Pokemon Scarlet & Violet - 18th Nov 2022! **OFFICIAL INFO ONLY**
- Thread starter DHR-107
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In all seriousness though, GF's idea of "Make your own difficulty" immediately fell apart when they said "The Exp. Share isn't an item anymore" in the very next sentence.
I get that having different difficulty settings for this game is tricky, but man, they really don't help their case with this nonsense.
There's a bunch of different things all making it harder to set your own difficulty. Honestly, the main one might be the Gen V XP being based on your level deal. You can't deliberately underlevel, and it's difficult to grind. Used to be, skipping trainers, using repels, and having a large team were all ways to keep yourself a few levels under the next gym. Now, it takes very few battles to bring you back up to par. The new XP share makes it worse, of course, but the XP formula is a big deal. XP management gets even harder to do right if you play on Set mode, which is the first rule any challenge run uses. -_-
Forced heals also contribute. There's no resource management anymore, it's all just a slugging match between you and the boss. Which would be fine, if the boss was a tough fight. But no, you've got a full team and are at the same level, and they don't switch and have no coverage moves. Have fun. (not that I ever considered resource management a fun source of challenge, but it's not even a possible one now)
GameFreak doesn’t even want you to do Nuzlockes.
In all seriousness though, GF's idea of "Make your own difficulty" immediately fell apart when they said "The Exp. Share isn't an item anymore" in the very next sentence.
I get that having different difficulty settings for this game is tricky, but man, they really don't help their case with this nonsense.
It's still a Pokemon game, there's the catch.
From my personal opinion, Pokemon has always been good on making a world you want to explore, and PLA and looks like SV is bringing this aspect to a whole new level in Pokemon (don't get too excited, I would say games like Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade Chronicles, Elden Ring, and a handful of other JRPGs & major Western titles still trump Pokemon in that regard; it's just Pokemon seems like is now trying to catching up to them which is GREAT if your a Pokemon fan). Everything we've been hearing sounds like a typical Pokemon fare to me but given more depth/details and a new coat of paint, which is what I expected and glad to hear is in the game.
HOWEVER I'm getting a sneaky suspicion that the story side of things isn't really going to catch anyone as amazing. Gen V and SM this won't be, I'll be surprised if it has as deep of a depth as PLA. Also no voice acting.
I was hoping the Titans wouldn't be subjected to Type specialty for this reason, kind of feels unbalanced that Victory Road gets 8 things while the other two only get 5. Though, whose giving you a "Badge" for defeating Titans on the Path of Legends? Arven?
I never remember the whole name of the mechanic.
Eh, you can just say Tera, that's what I do most of the time.
So Heart Scales still going to be a thing (guess they can be recycled to a TM component part)?
I mean the new Armor Mewtwo already looks like a Transformer's Robot Form:
Or, being they're a BIKE GANG, not only have their Pokemon out attacking yours but they themselves are on their Cyclizar riding around and past your Pokemon throwing smoke bombs, flash bombs, and other stuff to hamper them. Luckily you have a Legendary as a ride Pokemon so, while your Pokemon battle, you ride around knocking out the grunt's Cyclizars causing them to flee from the battlefield.
Like, seriously, from what it sounds like the only thing them being based on Bosozoku affects is you battling the Squad Leader's Starmobile (... but that's still in a "normal" Pokemon battle).
Hey, I'm actually all for that. While I know some people like that one aspect of Pokemon battles is that the opponent is using a Pokemon you yourself can use... it also means they can never really go "crazy" at least with the Pokemon used as the boss. It's this reason why I liked PokeStar Studios in B2W2, seeing all the unique bosses though obviously limited in that there's a script you gotta follow.
They tried to make things more interesting in Gen VII with the Totem Pokemon (which the Titans are sounding similar to), Mother Beast Lusamine's Pokemon, and Ultra Necrozma with them boosting their stats (and the Totems also being SOS Battles). But being the Totem Pokemon were just slightly bigger Pokemon and Lusamine's Pokemon & Ultra Necrozma just having an Ultra Aura around them, the effect wasn't as impactful.
