yeah crediting palworld's success to "passion" is a bit misguided, they outperformed their budget primarily due to theft
but if a game like that can make such numbers it's pretty clear that there's a big hole in the market that pokemon could fill but gamefreak is refusing to fill
palworld has so few original assets lmao
even if SV's rock texture is dogshit at least they made it and it's not a store asset, ftr assets are fine and there for a reason, but people shouldn't be praising people for making shit quickly when they didn't have to do quite a bit of the work. like even stuff like "the pickaxe animation is the same as from Fortnite" is the type of thing that speeds up development. And they could do that thousands of times.
Another thing is that one is for the fucking Nintendo Switch. And while Pokemon Legends Arceus is absolutely not one of the best looking games on the system, it actually runs stably. I was watching my young step brother play Palworld with his friends (oh saying slurs, the target audience for this game is so glorious,) for a bit and holy shit it was lagging on a Series S. The Xbox port only has two skews to worry about and it is running pretty poorly, and it really shouldn't be even as an Early Access.
Scarlet/Violet runs like shit on the Switch also, but fucking imagine these devs trying to do a port job of Palworld to Switch. For the record, a lot of companies just gave up on making larger scope games for the Switch, for instance Genshin Impact devs promised a port... four years ago. This is cool because Gacha games are Ew, but also people kind of don't realize that games like BotW and Xenoblade are an outliar. Another turn based JRPG published by Nintendo in 2019 was Three Houses which looked like shit outside of the anime portraits.
Look at Persona 5 Royal past the UI
This is not a bad download of the screenshot. It is just that blurry. This is a PS3 game. It runs at IIRC 540p on Handheld mode, with a 1080p UI.
So my thoughts on Pokemon graphics for the future are a few things:
1. Use things like portraits more. It'll make you game look more stylish, and distract people from the lower quality models if still present.
2. Incorporate celshading into the artstyle. BotW has celshading and it masks a lot of how the game saves performance; the models look like shit
3. Just give the game another year of development for fucks sake. SV with another year was just the best Pokemon game IMO, it's honestly pretty depressing it came out so buggy and unpolished. It is an actually imaginative Pokemon game with a lot of new ideas that no one cares about because it's in 15FPS.