https://youtube.com/watch?v=nKokFJ1Nn2ECobblemon 1.8 is out.
Official Alpha Pokemon they function in a more interesting way than the unofficial addon, same with the TMs and you can actually make them, size variations (due to Alpha pokemon), more structures, overhauled Pokemon habitats, spawn pool editor (which I'd love to mess around with), new move effects and animations, and probably other shit. They're sticking with 1.21.1 instead of version chasing completely, only bad part is that a lot of addons will probably break again.
Please allow me to be a whiny bitch for a moment:
This update took the longest of any Cobblemon update in years. There was a 10 month gap between the releases of 1.7 and 1.8 (9 months between 1.7.3 and 1.8).
Despite this, it adds the least new content of any update so far. Almost everything it adds was already accounted for with well-done and popular side-mods and/or could be argued as a minor addition. (A new tooltip got an entire bulletpoint to itself, for god's sake.) Some of the remodels it adds look worse than the models they're replacing (Buneary is maybe the most obvious example, to the point that even the official discord wasn't sweet on it), and there are completed remodels and animations from almost a
year ago still left unimplemented. There are also major features-- most notably breeding-- that are absent despite having been "basically done" for over half a year and previously being billed for this very update. There were very few sneak-peeks for this entire update gap, and a lot of them were experimental features with little importance (eg a photo mode for the pokedex,
another revamp of trading, a bunch of different visual variants of existing blocks) that were repeatedly stressed to
not be for 1.8, which indicates a large shift from how communicative the team was during updates 1.5-1.7.
The devs even seemed to be aware of this, as they heavily emphasized that this update had a larger emphasis on remodels, animations, and riding updates than any other they'd done so far to compensate... but 1.8 has almost half as many model + animation updates as 1.7 had, only adds 6 new rideable Pokemon (none of which are common sense staples like Rapidash, Pidgeot, or Dodrio), and barely adds any new Pokemon despite having fewer than 30 non-legendaries left to implement. It is borderline anemic compared to 1.7, which itself was already smaller than 1.6.
This isn't a bad update. Maybe it is by previous standards, which is the only reason I'm complaining, but it's still relatively comprehensive and interesting. I just want to point it out, as I think it's indicating some kind of trouble in the dev team. I'm guessing there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and they're all too distracted with their own pet features to work as cohesively as they did before, which is causing major number updates like this one to come out more like half-baked interim updates (despite longer gaps between releases).
I actually thought 1.7 itself felt a little undercooked (even after the three interim updates), mostly due to the riding feature being very strangely distributed and somewhat unbalanced (there are still only 17 water mounts compared to 20+ flying ones and 50+ land ones), so seeing 1.8 come out as half-baked
even compared to 1.7 is bothering me. I really like the mod-- it's the most fun I've had with anything Pokemon in years and clearly has a lot of love and care put into it-- so seeing it start to suffer like this is irking me.
Hopefully the devs can get back on top of things and make a decent 1.9 instead of version-chasing a version nobody likes.