Eternamax Eternatus is the first true example of a unique boss which you cannot obtain outside of the battle with it. And, though it was easy, it did feel "epic" and made it more exciting had it just been a normal Gigantamax for Eternatus.
So, while the grunt portion of the battles sound bland, I am looking forward to the Starmobile battles as Pokemon now downscaling what they did with Eternamax Eternatus and having normal bosses be unique challenges. And as long as there is a Pokemon connected to it that you can catch and use minus the "boss form", I think it would be alright. We should just be lucky its a new engine Pokemon and not Rotom, not that I'd argue against a Rotom-made unique boss.
Really? I'm all for an "Easy Mode" or an (optional) power-up that appears if you've lost a number of times just so those who want to have a casual fun experience can get a move on, but I feel just letting the player become invincible isn't really letting them play a game, at that point its a visual novel (with whatever story there is) that requires you to do a menial task.
To be fair on Celeste's part, there's still some puzzle solving with the timing of your jumps & dashes. But for a game like Mario x Rabbids an invincibility mode gets rid of any tactical thinking and now you can just walk up to the boss and shoot them.
Taking things back to Pokemon, while Always On Exp. Share doesn't completely make the game unlosable, if you're just playing the game casually you'll still end up over-leveled by at least the halfway point. And while an opponent with a Level advantage can be overcome by the player with Type advantage and use of items, once the player is overleveled that's it, there's no way the NPCs can ever beat them unless the player purposely "sabotage" themselves. Unless a player likes just streamrolling the rest of the game, they may as well just a playthrough on Youtube.
A mechanic that's meant to make the game easier can easily flip the difficulty so much in the other direction that now kids are dropping it because its too easy. There's a balance and unfortunately Pokemon has had problems with finding that balance.
...
Well, at the end of this catch-up, guess I should give my thoughts on the major discussion of these reveals: 3 STAB Terastallize.
My opinion is we'll see how balanced it is when the game is released. Yeah, pretty much a non-answer. Like, I get the concerns people are having, and I too am a bit disappointed they didn't fully dedicate to the concept... BUT at the same time I also get why they kept the old STABs so not to change a Pokemon too much. This also makes Terastallize now probably equal as a power-up as Mega Evolution was. "But Mega Evo you had to hold an item"! Yeah, but Mega Pokemon's stats were increased & min-max to such an extent that wasn't an issue (not to mention the Type changes and Abilities). For most Pokemon who got a Mega there was no negative to Mega Evolving even if it meant losing the Item slot; the only "negative" there was that there were just some Megas which were objectively better thus if you're using a "lesser" Mega you may wonder to yourself "why am I wasting my Mega on this Pokemon?".
Because that's another thing about Terastallizing, am issue which has been with the Super Mechanics since Mega, the "only one" limitation. Sure, we can make ANY Pokemon have Triple STABs with the third being a glorified Hidden Power (and the Type its Type Chart now follows)... but it's only the one. And it's likely, in competitive, there's going to be a group of Pokemon where they're the go-to Terastallizers and you'd want to have there Tera Type be one or two of a certain Type. And then we'll get into the counter meta where it'll end up to fight a Terastallize you'll need to use your own: basically you'd go in with two or three Pokemon you plan on Terastallizing, one being your ideal choice but the others being a counter pick if your opponent Terastallizes before you're ready. So in the end it's Tera vs Tera with one coming out on top, but who knows if the winning Tera is the one the player really wanted or was just a counter-play, PLUS whatever the case maybe it's now weak so possibly easier to revenge kill.
And it's not like this is a Hidden Power situation, only the Tera Pokemon's Tera Blast changes Type, otherwise its Normal. So in the end it's just one super Pokemon. Just like Mega. Just like Z-Moves. Just like Dynamax/Gigantamax.
