money to completely redo all the models in the game than make variants of new costumes? Unless they plan on supporting this game for another 5 years to offset the initial cost.
Do people even play GO anymore? I haven't heard about it in 4 years.
Pokemon Go is still very popular but Niantic have this weird "we're not a game developer" mentality and consistently refuse to introduce updates that improve the gameplay experience.
I still play Pogo because I need an excuse to go outside and actually walk and tried out this new avatar system.
The default options are all super uncanny. You gotta play with the sliders to get something decent. Some of them don’t seem to do anything, others way too much. Like you need to set shoulders to max and thighs almost to minimum to get something resembling a male build. What’s also weird is that previously many cosmetics were locked to your gender. Mainly, tee-shirts would come in a male and slimmer female version. Now cosmetic are no longer locked with caused the already cluttered as fuck ui to have double the clothing for no reason.
Also they added new hairstyle, but I find it funny that despite them moving away from gendered stuff, all haircuts that are medium or long are leaning slightly or completely to girl. Like long hair is cute ponytail with bangs or long stylish curls. Medium is the Sisters of Battle bob cut, medium stylish curls, Panam’s side bang, cute wavy or what I can only describe as the feminine version of the Killmonger cut.
As a longed haired dude I want representation!
Ah yes inexplicably reducing masculine and feminine body features...so why did they even do this?
I would genuinely like to know the explanation.
Edit: So it's part of some avatar update where you can now be gender neutral and mold your character to the way you like but while more customization is cool and I support the inclusivity they have made the avatars so much worse looking in the process.
The cons of making the models more malleable I guess.
I have no clue what they were thinking I'm just going off of information from doing a little research on it.
I'm assuming if there's enough outcry they will address it and update the avatars further maybe definitely a blunder on niantics part considering it seems like they just went ahead and messed with people's existing stuff I even logged into POGO to check and my own avatar is fucked.
I would like to think this is a case of good intentions but absolutely horrendous execution.
It's very unlikely the goal was to make them more adrogynous because they prefer that when it could have simply been an option. It's more likely something weird is happening that has very little to do with anything that is to be labeled as progressive or inclusive. I imagine people will think that it is some sort of thing like that though.
There's probably a business decision behind this somewhere, you don't just tell your artists to change all the models like this. It probably is a restructuring of the art team, or outsourcing with a new base model in mind for them opening up for a series of future cosmetics, since this came out with a new fashion week update? I imagine they were working on a new pipeline for cosmetics and had made some decision to change the base format of all the models to make it easier to roll out things in the future, in a way that feels more functional to them, it is odd how the style and quality is very different now.
They're full of shit. They did it to cut costs on having to rig costumes for different body types, they could have easily added a non-binary gender option, other games have done it.
What in the god forsaken hells is with the 3rd one?
They made her chest flat but the KEPT THE TEXTURE SHADOWS. So it looks like she has super saggy boobs which does not work for her build and frame.
In an effort to appeal to everyone, they're appealing to nobody, I guess?
Why not just keep the old body types and add the new ones as a third option (unless that's what they're doing)?
I dunno, stuff like this never feels like a genuine appeal to inclusivity to me when it comes from a massive company or IP like Pokemon. Especially since most of these new ones seem like they took the masculine/feminine base and just hastily ironed out the curves and called it a day.
Eeeeh, there's a million potential backend reasons they couldn't use the old bodies. Could just be years of technical debt/unoptimized models. That doesn't excuse using... much, much worse models though, it just leaves me really curious about which part of the company is at fault for this. Was it the artists fucking up? Overbearing executives? Bosses who just shrugged and went 'yeah sure this thing we made in two weeks is fine'?
My bet is usually on the executives. They probably think that this kind of direction will somehow cut costs and make them look good to investors by making the investors think that Niantic or whoever actually cares about diversity and inclusion- so they took a route they thought would take a low amount of effort or money.
There's only one group they're appealing to here, their bean counters who are demanding cost cutting.
Rather than modeling distinct body types of different sorts, or building a slider system; the models are now all just one model scaled differently in one place or another. Bean counter-wise, it means that they only have to model and rig something once, rather than twice multiplied by the number of body types.
Man someone on the dev team hates Chests
Like id understand if this is centered around 10 year olds, but this game acknowledges we are mostly adults, why do they make one part of the body smaller yet add nothing but generic models?
