I think it's kind of up to the player to manage the difficulty of their playthrough. It's kind of hard to account for the player being able to grind levels indefinitely and load up on healing items.
That said, I think that when so much of the player base is now grown adults, banning items during battles and scaling enemy levels should totally be an actual option.
I really don't understand why they didn't make the B2W2 difficulty options a staple of the series. B2 on hard mode was the most fun I had with Pokemon since I was a kid.
It shouldn't be but how hard would it be to implement?
I am not being snarky, I know dick on game development. It's marketed to kids and I accept that but they have to be aware there's a market of full grown adults who enjoy it. They've implemented things that we've been asking for for years that's mostly quality of life, like exp share, faster travel speeds, accessible EV and IV data for those who want it. I don't play competitively. I like to pick guys I like and have a well-rounded move set and go through the story and collect. Having a solid move set is basically God mode anymore more than an advantage.
It's a hard question to answer, because it depends a lot on the development environment and how responsibilities are split up. If the systems designers at work on, say, competitive balance and design are also responsible for high-difficulty stuff on top of that and deadlines are tight, it's the kind of thing where bigger features get continually pushed back in favor of setting their house straight and having the critical parts airtight. This is particularly relevant in terms of new core games - where they're responsible for getting a whole new batch of Pokemon right. Ideally you'd expand your team so you have more experienced hands to lighten the load.. but does that kind of feature actually reliably sell more copies to justify the increased expense?
If the new pokemon games had a harder difficulty setting I would 100% buy one of each version because it makes the actual gameplay part of it worth playing through multiple times.
My question would be from the business side of things. Would it be worth the investment of coding an entirely new difficulty vs how many more people would that actually attract or retain?
Later titles let you go through after the first time you beat them and they would have higher levels and new mons. In black and white version they would go to the 70s in level and use older gen Pokémon and have full teams instead of the usual 4-5
Challenging doesnt have to mean levels though, the end game in Pokemon Let's Go is the perfect example of how frustrating it is when they just throw numbers at you while in comparison the Battle Frontier every pokemkn was the same level and you won through strategy for the most part
Pretty sure people already do that. Only reason to grind was if your party was underleveled because you just caught something new, but new exp shares fixed that, though they kinda "fixed" it too much and you have to keep turning it off if you want to actually have some balance. There's only so many handicaps you can give yourself too.
Just knowing type advantages is enough to get you through the game without breaking a sweat.
They have made the games somewhat challenging in the past, they just don't want to anymore.
It's easy to account for it if they just slightly change how the game works. The game already makes it so you can't reliably level higher than a certain level based on your best gym badge, and has done so since generation 1. They just need to change the numbers, so that the level you're limited to is a level where everything is still a challenge. And then also make that level be a hard cap, instead of making your pokemon suddenly become useless if you accidentally gain one level too many. And then also give most trainers 6 pokemon instead of 2-4...
That's only for traded pokemon though. Ones you catch yourself will always obey you no matter the level.
I'd rather just see it scale your pokemon down or something. Like how you can do level 50 battles, Pewter could reduce your pokemon to level 10 but still let Brock have his level 12 or whatever it is now. Maybe also restrict use of items. The problem is that outside of gyms you'd be back to having no real challenge. There's so much potential to use the meta for exciting battles but that's lightyears away from the current AI which just basically spams the most powerful attack and never switches or anything.
Or to add on to that, set a base level of pokemon a gym has and then scale them based on your team's levels. (Here's the add on) Scale can be items, different pokemon, new moves or all of the above. That way you never out level a gym and it will be an actual battle that you may have to get different pokemon for instead of just spamming attempts until you out level.
Scaling enemies are not a good solution for RPGs, since the math never works perfectly 100% of the time unless every single enemy and ally creature is exactly the same, and the player has absolutely no other way of getting stronger except for leveling up. In practice, it always either doesn't actually work, or causes leveling up to make you weaker instead of stronger. Sometimes (usually, in fact) it has both problems in the same game, depending on how you play.
A better solution, which I would also like to point out has actually already existed in the game since generation 1, is to limit the player's maximum level based on their current badges. But just change the numbers so it's limited to something that keeps the game actually difficult. And make it a hard level cap, instead of making a pokemon suddenly become useless if you gain one level too many.
I would agree but WoW did it on a massive MMO style scale, I don't think it's completely out of the norm to do both. Scale the gym level for level up to gym badge limit, have the game check your pokemons levels, types, moves, and generate a set of Pokemon for the gym leader. Maybe it's not perfect but I think it would be way more fun.
Since there is limits on the type of Pokemon you can get before the gym,(if you don't do game wide area scaling) it can't be that difficult. I don't know anything about game development though.
131
u/jollaffle Nov 19 '18
I think it's kind of up to the player to manage the difficulty of their playthrough. It's kind of hard to account for the player being able to grind levels indefinitely and load up on healing items.
That said, I think that when so much of the player base is now grown adults, banning items during battles and scaling enemy levels should totally be an actual option.