I feel like the whole "Pokémon games are too easy" discourse is kinda funny because most people who actually do challenge runs tend to say that the most difficult game is USUM. Don't get me wrong but I'd rather take the word of people who actually play the game trying to make it challenging, who know what they're talking about, over the random bozo any day.
I feel like Pokémon in general is way harder to balance than people realise. Its a game where your roster can have dozens of possible Pokémon, each person plays differently as some try to go from one objective to the next straigth away while others try to explore everything before moving forward,s ome people play casually while others like to EV train their in-game team, so on and so forth. Obviously that doesn't mean they shouldn't do anything to make the bosses interesting battles, but my point is that there is no "one size fits all", because the way everyone plays Pokémon leaves them with a lot of variables in teams, moves, item and levels that can't all be accounted for, even if they made multiple different teams per booses. I know people tend to point at BW2's difficult select but even that wasn't perfect (and as it turns out, the levels in Hard Mode don't actually scale, they're the same stats as Regular Mode's levels). At the end of the day there's not much of an in between they could to stop people from steaming through with X-Items or an Overlevelled mon but that still felt fair vs someone who's just trying to play casually with mons they like. Even if they did level scaling, that wouldn't actually make the battles any more or less difficult - it'd always be the same level of difficulty because it would always match your own level
I feel like the next best thing they could do is just make these battles interesting and memorable. Gen 7 saw a bunch of story bossses being EV trained and having genuinely interesting strategies for the Totem mons with allies that synergized with the totem. While too early to tell for Gen 9, the fact the Grass gym is using a Rock mon that can deal with Bug, Fire, Ice and Flying Types gives me hope (Here its more than just coverage even, as apparently Terastal would keep its Rock STAB, making it a pretty devastating mon for the first gym). Mela apparently being a sun-based team as the first of the star bosses, at a lvl 27 Lead, is also shaping up to be pretty interesting for an early boss - as some of the reviewers said, their Quaxly got beaten by her Fire mons even
And tpo be honest I never felt like the "forced healing" actually even mattered...? I'd be bothered if they happened in between Elite 4 matches or between GymTrainers and Gym Leaders but most of the time they either happen after a rival battle that's near a Pokémon center anyways or after a larger route where after a certain point you'd fly back to heal regardless. I get why people dislike these but they are way les of a deal than people make them out to be.
Would prefer the EXP share to have a toggle but I feel like they've been doing a much greater job at balancing the level curve around the EXP share than when the change was first made.
I guess my closing statement is that I feel like people are getting a bit too dragged by their personal bias against gamefreak to even consider what other options available would be worth doing (or if what they're complaining about even applies to these - saying the mons won't have any coverage moves when the grass gym is outright shown to use a Rock mon doesn't really make sense to me). I guess its best to wait and see, but I feel people are being overly pessimistic about team composition that we barely know about
I feel like Pokémon in general is way harder to balance than people realise. Its a game where your roster can have dozens of possible Pokémon, each person plays differently as some try to go from one objective to the next straigth away while others try to explore everything before moving forward,s ome people play casually while others like to EV train their in-game team, so on and so forth. Obviously that doesn't mean they shouldn't do anything to make the bosses interesting battles, but my point is that there is no "one size fits all", because the way everyone plays Pokémon leaves them with a lot of variables in teams, moves, item and levels that can't all be accounted for, even if they made multiple different teams per booses. I know people tend to point at BW2's difficult select but even that wasn't perfect (and as it turns out, the levels in Hard Mode don't actually scale, they're the same stats as Regular Mode's levels). At the end of the day there's not much of an in between they could to stop people from steaming through with X-Items or an Overlevelled mon but that still felt fair vs someone who's just trying to play casually with mons they like. Even if they did level scaling, that wouldn't actually make the battles any more or less difficult - it'd always be the same level of difficulty because it would always match your own level
I feel like the next best thing they could do is just make these battles interesting and memorable. Gen 7 saw a bunch of story bossses being EV trained and having genuinely interesting strategies for the Totem mons with allies that synergized with the totem. While too early to tell for Gen 9, the fact the Grass gym is using a Rock mon that can deal with Bug, Fire, Ice and Flying Types gives me hope (Here its more than just coverage even, as apparently Terastal would keep its Rock STAB, making it a pretty devastating mon for the first gym). Mela apparently being a sun-based team as the first of the star bosses, at a lvl 27 Lead, is also shaping up to be pretty interesting for an early boss - as some of the reviewers said, their Quaxly got beaten by her Fire mons even
And tpo be honest I never felt like the "forced healing" actually even mattered...? I'd be bothered if they happened in between Elite 4 matches or between GymTrainers and Gym Leaders but most of the time they either happen after a rival battle that's near a Pokémon center anyways or after a larger route where after a certain point you'd fly back to heal regardless. I get why people dislike these but they are way les of a deal than people make them out to be.