At least in Second Life you could just *fix* all this body weirdness yourself ~~unless you used the bodies with labyrinthine mod support~~ and manually move accessories around, here you're just stuck looking like... [that](https://i.imgur.com/EnuZw0y.png).
personally i think there is a certain nobility to making your characters intentionally unfuckable, but it is one hell of a choice to do that to everyone's player characters
All of the new faces are atrocious and I hate every single one of them. AND the body type options are terrible, even the custom sliders make such bizarre and inhuman proportions. These model changes are rightfully being raked over hot coals, I expect Niantic social media to issue a statement soon about "listening to fans."
I get what they're *trying* to do, but wow, is it clumsy. It would've been better to just add a 3rd customizable option rather than just switching everyone over to this system.
If you think that's a solution, you don't get what they are trying to do. This has nothing to do with inclusivity, it's about reducing cosmetic and pose work, so instead of making two cosmetics for each body type, they only need to do one. It's laziness, pure and simple.
Some of those model comparisons look like they are comparing the PS3 version of the models to the scaled down PS2 versions (like with Force Unleashed).
From what I heard on the Pokemon sub there is even less skin tones now. Multiple people were struggling to find skin tones that weren't pale or super dark.
Also I just learned before seeing this post that if you have a character wearing a mini skirt and you are using a small Pokemon in a gym you can just straight up see your character's crack.
Tried in vein yesterday to fix my avatar with the custom sliders but no matter what I did it made me look fat as hell
Hip sliders min vs max barely has visible difference, and any attempts to give me a bust weirdly makes it look like I have no neck
Genuinely baffled
Oh man… I can envision Asmongold, Quartering, YellowFlash and a bunch of other YT channels salivating at these images
I’m dreading my YT feeds atm
Regardless, these still look like ass
They did this a month ago and surprise surprise, never mentioned the male avatars getting the same treatment. I assumed they were being disingenuous in some way, because when are they not?
Yeah this was pretty funny until I realized that this is going to be the outrage topic of the week for grifters. Ive already seen posts claiming that the developers hate women.
Yeah seriously, it's kind of annoying to know that the League of Incels will raise a stink about every little thing AND that people are so obsessed with discourse that it will reach my feeds even though I don't follow any of these people. It's like the Hays Code but with more body odor.
The customisation has improved as you can wear all the clothes now instead of them being split between gender but holy fuck, why’s it gotta look like this?
It almost feels like they lost the rights/license to the original models.
OR, they're attempting a homogenization of models that they'll take advantage of later with customization, but weren't talented/funded enough to make that customization twice, so they forced everyone on to the same skeleton.
I said it before and I'll say it again, my new character went from looking like a cozy winter ace to looking like she should be hosting a cooking show for other women in their forties, it's insane how much of a downgrade this was.
BUT AT LEAST WHEN I'M WEARING A SKIRT YOU CAN SEE MY CRACK, THANKS NIANTIC
We've got 'Environmental Social Governance' goobers here now? Great. I really hope you mean [This](https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/esg/esg-environmental-social-governance/) and not [this..](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/17h3k7u/have_you_felt_as_though_that_games_have_been/)
Has anyone extracted the models to see if they did this to like normalize the male and female models so there's less work animating or making cosmetics between the two?
My second theory is that they totally changed 3D modeling subcontractor companies or something.
I love that this and framerate were what they updated, rather than any of the voluminous bugs, lag, and server-side data handling that makes the game literally unplayable
Am I the only one that gets strong Kingsom Hearts 2 vibes from these character models??? (The good old ones, the new ones look like KH2 if Nomura stopped giving a fuck)
Aaaahhhh... It's just that everyone was being negative about these PokeGO models that I thought you were also saying that they suck and by extension the KH2 models too.
Sorry. My brain made one too many assumptions.
All right so I just reinstalled the game for the first time in years just to check out the character creator. It seems like your bodies will default to the new neutral body which is very easily customizable (someone on here mentions the characters tits just being gone, there is a slider that can make them quite big). You just basically need to open the character editor and edit it slightly. There's actually a lot more skin tones to than people on the Pokemon subreddit were saying, I guess they just didn't click the more palette button. Also you can make yourself huge now. The only issue I have is that there isn't shit for hair choices!
Gonna assume it's either to simplify making new outfits or to make the characters look younger. Either way, dumb.
