How do you think B&W remakes will be handled?

[Fabulously Olivier]

While I think the ideal would doubtless be to bundle Black 2 with Black and White 2 with White, I'm thinking that's too consumer friendly for Nintendo. I think they're most likely gonna be sold as DLC. 

[MeteorPhoenix]

BW2 are probably the best Pokemon games they've ever put out (in terms of sheer content), so I hope they don't outsource then like they did with the last ones.

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

My guess is "B2W2 as DLC Expansion Pass". But I wonder how they'd handle it. Would it be its own full campaign? Or would the B2W2 exclusive areas be added as post-game DLC? Or maybe mid-game, with level scaling? In my opinion, that's more likely than having a full, start-to-finish campaign.

Either way, it'd be neat to have Nate and Rosa as playable alternatives to Hilbert and Hilda, from the very start of the game. Also to see the B2W2 Easy/Challenge mode options thrown in to the game as a whole.

[lenticular]

My guess is "poorly". Given how underwhelming BDSP was, and given how Gamefreak seems to be overstretched trying to hit the deadlines for the main series titles, it's hard to see Black and White remakes getting a whole lot of love. My best guess is that we'll see a minimal viable product remake of Black and White at some point, and Black 2 and White 2 will just be forgotten about. I am not, by nature, an optimist.

[Eltosian Kadath]

Seeing as the Pokemon company have made a habit of ignoring the "third" versions in the remakes, I bet they will just ignore BW2. The main exception to this being Crystal with Heart Gold and Soul Silver, but Crystal is also the final version which changed the story the least out of all of them.

[Fabulously Olivier]

14 minutes ago, lenticular said:

My guess is "poorly". Given how underwhelming BDSP was, and given how Gamefreak seems to be overstretched trying to hit the deadlines for the main series titles, it's hard to see Black and White remakes getting a whole lot of love. My best guess is that we'll see a minimal viable product remake of Black and White at some point, and Black 2 and White 2 will just be forgotten about. I am not, by nature, an optimist.

Frankly, Gen 4 is also bottom tier Pokemon, salvaged only by Platinum fixing some of its issues. So the lack of quality in BDSP wasn't even surprising.

[lenticular]

8 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

Frankly, Gen 4 is also bottom tier Pokemon, salvaged only by Platinum fixing some of its issues. So the lack of quality in BDSP wasn't even surprising.

Honestly, Gen 4 is the generation that I personally had the most fun with. Admitedly, a big part of that was the people that I played it with, but I also didn't really have any of the problems with it that people often talk about these days.

[Hrothgar777]

Unrelated to the poll (which I did answer), remaking these games would be an amazing opportunity to let you play the villains for once. Team Plasma was about the only team that had an actual, coherent, morally relevant point and they weren't bat$#!+ crazy.

The whole critique at the end amounted to [1]. All Pokemon are genetically predisposed to love being slaves to mankind because it's "friendship"; and [2]. Ghetsis is a bad dude so that invalidates everything the good faith members of the group believed, said, and did. It's a cop-out, though I guess it's fine if they just wanted to keep the Pokemon franchise going. But why not let players entertain the ideas of Team Plasma if they choose?

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

21 hours ago, Hrothgar777 said:

and [2]. Ghetsis is a bad dude so that invalidates everything the good faith members of the group believed, said, and did. It's a cop-out, though I guess it's fine if they just wanted to keep the Pokemon franchise going.

Yeah, that briefly captures how they really fumbled the delivery on the intriguing setup of Team Plasma. And the fact that they're using Pokemon in battle makes them obviously hypocritical. They could've done terror/activism - like closing off a bridge, stealing all the Poke Balls, shutting down the PCs - to get their point across. But because all villainous teams need to do Pokemon battles, so do Team Plasma. Even if it directly contradicts their messaging.

Like, how funny would it be for a villain to get elected Chancellor of Pokemon Land, and declare an end to Poke-slavery. Only for every trainer and his cousin to stop him the only way they now how - by challenging him to a Pokemon battle. Except, he doesn't have any Pokemon, so he can't be defeated in battle. Making him - and his agenda - invulnerable.

22 hours ago, Fabulously Olivier said:

Frankly, Gen 4 is also bottom tier Pokemon, salvaged only by Platinum fixing some of its issues. So the lack of quality in BDSP wasn't even surprising.

Gen IV gave us Lumineon, though, so I'm willing to forgive them for everything else.