Would prefer the EXP share to have a toggle but I feel like they've been doing a much greater job at balancing the level curve around the EXP share than when the change was first made.
I guess my closing statement is that I feel like people are getting a bit too dragged by their personal bias against gamefreak to even consider what other options available would be worth doing (or if what they're complaining about even applies to these - saying the mons won't have any coverage moves when the grass gym is outright shown to use a Rock mon doesn't really make sense to me). I guess its best to wait and see, but I feel people are being overly pessimistic about team composition that we barely know about
It really just boils down to that.
When battles like Opal come up, it's pretty transparent that she's not actually trying to beat you pulling up with a Fairy Wind Mawile. That's SwSh's 6th Gym btw.
I wish people would stop saying that.
It literally never happened. EVER. Since Exp. All and all its problems were introduced as a forced mechanic, the games simply did not manage to have a single decent level curve.
I've played SwSh and LGPE w/ the Exp Share doing only trainer battles and little grinding (sometimes to catch a new mon / meet an in-game req) and both had solid level curves, though LGPE kinda fell off at the end due to the non-linear nature of the last few sections of Kanto. Still, the E4 were pretty tough. BDSP's level curve was a bit whack though, where I needed to have two teams to not be overleveled for most of the game.It really just boils down to that.
When battles like Opal come up, it's pretty transparent that she's not actually trying to beat you pulling up with a Fairy Wind Mawile. That's SwSh's 6th Gym btw.
I wish people would stop saying that.
It literally never happened. EVER. Since Exp. All and all its problems were introduced as a forced mechanic, the games simply did not manage to have a single decent level curve.
I would like the Exp Share toggle to come back as well (largely for EV training purposes), but I believe GF has mentioned in an interview that an overwhelming majority of players who play these games leave it on. I am assuming that in their view, the Exp All system is just an evolution of the old Exp System, and to their credit, I don't believe they are entirely wrong. From the casual playthroughs I've done of the recent games, the Exp Share is immensely useful since it eliminates one of the bigger problems with catching new Pokemon: the barrier to entry. Generally, people who are playing a Pokemon game usually want to use the Pokemon in the game. However, most Pokemon that you catch usually suck and can't battle on their own, so you have to switch train them, which is tedious and takes a lot of time. The Exp Share system largely eliminates this barrier to entry and grants the player a lot more options they would be willing to use. When I was playing my first playthough of Sword, I remember catching a Caterpie early on to fill an empty slot on my team. I didn't use it for a majority of my times playing the early routes, but its access to Status moves and its typing let it be quite useful at various points, like against the first gym, or statusing Pokemon I wanted to capture. It wasn't much, but the fact that Caterpie was passively leveling up made me more incentived to use it for its positive traits, whereas I normally wouldn't have given it a second thought. There were also case in LGPE where I tried some Pokemon, but they just did not work out (i.e. Hitmonchan, Butterfree) but the little time I did invest into them was still an overall net gain rather than a waste of time due to the rest of my team being leveled.