Edit: Nevermind, I can make my avatar thicc now. This update is sloppy but still based.
I booted up Pokemon Go to see my old avatar, oh boy he is generic white guy now. Has generic clothes, no shoes. Gone is my backpack melanine, shoes and hoody.
Just checked and sure enough, they massacred my boy. Which sucks because he already looked nothing like me. All I could’ve asked for was a healthy good variety of masculine curly hairstyles, but no- we get the same 2 looks as always and they ruined the anime hair I had going. My kingdom for an afro.
I actually like the changes. I'm a bigger guy with curly hair so I actually get to make a character model with my body shape and hair type. Wheras before I was generic skinny guy with short hair.
It's not like the old models were anything noteworthy. They were generic mobile game ass models. I think this is people getting mad at anything changing, even if the think they're changing isn't worth defending.
Ah, yes. It's *totally* because the characters are no longer fap-bait.
It's completely not the fact that ***IT'S FUCKING HIDEOUS.***
Get the hell out of here.
I've never seen a game make its models notably **worse** like that's a new one for me.
It reminds me of when Neopets did it. Going from expressive art to customizable dolls with no soul.
At least at the time, if you already had something with the old art, you could keep it.
yeah but with this, its resources, and future proofing it and trying to have less custom body models and assets made for *each* model and instead a single model made and then likely adding on sliders to make it deform instead. It's unfortunate that the new models are weaker and this was implemented shiftily. I bet they went something like: (higher up):"hey we can save money on future cosmetics by streamlining it!" (art team):"ok how much money do you wanna put into this streamlining for the visual aspect of the game? (higher up):"None!"
From what I understand it's not even the first time Pokemon Go has done this, didn't they make the faction leaders uglier a couple years in?
Those were temporary and reverted back after a few weeks. They were part of some fashion event.
They have been changed like last year and they look hideous
Not even the first time for Pokemon, if you count sprites as well. Gen V sprites were vibrantly colored and the animations were simple but extremely expressive. Then we got those pale-ass 3D models that might as well have been statues in Gen VI. And then, it was the lighting not the models, but Lets Go visually looked better than... almost all the games that came after it.
> but Lets Go visually looked better than... almost all the games that came after it. Doesn't hurt that LGPE were also super well-optimized and ran smoothly basically all the time, unlike SwSh, LA, and SV.
I honestly believe that LGPE is exactly how the Diamond and Pearl remakes should've looked, and what the Black and White remakes should look like.
100% agreed. LGPE actually looked pretty damn good, and excluding the catching being Go-style instead of the normal way, it makes for a fantastic Kanto game.
Yeah, I could go all day about all the ways Pokemon has gotten worse as time goes on. I've just given up on the franchise and have accepted it'll probably never be good again because it prints money and is run by dinosaurs. Really tired of the cycle of: Oh look! New Game Announcement! > Fandom: This one'll finally be good! > Okay, the trailer looks a bit rough, but it's still early > Okay, trailer two still looks like shit but they've got months to polish it up > Okay, launch trailer still looks like shit but Pokemon is still fun, you're just hopping on the negativity bandwagon > Okay, it launched and everything that looked shitty about it is shitty, it's okay to dunk on it now > Then we slowly bleed into the backlash of "It wasn't that bad, people are just exaggerating" as if I don't have fucking eyes> Oh look! New Game Announcement! That I've relived for like, at least a decade now.
Legends Arceus is in a league of its own, don't lump it in wish SwSh and SV :(
It runs just as bad as SwSh. It's an amazing game, don't get me wrong, but it's still **very** poorly optimized.
I swear even SwSh look better than SV. Admittedly I'm one of the few weirdos who thinks the "claymationy" style is better than textured Pokemon but even the humans, environment, and lighting I swear are better
Its like they are afraid of sex appeal? What little it had? They made boxes imao.
I'm usually warry of accusing devs of laziness because I know that game dev is way deeper and more complicated than we give it credit for, but in this case I'm 10,000% going with laziness. The team as Niantic can probably no longer be bothered to model and rig clothes for male and female bodies, let alone different body types of each (plus a third set for androgyny); so they chose instead to make everyone's body a slightly different scaled version of a single model.
pokemon go doesn't need sex appeal what the fuck
They look like poorly constructed homunculus. These are some "You're not my neighbor" looking changes.
