"[Official announcement] "Ultimate Emerald" production team announced that it would stop updating"
"[Abandoned Pit] Pokemon Zero World Announces Abandoned Pit"
"[Abandoned Pit] Pokémon Universe Announces Indefinite Postponement of Updates"
……
This is the scene that appeared in the "Pocket Edition Resource Bar" on December 27. On this day, well-known and unknown projects of all sizes were shut down en masse, and for the small circle of the revised Pokémon, its scale was no different from a devastating earthquake.
The so-called "Pocket Revamp" refers to the doujinshi game of the Pokémon series. Those players who are not satisfied with the content of the original game, play their super hands-on ability, use the original game as the basis, tell their own story, or make the most perfect game in their minds.
And when these creators who use love to generate electricity stand together and collectively abandon the pit, you who don't know much may not think that the biggest event ever in the Pokémon game circle is actually only because some players want to open a modifier in "Ultimate Emerald V"...
1
Pokémon revamped games have a long history, and fans around the world are quite enthusiastic about the revamped game. In China, the popularity of the revised work "Dark Phantom" is even greater than that of the original "Pokémon Emerald".
In Baidu Tieba, the popularity of "Dark Phantom" is crushing the original
The remake of "Ultimate Emerald", which also originated from "Pokémon Emerald", is the fuse of this event.
With a complete collection of Pokémon, "Ultimate Emerald" brought as many as 898 Pokémon in the fifth generation, retaining the Mega evolution and Z skill system, while also following the footsteps of the times to complete the characteristics, moves, props and other content and mechanisms of the eighth generation, the Shen'ao map, the reverse world, and a large number of new plots and gameplay all represent the challenge of the production team for the breakthrough of the new work. With so much content, it's hard to imagine how the production team could be compressed into tens of MB.
In order to polish this work, several enthusiasts who use love to generate electricity have spent two years working on game production day and night, and even some team members have run to the Internet café to make games due to computer failures, and the degree of bitterness can be seen.
At the time of release, in order to heat up the two-year-old project, the production team carefully prepared a puzzle game to inform the release date of the game in the form of interactive puzzles.
Players quickly figured out the answer to the puzzle: the Sunflower Monster on Route 12 and the No. 21 of the United States Illustrated Book, suggesting that the game will be released on December 21.
After two years of new works finally released, "Ultimate Emerald V" suddenly became the focus of everyone's attention. In this small circle, the cheers were endless. At that time, probably no one expected that just a week later, a bloody storm would sweep in.
2
Less than a week after the game was officially announced, the Ultimate Emerald production team announced that it had abandoned the pit and temporarily stopped updating.
Cracking is the first reason listed by the production team.
Cracking here refers more to those who make secondary modifications to the game without permission. The production team's painstaking efforts for many years have been tampered with wantonly, and it is definitely uncomfortable for anyone to feel bad.
Admittedly, it is an undeniable fact that Ultimate Emerald is essentially a cracked version of Pokémon Emerald. Since the production team is clearly opposed to cracking, what is the attitude of the original copyright owners Nintendo and TPC towards such a revamped game? The answer is simple: turn a blind eye.
The strongest legal department in the Eastern Hemisphere, Nintendo,000, has a strict control of copyright for all to see, and it is not soft to kill profitable fandom games, but if it is a gratuitous dedication to generate electricity with love, in the vast sea of Pokémon revisions, the game warned by Nintendo's lawyer letter is counted on one hand.
The domestic revision group is also well aware of this reason, all the revision games are never charged, and not profitable is the unshakable bottom line of respecting the copyright of the original work.
However, the production team has the bottom line and dignity, which does not mean that unscrupulous pirate merchants also have it. Open Taobao, Pinduoduo, and other e-commerce platforms that lack effective supervision, and interest-related resources will sell thousands of yuan in just a few days.
In fact, this kind of second-hand pirated game dealer case is not a big news in the game circle, you can always see several tens of thousands of sales of pirated game collections in the front row of the search page, the low price of ten yuan with hundreds of games without installation, and the evaluation area is full of "good quality and low price" appreciation.
The most infuriating thing in the world is that pirates are stolen from their own heads, and what is even more infuriating are those who take the fruits of their labor and modify a few strokes to count as their own works, and want to use them to make a blatant profit. This Pokémon revision circle is also reasonable because of the collective strike protest of second-hand dealers.
Of course, if it were just that simple, it wouldn't be worth a big book. Because the players were forced to come and buy a cracked version of the game, in a way, it was the production team itself who added an anti-cheat mechanism to Ultimate Emerald V.
3
Modification and cheating are an enduring hot topic in single-player game circles.
The positive side believes that there are no elements that affect other players in single-player games, that modification is only about their own game experience, and that others have no right to dictate their own choices; while the other side is righteous and criticizes this unfair behavior of trying to tackle the problem without making an effort.
