Palworld 1.0 is officially out!

[BlusterBong]

I'm sure you're being sarcastic, but it's hit nearly a million concurrent players at its peak since 1.0 launched, and that's only on Steam. It's several orders of magnitude better than Legends Z-A, GameFreak is gonna have to do something really interesting/different with Winds and Waves if they don't wanna risk losing a sizeable chunk of the core player base. Odds are they don't care though as long as cards and merch sales keep pace.

Ah yes... the core players of checks notes a general purpose RPGs where the major progression is higher stats as you progress through the game are going to leave for a checks notes survival crafting game with RPG elements where the major progression is getting better and more powerful gear, mainly by finding the crafting ingredients in the world.

 

[Xzi]

Ah yes... the core players of checks notes a general purpose RPGs where the major progression is higher stats as you progress through the game are going to leave for a checks notes survival crafting game with RPG elements where the major progression is getting better and more powerful gear, mainly by finding the crafting ingredients in the world.

Correct, people have been waiting for the Pokemon games to do something, anything different or interesting for decades. They finally got about halfway there with Legends Arceus' concept and then for some reason decided to take a huge step backward with Legends Z-A. Mainline games are even worse, to the extent that they might as well still be getting ported to the original Game Boy. For that matter, you could make them wholly text-based and the experience would be fundamentally the same (not to mention have far fewer bugs/performance issues).

Beast of Reincarnation seems like GameFreak's final chance to prove that they're bored to tears with the Pokemon franchise and not just an F tier developer in general. Either way they should hand the reins off to a more passionate/competent studio, and it seems Nintendo have chosen Koei Tecmo to fill that role (they're credited in the Winds and Waves trailer). The critical and commercial success of Pokopia has likely accelerated that transition as well.

 

[BlusterBong]

Correct, people have been waiting for the Pokemon games to do something, anything different or interesting for decades. They finally got about halfway there with Legends Arceus' concept and then for some reason decided to take a huge step backward with Legends Z-A. Mainline games are even worse, to the extent that they might as well still be getting ported to the original Game Boy. For that matter, you could make them wholly text-based and the experience would be fundamentally the same (not to mention have far fewer bugs/performance issues).

Beast of Reincarnation seems like GameFreak's final chance to prove that they're bored to tears with the Pokemon franchise and not just an F tier developer in general. Either way they should hand the reins off to a more passionate/competent studio, and it seems Nintendo have chosen Koei Tecmo to fill that role (they're credited in the Winds and Waves trailer). The critical and commercial success of Pokopia has likely accelerated that transition as well.

...My point was the layman consumer of RPG games arn't going to play a game that has RPG elements if they didn't like the direction an RPG franchise they mainly played was going, they're just going to move onto a different RPG series.