22 hours ago, lenticular said:

My guess is "poorly". Given how underwhelming BDSP was, and given how Gamefreak seems to be overstretched trying to hit the deadlines for the main series titles, it's hard to see Black and White remakes getting a whole lot of love. My best guess is that we'll see a minimal viable product remake of Black and White at some point, and Black 2 and White 2 will just be forgotten about. I am not, by nature, an optimist.

Honestly, this is more probable than my original take. BDSP didn't get "Distortion World DLC", so why would the next remakes? They'll probably only do DLC for the Generational standard-bearers... and they won't include B2W2 in the base game... and they wouldn't remake the sequels separately... in other words, it's so over for Pokestar Studios.

[Lord_Brand]

7 hours ago, Shanty Pete's 1st Mate said:

Like, how funny would it be for a villain to get elected Chancellor of Pokemon Land, and declare an end to Poke-slavery. Only for every trainer and his cousin to stop him the only way they now how - by challenging him to a Pokemon battle. Except, he doesn't have any Pokemon, so he can't be defeated in battle. Making him - and his agenda - invulnerable.

Or they just use their Pokemon against him directly. Who's gonna stop them? The police who aren't allowed to use Pokemon? Not to mention, wild Pokemon can still be a threat, and most likely would not be kept in check if no one was allowed to train Pokemon. Suddenly, this hypothetical Chancellor is gonna wish they'd never outlawed "Poke-slavery". And finally, how would they enforce this mandate if rebellious trainers say no? Using Pokemon they're not supposed to be "enslaving" to force everyone else to give up their Pokemon, including the Pokemon who are perfectly happy with their trainers and thus are just as likely to put up resistance against their would-be liberators? Like, I get it's mainly a joke, but such a plotline sounds even more infuriatingly dumb than when everyone let the Sword and Shield fops just get away with crimes despite being perfectly capable of dogpiling them with their Pokemon to wrest those jewels back from their smarmy grip (I royally hated those two, they were hands-down the worst thing about SWSH, Dexit be danged).

Now, a case could be made for a darker story akin to the Colosseum titles (could even be a third trip to Orre) where the regional government has instituted "Pokemon control" for everyone but themselves, leading to a resistance fighting against them, but that feels like it'd swing way too close to real-world politics with the obvious parallel. I just worry it'd end up being too controversial and divisive, and pile on to the heaps of flame wars and drama we already have to endure. The less Pokemon mirrors real-world political strife, the better.

As for B&W remakes, I'm choosing to be cautiously optimistic that they'll learn their lesson from how poorly BDSP was received and actually put in some effort for Thunder Black and Blaze White, and do some of the things BDSP should have done, like give us more Mega Evolutions and actually evolve the gameplay to match modern generations (they have a bunch of Gen IX Pokemon models to use as a starting point). They need to learn from their successes with FRLG, HGSS, and ORAS - players want to see remakes get the same level of love as the shiny brand-new games.

Now, one can make an excuse that these games came out at a time when the current generation were babies, so they don't "need" to change them all that much, but they certainly shouldn't be repeating the mistakes the originals made, as BDSP did. BDSP simply does not look impressive next to Legends: Arceus or SV. Many fans would have rather waited a year or two for proper DP remakes with LA to tide them over in the meantime. Heck, a smart move would have been to include some nods to LA in BDSP, or crazy idea, build BDSP off LA's engine.

A recurring pattern with remakes is that, with the exception of FRLG, they have always ocurred in the generation twice their number. Originally it seemed like it was gonna be remakes every two generations later, but ORAS's absence from Gen V nixed that idea. So, logic stands that we won't see Gen V remakes until Gen X. They could choose to deviate from that, of course, but for now that's a pattern we can use for predictions.

My hope is that new Megas will start becoming a more regular occurence, but if they insist on being stubborn old gits about keeping Megas limited to Gen VI and VII, then whatever new hook comes along in Gen X may be applied to Gen V instead, assuming it's not another stupidly region-locked phenomenon like Dynamaxing or Terastilizing (seriously guys, way to kill the potential...).

I guess you can say I'm jaded but stubbornly hopeful at the same time? I mean, we live in a world where a SMRPG remake happened and a Paper Mario TTYD remake is happening. If Nintendo can pull their heads out of their rear ends long enough to greenlight the next best thing after a new proper Paper Mario, then I see no reason to believe a miracle can't happen at the Pokemon Company as well.