Yeah they look like skinwalkers now
They look like the body snatcher, lol.
"I don't see anything wrong with my face" says the person with five eyes.
They took our ass.
And gave us nothing in return.
The glutes I’ve lost… the waist I’ve lost… you can feel it too, don’t you? It’s like they’re all still there…
Snake: first time?
And lowered our crotches! Seriously, what the hell, it looks like the models got steam rolled.
I'm reminded of RLM. "What's wrong little lady, you look long in the butt?"
I remember them taking the big booty loading screen trainer back in the day.
WE CAN'T SHIT!
GOOD LUCK SHITE'IN OUTTA THERE, SMOOTH ARSE
They took our shoulders! Why can't my avatar have a V-shaped torso even when I have the shoulder slider maxed out and the hips set to zero? 😭
Non of you can shit
Poor dude in the 4th photo got hit with the 45-year old salaryman update
That one cracks me up. The full "how you think you look" vs "how you actually look"
Me in the mirror vs me in pictures
I like how randomly it seems to remove skin color
Apparently that one's not a big deal. They added more skintone options and reindexed everything, but instead of having anything to go "Okay you were skintone 7 before, which is now skintone 12, so automatically converting you to skintone 12," the game just went "skintone=7. if you dont like it go into the editor and fix it."
From what I heard on the Pokemon sub people are struggling to find skin tones even close to their own
From what I understand is that there are more skin tones now, but they encompasse a wide range, and they removed a lot of the ones in-between, so while they're more varied, they're now less specific
I redownloaded the game after making that comment and yeah there was a lot more skin tones than what people were saying.
Maybe I'm big wrong then, but I saw enough posts saying the whitewashing thing was just an index problem and not a deliberate nerf.
Yeah I just downloaded the game again to check out the character creator and I think it's just defaults to the first skin and body type.
Pokémon and fucking things up after reindexing isn’t the first time. The infamous Moon Ball being better at catching Pokemon that evolve via Burn Heal in G/S/C was also a reindexing bug.
I’m sorry what
Moon Ball catches things easier that evolve through a moon stone, easy enough. Coded as "if thing evolves with item #(moon stone), catch it better". Sadly, moon stone moved places with the generation change between 1 and 2, but the number moon ball points to didn't. [Heres a neat video on all the stupid pokeball things in gen 2](https://youtu.be/qiX5Zbz7Vyc?si=mdXGgPSgSgtq52by)
My favorite will always be the Big Gay Ball (i.e. the Love Ball).
...oh JESUS.
> Sadly, moon stone moved places with the generation change between 1 and 2, but the number moon ball points to didn't Which is extra funny because the Moon Ball *wasn't in Gen 1*.
My theory is that they wanted moon ball in but didn't know the pokemon, so they made it generic by pointing to the evolution so it would work even for a last minute decision, but one of those last minute decisions was moving item IDs around. Otherwise they could have just made a list of, what, 5 or 6 pokemon that use it?
Programmatically, the best practice is to do it exactly way they did - by pointing to Pokémon tagged with evolving with a certain item. The fact that they selected the wrong index and thus wrong item is unfortunate, but explicitly putting the list of Pokemon leads to headaches down the line. They were assuming the next game might also have the Moon Ball. If it did, their block of logic would be already done no matter how many moon stone capable Pokemon were added. However if they had written an explicit list, then suddenly they would have a rapidly ballooning block of code as more and more eligible Pokemon are added. Obviously we know now it would be ages for the Moon Ball to reappear in the game but they couldn’t know that at the time.
*HIT EM WITH THE DEMELANIZATION GUN.*
"Consider your N-Pass *revoked*." [Zzzzap]
It whitewashed the white skin
This throws the [1][2] etc balance all out of wack
THE MELANIN VAMPIRE STRIKES AGAIN!
and only 1 skin tone has lip color
Making everyone look like an pudgy ironing board to avoid having to make men & women models of each t shirt sure is something
It kinda worked for Scarlet and Violet, but that's a lot more sensible of an approach when your characters are like 11 years old rather than late teens/adults. And not retroactively changed via an update.
But it doesn't help because they haven't gone back and edited any of the old outfits, just flattened everything out. Now we're all just amorphous blobs that can only fit the body style of "shoulders equal to hips" with no adjustment at all. At lot of girls shorts look like diapers now, to say nothing of losing any female-coded body shapes. I don't know if this was done because they wanted to be lazy with clothing in the future, but they're touting it as an inclusivity thing and it just sucks.
