I think discussions of game engine falls squarely within the purview of the thread, and that inevitably will mean some game play discussion, but yeah, there is a place for that discussion.
I realize that at some point the Tech Detectives sorta made this thread our home, in what was probably back in Era a more far ranging discussion, but now that it's a whole Nintendo site,I think we can afford to separate them.
I don't play Pokemon - I bought Arcaeus to try to get into it, but I honestly didn't understand the gameplay, and the game seemed to have no interest in teaching me, so we parted ways. But the signs of rushed production are everywhere, and that was miles ahead of SV, technically. I'm not sure it's even a lack of technical acumen, it's a lack of manpower and schedule management. If you've worked in software dev, you can see it everywhere.
There is something called "Zero Bug Methodology." If you've written more than 3 lines of code, you know that all software has bugs. It's actually provable as a mathematical point, bug-free code is impossible. But in a zero bug world, it means that bugs discovered during development always always always have priority over features, no matter how small. Features are what define the schedule for software, especially when you're starting out. The regions need to be this big, there are this many cut scenes, there are these pokemon, it needs to be open world... you build the schedule around delivering those featuers.
When you have a tight schedule, it's tempting to keep the train moving on features, and only fix bugs as needed to keep the schedule up, or trying to triage bugs into major and minor, and only work on major ones, saving minor ones for "free time" that never comes, or for post-release support, or a final wave of bug fixing during the "optimization" phase.
This is terrible. Bugs are easiest to fix the moment you discover them, because they're likely related to a change you just made, easily found, and that you still understand. The impact of a bug is hard to measure - two minor bugs can interact to create a major bug. And the longer bugs persist in a system, the more likely they are to become load bearing.
There is a bug in a piece of software I use daily - a very minor one on paper, but that can occasionally cause disastrous problems. We know exactly what we need to do to fix it. But we can't, because there are hundreds of known parts of the system that have accidentally depended on the buggy behavior. This is incredibly common - we talk about bugs or outdated systems being "technical debt". Over time, just like financial debt, technical debt accrues interest.
As long as GameFreak is operating on the current schedule, and reusing their engine, they will never have time to pay down their debt and the situation will get worse instead of better. Instead of maturing into increased stability and "annoying but well documented and understood" cruftiness, the GF engine is collapsing under it's own weight. Hiring the greatest game engine programmers on the planet will not fix a project management issue.