Of course, this kind of thing belongs to the big debate that is justified by public opinion and reasonableness, and it will certainly not be discussed here. The key point is that in the Pokémon revamped game circle, many production teams have been scornful of cheating.
The main contradiction is this: these fan games, which are not too rigorously made, will inevitably have all kinds of strange bugs after being tossed around by modifiers. But it is not a coincidence, so the low-quality players who have a bug and cannot play smoothly will not only not reflect on themselves, but also run over to insult the team members who stay up late to work and make games, completely ignoring the fact that they cheated first.
The protagonist of this event, "Ultimate Emerald", due to its reputation, it is inevitable to encounter these extreme players whose brains are not very good. In the early years of the "Ultimate Emerald" production team, there were incidents in which the team members were indignantly retreated by such players who jumped their faces and scolded the street.
Since then, they have produced a certain PTSD for modifying this behavior, and the management of Tieba has become more and more stringent, and this time with the release of the fifth generation, the anti-cheating work has also been put on the agenda early. In Ultimate Emerald V, players who try to skip class with a modifier will face a series of problems such as game jamming.
The fact that the anti-cheat mechanism built into the single-player game should have reached some players, and the perverted difficulty of Ultimate Emerald V completely ignited this flammable fuse.
In fact, this tendency to raise the difficulty has been reflected in the "Ultimate Emerald IV" a few years ago. In 4 generations, the multi-fold effort value of NPC sprites makes the experience for players who are not willing to honestly brush individuals with liver level not too good.
In the 5th generation, the difficulty of not being friendly has reached a higher level. Perhaps the original intention of the production team is indeed to increase the difficulty to bring some new possibilities to this game that is already difficult to break through, but it is clear that such a high difficulty is not acceptable to everyone.
Pokémon has evolved over the decades, and there are countless players from all walks of life. There are players who enjoy difficult battles, and there are naturally mild players who don't care about battles, but only want to collect cute Pokémon and appreciate the game's plot.
In fact, this game also has a built-in low-difficulty mode, so that players who do not want to suffer can experience the game smoothly. But for those players who grew up playing Pokémon in childhood, and now they have become social animals and can't squeeze out a lot of time to brush brush, skipping meaningless brush levels with modifications must be the best way to play.
At this point, the whole thing has formed a layer of weird matryoshka dolls:
The production team resented the cheating due to the previous PTSD
Added anti-cheat features to the new game
The game is too difficult or unwilling to spend time leveling, and players try to cheat and skip class
Normal modifiers cannot successfully cheat
A second modified version of the anti-cheat feature that cracks appears
Criminals will take the secondary modified version to the e-commerce platform to make a profit
Some players are willing to support such "pirated" games, and use this to attack the anti-cheating mechanism of the production team, further intensifying the contradictions, and finally hurting the production team itself.
So there is the scene at the beginning of this article, the "Ultimate Emerald" production team took the lead in announcing the abandonment of the pit, setting off a big action to resist the second revision and resist cheating.
Maybe it is deliberately abandoning the pit, or it may be just unintentionally following the trend, but in the end, since the matter has come to an end, a scolding war is inevitable.
In the past few days when the entire circle has announced the abandonment of the pit on a large scale, forces from all sides have taken turns to appear. The controversy diverged from the initial criticism of extreme players to innocent ordinary modified players, and in the mixed environment, there was an act of digging up black history with each other, finding the production team's previous inferior attitude to player feedback, and even rumors that seemed to be right and wrong, true and false have long been unable to distinguish between true and false.
There was even an infighting between the production teams
"Nintendo doesn't have anti-cheating, why do you oppose it?" "People are fortunate to be working hard to make games, so why do you point fingers?" Such insults, player-player conflict, player-production team conflict, producer-maker conflict, genuine and pirate conflict, ideological conflict, together created the biggest farce in the Pokémon revision circle.
4
The only lesson that mankind has learned from history is that mankind will not learn from history.
Just like the aforementioned "Dark Phantom", it is also due to malicious secondary modifications that caused the author Ebony Phantom to leave this circle. In the cycle of history, everything is as it was, but this time, more than one person has left this circle.
Whether the Pokémon revamped game circle is finished or not is now unknown, but the only thing that is certain is that the members of the Ultimate Emerald production team will have lost their love after this incident. Perhaps by providence, The Dark Phantom stopped forever in version 5.0, and Ultimate Emerald probably won't have a sixth.
Who is right and who is wrong? Such a dualistic point of view certainly cannot simply summarize this storm, perhaps the production team has been struggling with the second revision and cheating for a long time, or it is just a simple misunderstanding, anyway, until the end, no one side bowed its head, and no side was the winner.