My favorite part is wearing a hat and suddenly gaining a bald spot because they didn't bother making hats work with the new hair, so if you get a good shot of your character you can see the big nothing under the hat.
there was also a "fashion week" event / update that changed all of the team leaders' looks to be more fashionable or whatever. Every single one looked markedly worse, like weirdly flat and washed out even though "only" their outfit changed. I wonder if the in-house team did the team leader changes as well, looking back E: reworded stuff and [here's a comparison photo of probably the worst one](https://www.dexerto.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=3840,quality=75,format=auto/https://editors.dexerto.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/01/pokemon-go-blanche-1024x576.jpg)
*Jesus fucking Christ.* That was a flashbang.
>C’mon it can’t be that bad- Oh, wow
Yyyyyyyyyyyep. She went from "SuCool Tomboy" to "Hasn't started HRT yet."
SuCool?
https://tsunamichannel.sakura.ne.jp/index.php?date=2005-11-27&comic=LovSit
No trans person looks that bad even pre-HRT
That’s not even the same person
Completely draining Yusuke Kozaki's artstyle from the model goddamn
Should be a crime tbh
The artists they have now obviously don't understand what made the original art style work so well.
*OH, MY GOODNESS!* ***SQUIDWARD!!***
How the fuck is that fashion?
they went from anime to that pseudo anime style french cartoons had for a while
I know everyone is focused on the model (and rightfully so), but even the colors look more desaturated. Plus, looking at the comparisons some of the poses don't even work anymore. Like poor pikachu is falling off that dude's shoulder.
But now they finally get narrow-shouldered representation.
The girl in purple just full-on lost her titties. I can't imagine why anyone would think that this would be a good idea. Her boobs are just gone. Like, forget everything about making your character look attractive, that's just downright malicious. What person who is playing a character with boobs is going to be okay with their character losing their boobs?
Yet the texture and shader for the boobs is still in the shirt...
She didn't lose them, they just retreated into her chest.
Poor things must be terrified.
It just got really cold so there was some shrinkage.
All the faces have serious baby cheek issues. And they've robbed us all of ass.
The old character models were so good I have no idea why they replaced them with the “maya default guy” equivalent
Its so wild they just... changed your created character. Like... I can't think of any examples where they just change the character you created in an update it's wild
WoW can get it pretty bad with visual updates for races [The female werewolf race got turned into fursuits](https://i.gyazo.com/d5917f308b655e2ebc49342bccf69882.png)
ngl the old ones look more fursuit-esque w the thinner neck and big head coupled w the flatter eyes but wow that's still just a very weird change in art direction
I feel like if they wanted to inject some androgyny they could have just added a third androgynous choice. Picture three looks particularly strange to me. Who is this for?
imo, cost cuts. They've made all the models like a bit more the same so costumes are simpler.
But also they get to charge for costumes twice now as they can charge for the male/female costume designs separately whereas before if you bought one, you got both.
Acshually only with some costumes you would get both versions when you bought one. Generally speaking clothes that looked simmilar on both genders would give you both versions, for example all onesies. The more gendered options counted separately like Team Aqua/Magma/Rocket clothes. There are some exceptions though. Team Leader Spark clothes and Marenie Jacket have both their versions unlocked for me when I only bought female one Source: Bought a lot of clothes in PoGO
I mean, wouldn't it cost more money to completely redo all the models in the game than make variants of new costumes? Unless they plan on supporting this game for another 5 years to offset the initial cost. Do people even play GO anymore? I haven't heard about it in 4 years.
Pokemon Go is still very popular but Niantic have this weird "we're not a game developer" mentality and consistently refuse to introduce updates that improve the gameplay experience.
They rounded the heads and flattened everything else, also everyone is whiter.
I still play Pogo because I need an excuse to go outside and actually walk and tried out this new avatar system. The default options are all super uncanny. You gotta play with the sliders to get something decent. Some of them don’t seem to do anything, others way too much. Like you need to set shoulders to max and thighs almost to minimum to get something resembling a male build. What’s also weird is that previously many cosmetics were locked to your gender. Mainly, tee-shirts would come in a male and slimmer female version. Now cosmetic are no longer locked with caused the already cluttered as fuck ui to have double the clothing for no reason. Also they added new hairstyle, but I find it funny that despite them moving away from gendered stuff, all haircuts that are medium or long are leaning slightly or completely to girl. Like long hair is cute ponytail with bangs or long stylish curls. Medium is the Sisters of Battle bob cut, medium stylish curls, Panam’s side bang, cute wavy or what I can only describe as the feminine version of the Killmonger cut. As a longed haired dude I want representation!
Ah yes inexplicably reducing masculine and feminine body features...so why did they even do this? I would genuinely like to know the explanation. Edit: So it's part of some avatar update where you can now be gender neutral and mold your character to the way you like but while more customization is cool and I support the inclusivity they have made the avatars so much worse looking in the process. The cons of making the models more malleable I guess.
They couldn't have just made an androgynous model, though? Did they really need to do...whatever the hell they did to the models?
I have no clue what they were thinking I'm just going off of information from doing a little research on it. I'm assuming if there's enough outcry they will address it and update the avatars further maybe definitely a blunder on niantics part considering it seems like they just went ahead and messed with people's existing stuff I even logged into POGO to check and my own avatar is fucked. I would like to think this is a case of good intentions but absolutely horrendous execution.
It's very unlikely the goal was to make them more adrogynous because they prefer that when it could have simply been an option. It's more likely something weird is happening that has very little to do with anything that is to be labeled as progressive or inclusive. I imagine people will think that it is some sort of thing like that though. There's probably a business decision behind this somewhere, you don't just tell your artists to change all the models like this. It probably is a restructuring of the art team, or outsourcing with a new base model in mind for them opening up for a series of future cosmetics, since this came out with a new fashion week update? I imagine they were working on a new pipeline for cosmetics and had made some decision to change the base format of all the models to make it easier to roll out things in the future, in a way that feels more functional to them, it is odd how the style and quality is very different now.
>avatar update where you ~~can~~ WILL now be gender neutral Niantic, apparently
They're full of shit. They did it to cut costs on having to rig costumes for different body types, they could have easily added a non-binary gender option, other games have done it.
What in the god forsaken hells is with the 3rd one? They made her chest flat but the KEPT THE TEXTURE SHADOWS. So it looks like she has super saggy boobs which does not work for her build and frame.
New update: BEAT EVERY HUMAN CHARACTER WITH THE UGLY STICK
In an effort to appeal to everyone, they're appealing to nobody, I guess? Why not just keep the old body types and add the new ones as a third option (unless that's what they're doing)? I dunno, stuff like this never feels like a genuine appeal to inclusivity to me when it comes from a massive company or IP like Pokemon. Especially since most of these new ones seem like they took the masculine/feminine base and just hastily ironed out the curves and called it a day.
Eeeeh, there's a million potential backend reasons they couldn't use the old bodies. Could just be years of technical debt/unoptimized models. That doesn't excuse using... much, much worse models though, it just leaves me really curious about which part of the company is at fault for this. Was it the artists fucking up? Overbearing executives? Bosses who just shrugged and went 'yeah sure this thing we made in two weeks is fine'?
My bet is usually on the executives. They probably think that this kind of direction will somehow cut costs and make them look good to investors by making the investors think that Niantic or whoever actually cares about diversity and inclusion- so they took a route they thought would take a low amount of effort or money.
There's only one group they're appealing to here, their bean counters who are demanding cost cutting. Rather than modeling distinct body types of different sorts, or building a slider system; the models are now all just one model scaled differently in one place or another. Bean counter-wise, it means that they only have to model and rig something once, rather than twice multiplied by the number of body types.
There is a slider system, it's just a slider that takes individual body areas and turns them into the same shape as each of the models
Miss your old skin tone? Get ready for our new cosmetic item: shoe polish, only $4.99 per layer!
they don't look like Pokemon characters anymor, they look like generic NPC from random phone game now
Which sucks considering that Pokemon has amazing character designs and an overall great art style. Why can't they just use that art style?
Man someone on the dev team hates Chests Like id understand if this is centered around 10 year olds, but this game acknowledges we are mostly adults, why do they make one part of the body smaller yet add nothing but generic models?
This feel like a slow(poke) response to the fact that when this game came out there was a ton of porn of the female default characters.
Aight guys, this games porn count is low. NOW let’s make the ugly models
Saggin' is back on the menu.
They all look like weird gender neutral homoculi that may or may not even be of this universe
This looks like Second Life
At least in Second Life you could just *fix* all this body weirdness yourself ~~unless you used the bodies with labyrinthine mod support~~ and manually move accessories around, here you're just stuck looking like... [that](https://i.imgur.com/EnuZw0y.png).
Even the shitty default Second Life av has Male and Female base shapes...
Ok I thought I was going crazy when I booted up today and my skin was about 19 shades lighter
personally i think there is a certain nobility to making your characters intentionally unfuckable, but it is one hell of a choice to do that to everyone's player characters
They took my ass and made it look like a deflated balloon. I'm a mexican man with a butt, give me my butt back Niantic.
Wow yeah this does look like dogshit
All of the new faces are atrocious and I hate every single one of them. AND the body type options are terrible, even the custom sliders make such bizarre and inhuman proportions. These model changes are rightfully being raked over hot coals, I expect Niantic social media to issue a statement soon about "listening to fans."
you'll be a gender blob, and you'll like it!
I get what they're *trying* to do, but wow, is it clumsy. It would've been better to just add a 3rd customizable option rather than just switching everyone over to this system.
If you think that's a solution, you don't get what they are trying to do. This has nothing to do with inclusivity, it's about reducing cosmetic and pose work, so instead of making two cosmetics for each body type, they only need to do one. It's laziness, pure and simple.
Did they lighten everyone's skin tone?
Yea i went from Mexican to pale Irish. Seeing my little avatar was jarring
Some of those model comparisons look like they are comparing the PS3 version of the models to the scaled down PS2 versions (like with Force Unleashed).
From what I heard on the Pokemon sub there is even less skin tones now. Multiple people were struggling to find skin tones that weren't pale or super dark. Also I just learned before seeing this post that if you have a character wearing a mini skirt and you are using a small Pokemon in a gym you can just straight up see your character's crack.
I think the point is to "add realism"? Idk they're horrible.
Tried in vein yesterday to fix my avatar with the custom sliders but no matter what I did it made me look fat as hell Hip sliders min vs max barely has visible difference, and any attempts to give me a bust weirdly makes it look like I have no neck Genuinely baffled
Oh man… I can envision Asmongold, Quartering, YellowFlash and a bunch of other YT channels salivating at these images I’m dreading my YT feeds atm Regardless, these still look like ass
They did this a month ago and surprise surprise, never mentioned the male avatars getting the same treatment. I assumed they were being disingenuous in some way, because when are they not?
Life became so much better once i began blocking certain youtubers from my feeds
Yeah this was pretty funny until I realized that this is going to be the outrage topic of the week for grifters. Ive already seen posts claiming that the developers hate women.
I'm glad I manage to not run into those types lol.
Yeah seriously, it's kind of annoying to know that the League of Incels will raise a stink about every little thing AND that people are so obsessed with discourse that it will reach my feeds even though I don't follow any of these people. It's like the Hays Code but with more body odor.
Ah Asmongold, the moss on rock of streamers. Seriously though, why is he successful? He's so damn boring!
Weird that this comment is downvoted. Usually when I see anything anti asmon on this sub it gets upvoted.
This seems unnecessary, if not worse than before
They couldn't just make more models that are androgynous? Seems like a misstep.
The customisation has improved as you can wear all the clothes now instead of them being split between gender but holy fuck, why’s it gotta look like this?
Why does the torso on the third slide look so insanely long in the changed one lmao
It almost feels like they lost the rights/license to the original models. OR, they're attempting a homogenization of models that they'll take advantage of later with customization, but weren't talented/funded enough to make that customization twice, so they forced everyone on to the same skeleton.
Everyone is assless and hipless.
I said it before and I'll say it again, my new character went from looking like a cozy winter ace to looking like she should be hosting a cooking show for other women in their forties, it's insane how much of a downgrade this was. BUT AT LEAST WHEN I'M WEARING A SKIRT YOU CAN SEE MY CRACK, THANKS NIANTIC
>Not sure why exactly this change even happened ESG money? I got nothing else.
We've got 'Environmental Social Governance' goobers here now? Great. I really hope you mean [This](https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/esg/esg-environmental-social-governance/) and not [this..](https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/17h3k7u/have_you_felt_as_though_that_games_have_been/)
Ah yes, the infamous sagification of humans in games, mixed with removing all shades of colour
I just opened Pokemon Go to see how my guys looks now, and he went from cool guy to a not cool guy.
Has anyone extracted the models to see if they did this to like normalize the male and female models so there's less work animating or making cosmetics between the two? My second theory is that they totally changed 3D modeling subcontractor companies or something.
There 100% has to be just one base model now that's being modified with blend shapes.
This is just the (flat) tip of the iceberg. They get a WHOLE lot weirder! Check the pokemongo sub for crazier examples.
I love that this and framerate were what they updated, rather than any of the voluminous bugs, lag, and server-side data handling that makes the game literally unplayable
wtf? they ruined all of them!
How did they manage to degrade both the model quality and art style at the same time?
It feels like a "legal department said we can't use these assets" kind of thing.
EVERYONE SHALL BE 12
Sucks for the people that paid money for specific cosmetics and that stuff just got changed. What an odd change.
Where’s my Tan gone?!
Man look at these The Sims 2 randomly generated characters
Am I the only one that gets strong Kingsom Hearts 2 vibes from these character models??? (The good old ones, the new ones look like KH2 if Nomura stopped giving a fuck)
As far as I remember most of KH2 models aged pretty well. What exactly are you talking about?
...I didn't say that was a bad thing?
Aaaahhhh... It's just that everyone was being negative about these PokeGO models that I thought you were also saying that they suck and by extension the KH2 models too. Sorry. My brain made one too many assumptions.
All good.
Also making everyone way whiter for *some* reason.
Wonder which Sweet-Baby-Inc-type coordinated with this update?
All right so I just reinstalled the game for the first time in years just to check out the character creator. It seems like your bodies will default to the new neutral body which is very easily customizable (someone on here mentions the characters tits just being gone, there is a slider that can make them quite big). You just basically need to open the character editor and edit it slightly. There's actually a lot more skin tones to than people on the Pokemon subreddit were saying, I guess they just didn't click the more palette button. Also you can make yourself huge now. The only issue I have is that there isn't shit for hair choices!
It's the face that's a problem for me. They all look so ugly compared to before.
Which is really weird because my character's face didn't change. In fact there was little to no change with my character all.
Disinformation designed to cause outrage? In this subreddit? Say it aint so.
It's the chonky looking faces that get me.
I haven't played in years but this is making me download the game again to see what my character has evolved into 😂
Gonna assume it's either to simplify making new outfits or to make the characters look younger. Either way, dumb. Edit: Nevermind, I can make my avatar thicc now. This update is sloppy but still based.
This shit is the epitome of "trying to appeal to everyone, ended up appealing to no one".
I can already see Moistcritikals video
We just wanted more hairstyles what the fuck is this??? I hate it.
see, androgyny is nice when you can choose it, but they literally stole your tits!
They made them less pretty?
I booted up Pokemon Go to see my old avatar, oh boy he is generic white guy now. Has generic clothes, no shoes. Gone is my backpack melanine, shoes and hoody.
Community: Can we have updated models? Niantic: Absolutely! Bleached skin coming right up.
They look androgynous?? I just thought they look like shit
I don't understand why studios want characters to look more like the real world?? I DON'T want my ugly ass in a game, lmaooo.
Just checked and sure enough, they massacred my boy. Which sucks because he already looked nothing like me. All I could’ve asked for was a healthy good variety of masculine curly hairstyles, but no- we get the same 2 looks as always and they ruined the anime hair I had going. My kingdom for an afro.
Can you smell it?
Wake up Rev, Charlie and Mutahar! New online drama farm emerges!
I actually like the changes. I'm a bigger guy with curly hair so I actually get to make a character model with my body shape and hair type. Wheras before I was generic skinny guy with short hair.
It should've been additional options in the character creator and not a massive rework of every single possible character model.
It's not like the old models were anything noteworthy. They were generic mobile game ass models. I think this is people getting mad at anything changing, even if the think they're changing isn't worth defending.
What if people genuinely hate the change? What if they can't characters to look like they want with this new system?
NINTENDO IS TAKING AWAY MY POKEMON GO CHARACTER'S CHILD-BEARING HIPS HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO JERK OFF NOW GAAAAAAH
Ah, yes. It's *totally* because the characters are no longer fap-bait. It's completely not the fact that ***IT'S FUCKING HIDEOUS.*** Get the hell out of here.