The only reason I don't want the Exp Toggle scrapped is due to cases like the aforementioned BDSP where the player was over the level curve for most of the game barring the Elite Four and EV training, which the Exp Share makes more efficient, but you can basically only EV train certain types of Pokemon at a time Ii.e. a team of special attackers). If GF is able to make these two things a non-issue, then I think I wouldn't mind the toggle being removed. Like in Legends Arceus, where levels matter less, experimentation is encouraged more, and there are no EVs; I'd argue the lack of an EXP Share toggle does not detract from that game at all.
I do understand keeping the old Exp System for the "challenge" but w/o a fast option to make battles go 2 - 3x faster I don't the the experience is tolerable unless you are doing somethng off to the side at the same time. Even the most hardcore ROM hacks have the EXP All system nowdays (w/ a toggle thankfully) and the reason for that is pretty clear I think.
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It's like Dynamax all over again!
I don't play that many games anymore except for Masters EX, which has some rather difficult battles especially if you don't have the current latest Sync Pairs, but I remember hearing people say over and over that the LEGO Star Wars games are easy and I'm like:Everyone said:
"But I never finished any of these games."
I have to admit, I don't have the biggest self-esteem. I thought using a game's "Assist Mode" is a form of cheating that would brand me as an idiot, even though not a single person pointed out my weakness, let alone made fun of me. Ever.
My last experience with a "Very Easy Mode" was the Picnic difficulty of Etrian Odyssey 2 Untold, a Roguelike known for being hard, and boy is it piss easy. But like, universe-breaking easy. Not just because I ended up forgetting strategy and using items, but also because F.O.Es, the series' signature super-hard enemies you are supposed to avoid, ends up easy. As in "I defeated all floor F.O.Es and still ended up fine at the end".
But that's not all, because since F.O.Es are intended to be tough, you keep hearing dialog like "oh no be careful this deer has a pattern that we should avoid otherwise it's game over for us" which add some unintentional comedy.
Drawing maps is still cool tho
In all seriousness though, GF's idea of "Make your own difficulty" immediately fell apart when they said "The Exp. Share isn't an item anymore" in the very next sentence.
I get that having different difficulty settings for this game is tricky, but man, they really don't help their case with this nonsense.
Grinding isn't difficulty. If the problem with the Exp. Share is that you keep overleveling because of it, plan better. That kind of sounds like a you problem, not an Exp. Share problem.
Personally I wouldn't care if they added the option to turn it off, but to pretend like the existence of the universal Exp. Share completely destroys any ability to make the game artificially more difficult is facetious as hell, and I've never had a single person who espouses this opinion (and for some reason there are a lot of them) explain to me exactly how it makes the game less difficult without falling into the "more grinding = harder game" logic pit.
I wish people would stop saying that.
It literally never happened. EVER. Since Exp. All and all its problems were introduced as a forced mechanic, the games simply did not manage to have a single decent level curve.
You act like this actually has any correlation with the universal Exp. Share when it really doesn't. Despite their other flaws, I think you would be hard pressed to argue that S/M and US/UM's level curve was one of them, and the games with objectively the worst level curves in the series, G/S/C and HG/SS, didn't have the universal experience share. This is more a product of bad region design in X/Y and Sw/Sh (and G/S/C/HG/SS by virtue of cramming the entirety of Kanto into the same level curve as Johto) than anything else.
What.
Why?
That literally involves more work and code to do than just having them have the correct stats for their level.
I did like 3 challenge mode runs and I felt like they were too easy but I assumed it was because I was getting more XP. Now I know why, I suppose. I'm amazed it's taken people a decade to realise the mode doesn't work properly, but I suppose quirks of Pokemon games taking that long to discover isn't unheard of.
We don't officially know yet, aside from (I believe) Hisuian Zoroark being confirmed to be in.
Most of the issues with the level curve is less "Exp All is forced" and more "using amie/refresh/camp gives you unfair bonuses". I mean, the increase to experience gain is one of the first things you get in those.
Also, running away from encounters rather than catching or defeating everything and all that; if you are completing the Dex before beating the game you will be overleveled, yeah.
Also, running away from encounters rather than catching or defeating everything and all that; if you are completing the Dex before beating the game you will be overleveled, yeah.