Honestly, it wouldn't be a bad idea if they created a "legacy" dev team to handle remakes, so long as they can avoid the laziness that brought BDSP down, as well as LGPE's alienating changes.

Edited April 27 by Lord_Brand

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

7 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

Or they just use their Pokemon against him directly. Who's gonna stop them? The police who aren't allowed to use Pokemon? Not to mention, wild Pokemon can still be a threat, and most likely would not be kept in check if no one was allowed to train Pokemon. Suddenly, this hypothetical Chancellor is gonna wish they'd never outlawed "Poke-slavery". And finally, how would they enforce this mandate if rebellious trainers say no? Using Pokemon they're not supposed to be "enslaving" to force everyone else to give up their Pokemon, including the Pokemon who are perfectly happy with their trainers and thus are just as likely to put up resistance against their would-be liberators? Like, I get it's mainly a joke, but such a plotline sounds even more infuriatingly dumb than when everyone let the Sword and Shield fops just get away with crimes despite being perfectly capable of dogpiling them with their Pokemon to wrest those jewels back from their smarmy grip (I royally hated those two, they were hands-down the worst thing about SWSH, Dexit be danged).

Well, you can test this in gameplay. If you exploit glitches in the Gen I games, you can leave Pallet Town without any Pokemon. Even make it yo the Elite Four. When you face them, the screen fades to white - and then fades back in. You've won! Clearly, the quickest path to being a Pokemon master is not raising any of them at all.

8 hours ago, Lord_Brand said:

A recurring pattern with remakes is that, with the exception of FRLG, they have always ocurred in the generation twice their number. Originally it seemed like it was gonna be remakes every two generations later, but ORAS's absence from Gen V nixed that idea. So, logic stands that we won't see Gen V remakes until Gen X. They could choose to deviate from that, of course, but for now that's a pattern we can use for predictions.

I mean, this is just the same thing as saying that "remakes happen every two generations". And even that's not really true. The "Let's Go" games were essentially a second pair of Gen I remakes, released in Gen VII (er, VII.5?).

I agree, though, that BW remakes probably aren't coming until Gen X. I do wonder how the Pokemon Company will handle things. We know Legends ZA is coming in 2025... but early year? Holiday season? Sometime in between? No idea. In any case, it's almost certainly the next mainline Pokemon game releasing. We know it's coming to Switch, but by the time it's out, there's a good chance that the Switch's successor will have released as well. This is nothing new for Pokemon - see B2W2, or USUM. But it does make me ask - when will the Gen X games come out?

Now, the pattern for the last few generations has been "every three years" - so, we'd expect holiday 2025. But the Pokemon Company prides itself on not being early adopters to the new system, when it comes to mainline games. And the Gen X headliners are almost certain to be "Switch 2" games - we've never had three Gen headliners on the same hardware. I'd be shocked to see the Gen X games released within the first year of the Switch 2's existence. As such, I think there's a strong chance that Gen X won't kick off until 2026.

Now, what'll come in between? Supposing Legends ZA is Q1 2025, what comes in Q4 2025? My best guess is, another "Let's Go"-style remake, probably of the Gen II games. It'd be poetic in a sense - starting, and ending, their presence on the Switch with the same kind of game. It'd be less work than a fully original title, as they could borrow a lot of assets from LGPE. Possibly even the Kanto region itself, assuming they base the next ones off of GSC. Meanwhile, they could update the gameplay and aesthetics - slightly - to deliver an overall improved experience, albeit nothing revolutionary.

[lenticular]

On 4/26/2024 at 4:56 AM, Hrothgar777 said:

Unrelated to the poll (which I did answer), remaking these games would be an amazing opportunity to let you play the villains for once. Team Plasma was about the only team that had an actual, coherent, morally relevant point and they weren't bat$#!+ crazy.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Team Yell (despite not liking SwSh overall) and think that they also meet those criteria.

Anyway, thinking about this further, I'm going to posit an unpopular opinion: Gen V (and subsequent generations) shouldn't be remade at all. We all expect that they will be, because remakes are just a thing that Pokémon does at this point, but really, what purpose does a remake even serve at this point? Yeah, the remakes would be more accessible than the originals, but that can be solved easily enough by sticking the originals up on Swith Online or the equivalent. And OK, there's some issues with translating the dual screens to systems that don't have them, but that only really needs a fairly basic port rather than a full remake. I feel there are a bunch of more interesting games that could be made with the resources rather than just another remake of somethign that already exists.

[henrymidfields]

I've only got this to say as far as what I want: