It has been a rough couple of weeks for The Pokémon Company. Well, and Nintendo and Game Freak, too.
After a massive leak hit the company, details for upcoming games and projects were discovered and, since then, fans have been gobbling up as much information as possible.
The Pokémon-like Temtem has a new release coming down the pipeline to reinvigorate the series
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One part of the leak points to a multiplayer project that looks awfully familiar and may give a reason to why The Pokémon Company danced around a lawsuit with the developers of Palworld.
It seems this multiplayer game that has been discovered also featured riding around on mounts, but more interestingly, there were gun-like objects in the data.
Codenamed ‘Rodeo’ the game was detailed on Twitter before being struck down.
It seems the game focused on battling Pokémon in co-op and saw players riding the Pokémon while engaging in fights.
This being a Pokémon product the gun in question wasn’t an actual gun that fired bullets, it seems to be more of a spray can, perhaps for a paint-like substance.
Details revealed the game was, in part, inspired by the Splatoon series, another of Nintendo’s properties.
There’s not a great deal of information about this possible game as it appears it may have been cancelled in quite an early stage.
However, it could have been renamed and focus shifted to another department.
Whatever the outcome, these experimental projects could see the light of day at some point, even if in part.
Technically we’ve already had rideable Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet for the Nintendo Switch, but this hints at riding other Pokémon not originally suited to the task.
It’s interesting to see features and mechanics that were a popular part of Palworld, which became a competitor to Pokémon when it launched and captured the attention of the gaming world.
Maybe The Pokémon Company wants to hold back its rival to capitalise on using these ideas for themselves.