I don't know why people are expecting the Amie bonuses to be forced in SV, SwSh hard capped the friendship before they actually got them and you had to specifically use Camp features to get above it, BDSP only forced them because they were shoddily made (see also: why BDSP Spindas and Nincadas can't be transferred to Home).
I don't grind, but I also don't avoid fights. In order to not overlevel for bosses, I've started running teams of like 8-9 mons. That's a game design problem, not a me problem.
The only reason people expect them to be forced is... because they were in last three entries. In all of USUM, BDSP and SwSh, you would end up getting the friendship bonus by the endgame or even by midgame if you stuck to same team even if you never used the arnie itself.
Will you look at that, you found a solution to your supposed problem all on your own.
No? Except for BDSP.
Gen 7, like Gen 6, had Affection as a separate mechanic, and while you were more encouraged to use the Pokémon Refresh since it showed up as an activatable selection after battles and could remove status effects, if you didn't use it you didn't gain Affection and thus didn't get Affection bonuses.
SwSh reworked how Friendship worked and essentially slapped the Affection bonuses onto the higher stages of Friendship (while also changing Friendship evos requirements from 220 to 160), but it capped it at 179, 1 point before the Affection bonuses start kicking in and the only ways of raising it higher and having the Affection bonuses start kicking in was through the use of the Camp or the Friendship boost from the EV reducing Berries. If you don't use either on a Pokémon (or if you only use them prior to the Pokémon actually hitting the natural Friendship cap), it can't gain more than 179 and thus doesn't get the bonuses of having 180+ Friendship.
BDSP forcing it on the player was a result of laziness on ILCA's part, not bothering to code the cap.
I maintain that the Exp. All is less stable because the total exp earned scales with the number of mons standing. So being above curve and winning fights with no losses increases your team's power faster than being below curve and barely hanging on. As a result, the exp scaling with level differences needs to be much more aggressive to keep a player on curve, which makes it harder to do both low-level runs and grind for exp if you deem it necessary.
"No... No... That's not true... That's impossible!"
(By the way, does this Challenge Mode thing also applies to Easy mode?)
Do I need to explain why running 9 mons, which means you will inherently have significantly better coverage for major battles, can't take your entire team into the Hall of Fame on your first time through, spend less time with each individual mon(even if the point of the playthrough is to use 3 mons you've never used before), and have to do a lot more work monitoring individual levels and swapping mons in to keep from outlevelling the bosses, is NOT a reasonable solution to a bad level curve making things too easy? And heaven help you if you have multiple experience groups on your team, you might get to use the Fast mons for all of one battle before boxing them again.
Honestly, it's weird. In earlier entries in the series, the player had far fewer tools for raising their mons, but that made it much easier to control. And if they gave us more tools to help raise mons(caps on level/EVs), we'd again find it easier to control. It's just the specific limbo we're in now where it's a constant issue with trying to keep mons where they should be rather than where the game thinks they should be.
/vp/ keeps saying Smogon is gonna ban Terrastalize is this true?
Probably not, it's not nearly as broken in singles as Dynamax, and even then it took a whole month after SwSh released to even start the vote to ban that. So it'll definitely be legal for a while after release and likely not get banned at all.
Stop suggesting level caps, far more people would dislike their inclusion than care about outleveling the Gym Leaders. This necessarily isn't directed at you specifically, but more at the fact people who keep suggesting them. Because you know that if Game Freak included them you wouldn't be able to turn them off.
Yes. Simply cause I ended up having them on me, empyrical enough to say it can happen.
You can get the arnie bonuses just off friendship levels, which increase either ways if you're actually using your pokemon for prolonged period of times and they aren't fainting.
And i've literally never used any of the Arnie features, in fact I think my "currydex" is completely empty in SwSh.
Like all things, the mechanic won't be banned at start.
It may eventually be suspected and banned if it ends up deemed overpowered, yes, but they won't ban it right away.
Also I recommend never reading reddit for your sanity. Also never reading smogon, it's bad for your health as well.